SC - One diabetic's view of adding sugar to counteract acidity
Mordonna22 at aol.com
Mordonna22 at aol.com
Thu Sep 28 04:04:40 PDT 2000
In a message dated 9/27/2000 6:15:57 PM US Mountain Standard Time,
owner-sca-cooks at ansteorra.org writes:
<< or maybe the supposedly "benign"
substance was a touch of sugar to counter a little acidity... do you have
any diabetics in the hall? you're getting into a sticky wicket here. >>
As a diabetic who has lived with the disease for over thirty years, I can
tell you that adding a bit of sugar to counter acidity is expected and
allowed for by any responsible diabetic. Sugar is an insidious and
ubiquitous substance. Indeed, despite what most people believe, diabetics
REQUIRE sugar in their diet. We simply have to balance our intake of sugar
against our source of insulin. It is a juggling act, true, but it is not
THAT easy to unbalance the vast majority of us. Perhaps it would be more
accurate to say that the balancing act is so complex that it is impossible to
get it perfectly correct even under ideal, controlled situations. A diabetic
who is so "brittle" that a miniscule amount of sugar added to a dish will
adversely affect them has no business eating food prepared by anyone other
than themselves.
Food is so complex that balancing sugar intake precisely is impossible to do.
There are far too many variables. For instance, let us say that a dish
contains carrots. Now on most "exchange" lists, raw carrots are allowed
"free", that is one can eat as many as one likes of them. However, cooked
carrots are a totally different proposition. The starches in carrots are
difficult to digest when raw, but cooking them converts them to easily
digestible sugars. The more you cook them, the easier they are to digest.
So a dish that has very lightly cooked carrots may be low in available sugars
when originally cooked, but be higher in available sugars when warmed over,
without adding anything. Another variable with carrots is how mature they
are. Fresh "baby" carrots, have more sugar than mature carrots out of the
root cellar. All natural foods have this kind of complexity in available
sugars. Adding a bit of sugar to counteract acidity would be no more harmful
to a diabetic than overcooking the carrots or using fresh, young carrots
instead of more mature, stored carrots in the same dish.
Mordonna The Cook
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