There’s a couple issues with sugar. The biggest thing is that there’s no nutritional value. Foods that tend to have a lot of sugar added, they don’t provide the satiety that you get from other more healthful foods, so people tend to consume more calories when they eat foods with more sugar in it.
The other worry is sugar-sweetened beverages. If you eat a cookie or a piece of cake, you have hormones to signal that you feel like you’ve had something to eat. That doesn’t happen with a soda.
It doesn’t mean that people can’t have a treat occasionally, but most Americans are getting too many calories through sugary foods and sugar-sweetened beverages. That means you’re not getting fiber, you’re not getting vitamins, minerals.
What we recommend for diabetics, is if someone’s going to have a small piece of cake, or a small piece of pie, then you would cut back on the other carbohydrates in the meal. If you normally have half a cup of rice, if the treat is going to be one cookie, then you have to have very little rice. The portion sizes for the most sweets are very small, but the sweets aren’t. The cookies they sell in the stores, some have 400 calories. A cookie is equal to a large salad in terms of carbohydrates.
by: Stephanie Dunbar, director of nutrition and medical affairs at the American Diabetes Association
