Is “carbohydrates” a dirty word in your home? For many people with diabetes and other health issues, finding ways to maintain or promote good health through healthy eating can be hard to balance with those favorite sweets and food cravings. Which means, sadly, that many people find it easier to simply forgo the treats they love rather than wade through the struggle of balancing their nutritional and health requirements. Well, we at Lord de Pastry have good news for you! Whether you’re diabetic or have some other health concern that means you have to watch your carb and sugar intake, we have healthy desserts to buy so you can stay healthy and still enjoy delicious bakery treats!

What is Diabetes?

If you have diabetes, what that means at a base level is that your body struggles to produce and respond to insulin, which affects how your metabolism processes food. As you eat, your body processes food and turns it into glucose, which it uses for energy. Without proper insulin production, there is no signal to your cells that tells them to open up and accept that glucose and put it to use. Without that signal from the insulin for your cells to accept the glucose, all that glucose your body produces will simply hang out in your blood stream and, without treatment, will build up more and more until it starts affecting your kidneys, nerves, eyes, and heart.

Of course, no one wants to struggle through kidney or heart damage if it’s treatable which, thankfully, both type 1 and type 2 diabetes generally are. Whether you have type 1, type 2, or even gestational diabetes during pregnancy, treatment generally involves careful monitoring of your insulin levels, diet and exercise regimens, and can include insulin injections. Because diabetes is directly affected by the food you eat and your body’s ability to metabolize it, diet control is a very important part of getting a handle on and treating your diabetes.

Why Carbs Affect Diabetes

The trick with eating when you have diabetes is that, sometimes, it can feel like you need a degree in nutrition just to eat healthily without overloading your system with glucose. When your body metabolizes food, some types of food produce more glucose than others, so the trick to maintaining a healthy diet is to know which foods will produce more or less glucose in your system. Thankfully, technology provides us a quick and easy solution. If you have a smartphone, it’s pretty simple to Google where on the glycemic index a food falls. For those with diabetes, choosing foods that are low on the glycemic index is important.

The hard part comes in when it’s time to balance your body’s need for well-rounded nutrition with its struggle to produce insulin and process glucose. Carbohydrates, as a category, produce the greatest amount of glucose; however, your body does generally need at least some grains for the nutrients included. So how do you eat grains and still stick to a low-glycemic diet? By trusting the glycemic index and limiting – but not necessarily nixing – those high-glucose producing foods.

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Diabetes and Desserts

Carbs and sugars are generally highest on the list of glucose-producing foods. When you’re trying to maintain a low-glycemic diet, the general guidance is to stick with foods that are 55 and under on the glycemic index. This includes foods like broccoli and pork that produce little glucose. Processed foods, even if they don’t seem like they would be carb-heavy, may be high on the glycemic index because of filler ingredients. If you’re unsure, check both the carbohydrate and sugar count on the nutrition information; as general guidance, anything more than 20 grams is likely to be medium to high on the glycemic index.

When you need to keep your glucose counts low, that doesn’t mean you can never have carbs or desserts ever again. It just means you need to balance those items in your diet. At Lord de Pastry, we pride ourselves on offering healthy desserts to buy that are all natural, include no preservatives, and are low in sugar. We do all this without compromising on taste because we keep it natural. If you’re looking for healthy dessert ideas or healthy desserts to buy, find a Lord de Pastry distributor here!