How to Reduce Sugar Intake in Your Diet

By Ashlen Wilder

2 min read

If you have type 2 diabetes, then at some point, your doctor or registered dietitian likely recommended that you limit or cut out your sugar intake. Although it can be hard, reducing your sugar intake can help you better manage your blood sugar levels. In addition, there are several other reasons why reducing sugar may be good for you.

Benefits of lowering your sugar intake

You might already be motivated to reduce your sugar intake as a part of your diabetes-friendly eating plan. If you feel like you need more motivation to let go of sugar, here are some other benefits.

Getting more energy

Typically, you might feel an energy spike after eating sugary foods or drinks. This burst of energy only lasts a short time, and after the spike, you will likely experience an energy crash. Cutting down on sugar will help you have sustained energy over a longer period.¹

Improving heart health

Reducing sugar intake can help heart health. Sugar can raise blood pressure and lead to chronic inflammation. A diet high in added sugars is associated with a greater risk of dying from heart disease.¹

Harmful effects of eating too much sugar

Skin and acne breakouts

High glycemic foods, like sugary foods, may cause acne and skin breakouts.²

Managing weight gain

Sugar is an empty calorie, and eating it can turn off your appetite-control system. Even if you eat a lot of calories and grams of sugar, you may not feel full.

Chances are, you will eat more of the sugary food to try to feel full. This pattern can lead to weight gain, and even obesity, over time.¹

Protecting liver health

High amounts of sugar can overload the liver. The liver is an organ that converts dietary carbs to fat. Over time, this can cause the liver to build up fat.¹

How to reduce sugar when you have diabetes

Making a big change in your regular eating plan is not easy. Most of us grew up eating sweet foods and drinking sweetened beverages.

As adults, our taste buds are accustomed to sweet foods and sugar. With the help of sugar-free sweeteners and foods low in sugar, you can start to trick your taste buds and slowly let go of or cut down on sugar.

Try sugar-free alternatives

To start your sugar-free journey, you might find it helpful to try new alternatives. Try switching soda for sparkling water, sugar-free soda, unsweetened iced tea, and water infused with fruits and herbs.

Instead of buying baked goods at the store, experiment with baking using substitute sweeteners. You can also swap sugary yogurts for plain Greek yogurt. Avoid coffee drinks with extra sweet flavored syrups. Instead, choose sugar-free options.

Seek more support

Stepping away from sugar is a huge task. To start, you can check out some sugar-free and low sugar recipes located in the recipes section on the site.

During your next visit, ask your doctor for advice. If you have access to a registered dietitian or certified diabetes care and education specialist, this is an excellent source of extra support.

How have you reduced your sugar intake? Have you noticed any big benefits from eating less sugar?

This or That

Which food temptation is harder to resist?

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richard-morrisMember
Unfortunately sugar isn't the only thing that you can convert from your diet into blood glucose. Starch is a long chain of glucose molecules and begins converting to glucose as soon as it hits the amylase in your saliva. So if you want to reduce glucose available from your diet so you don't have wild swings in blood glucose then you have to restrict grains, tubers and other sources of starch too. The good news is if you eat no glucose, you won't run out of essential glucose to run glucose obligate tissue like your brain. Your liver is able to make all the glucose you need on demand, and you can have stable blood glucose all day without needing to eat any (and if you are a type 2 having to deal with the insulin response to suddenly having too much glucose).
1. richard-morrisMember
 <inline-mention username="Ashlen Wilder" user-id="3526153"/> technically we can make glucose from other fuels too. The glycerol moiety (which is essentially half a glucose molecule) in a fat molecule (triglyceride) is scavenged by the liver to synthesize new glucose once the fatty acids have been removed to produce energy. Glucogenic amino acids (Alanine, Arginine, Asparagine, Aspartic acid, Cysteine, Glutamic acid, Glutamine, Glycine, Histidine, Methionine, Proline, Serine and Valine) can also be used as substrates for new glucose synthesis. You can't avoid protein. You need essential amino acids, and sufficient bulk amino acids to support protein turnover - around 1-1.5g per kg of lean mass appears sufficient in urea appearance studies. The problem for type 2 diabetics is not so much the speed of glucose appearance, as it is with the pancreas's secretion of insulin in response to it. The pancreas of a non diabetic eating a mixed meal will make insulin in response to glucose challenge, it will be cleared by peripheral cells, and insulin will drop back to baseline within 2 hours of the meal and they will be back to burning fatty acids between meals. In type 2 diabetics insulin has been seen experimentally to remain elevated for 6 hours post prandially. This means that cells are inhibited for quite a long time from transporting fatty acids across the mitochondrial membrane (through malonyl-CoA inhibition of the carnitine palmitoyl transferase transporter). As you can imagine slow release sources of glucose (complex carbohydrates) are not particularly helpful. However dietary fibre is fine because it makes it to the hind gut undigested, where it can be consumed by gut flora and converted into short chained saturated fatty acids like butyrate which pass the human gut easily and are an excellent fuel source for colonocytes. Excellent low carb sources include shirataki/konjac "noodles" (gluccomannen), jicama and Jerusalem artichokes (inulin). The inability to access the fatty acid buffer due to elevated insulin drives inter-meal snacking which just resets the insulin timer and perpetuates it's elevation. It becomes a vicious cycle where in a type 2 diabetic eating a balanced diet of 3 meals and 3 snacks a day, insulin remains elevated for most of the day with the exception of the last few hours of sleep. If a type 2 diabetic "white knuckles it" and avoids snacking they have to run the gauntlet of reactive hypoglycemia. It's a problem with the glucose homeostatic regulation in type 2 diabetics of high levels of blood glucose. The trick for a type 2 diabetic is to rely on the other homeostatic regulation of glucose - namely when you don't have enough your liver makes some. So the task is to eat so few sources of glucose that you keep the liver engaged managing blood glucose. The pancreas doesn't make very much insulin in response to newly synthesized glucose as it does to intake glucose (sugars and starches) because the newly synthesize glucose is just to top up blood glucose to the bottom of the physiological range. And because insulin remains low, fatty acids are readily available as a fuel source 24/7. In my case (frank type 2) I switched from a mixed diet to a ketogenic diet in April of 2016 and my HbA1c went from 11.2% to 5.2% and has remained there ever since. It's a hack for people who have an impaired ability to manage high glucose, that they can leverage a back up system for managing low glucose that is perfectly capable of making enough for tissue that must have glucose. But a balanced diet contains too much glucose for that - so it has to be ultra low carb, high fat, moderate protein which is controversial.
2. richard-morrisMember
 I suggest <a href='https://www.amazon.com.au/Art-Science-Low-Carbohydrate-Living/dp/0983490708' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer ugc'>https://www.amazon.com.au/Art-Science-Low-Carbohydrate-Living/dp/0983490708</a> if you want to do more research on the subject and look into the studies funded by Virtahealth that used this diet and were PI'd by the books authors. <a href='https://www.virtahealth.com/research' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer ugc'>https://www.virtahealth.com/research</a> Specifically the long term outcomes in type 2 diabetics (53.5% reversal of T2DM, 91% deprescription of exogenous insulin, and 87% diet compliance over 2 years which is remarkable for any diet study) <a href='https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2019.00348/full' target='_blank' rel='noopener noreferrer ugc'>https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fendo.2019.00348/full</a> But you don't need to buy their product, all the info needed to formulate the diet is free in the book.
Ashlen WilderMember
Hi <inline-mention username="richard-morris" user-id="3630690"/> thanks again for sharing on here. So great to hear you found a way of eating that has been beneficial for you! I appreciate you linking those resources, I also enjoy looking into research I have yet to be exposed to. Best, -Ashlen, <a href='https://type2diabetes.com' target='_blank'>Type2diabetes.com</a> community moderator