“1 in every 2 adults who are over the age of 20, have pre-diabetes or diabetes right now.”
Health and fitness expert and physical therapist Lisa Morrone discusses the best ways to combat diseases like diabetes.
Lucky Charms, Cap’n Crunch and Froot Loops, do these cereal brands sound familiar? Lisa recalls a specific memory from her childhood,
“Growing up in my home we had a shelf full of ten boxes of the sugared cereals and we did not just pick one of those, we picked all of them and we made “Sand Art” in our breakfast bowls.”
Although these cereals can be tasty, they lack nutritional value and are filled with simple carbs and excessive sugar.
“That is oftentimes how kids are eating breakfast or even adults are eating breakfast, so we’re starting our day with a sugar spike that is going to jolt our pancreas into action and it’s going to raise our blood sugar really high.”
Cereal isn’t the only contributor to high blood sugar levels in our diet today. Lisa reminds us that drinking our sugar in liquid form is just as unhealthy.
“You might think that you’re doing yourself a real great service in the morning by having orange juice with your breakfast, but you’re spiking your sugar just as much as if you had Frosted Mini-Wheats.”
What about eating whole fruits, such as oranges and grapes?
Studies reveal that eating whole fruits is linked to lowering the risk of type 2 diabetes. Lisa explains the benefit of eating fruit in its purest form,
“When you have an orange, you’re eating all of the fiber of the orange with the juice, that’s how God created our bodies to be able to eat fruit in a safe way.”
We can gain helpful insight from Genesis 3.
“In the Garden of Eden there was fruit trees, there were not juice bars. Now we’re just squeezing juice and we’re drinking juice.
“If you know anything about type 1 diabetics, if their sugar starts to go very low and they’re about to pass out, the thing that you give them to jolt their blood sugar up is a glass of orange juice, we don’t need to do that to ourselves. We don’t need that sugar jolt in the morning, so absolutely, eat a full orange.”
Lisa suggests pairing our fruit with a lean protein. She provides an example,
“If you’re going to eat a banana, eat half of the banana and smear it with some peanut butter. Take that fat and that protein of the peanut butter and partner it with the fructose, which is fruit sugar, so we don’t spike our blood sugars.”
“When foods are paired and partnered like that, we have a great protective mechanism there.”
Lisa explains how insulin resistance is often the prelude to type 2 diabetes, and that we need to maintain a healthy diet in order to slow that process down.
“In my book Diabetes: Are you at Risk?, what I teach people is that insulin resistance, which leads to pre-diabetes, which leads to diabetes, heart disease and other cancers, comes from eating carbohydrates excessively or by themselves.”
By pairing less carbohydrates with more whole fruits and lean protein, we’ll be on our way to fighting diabetes and maintaining our overall spiritual, physical and mental health.
