The Quick Answer: The shopping list is the perfect place to manage snacking—if a snack is in the house you'll likely eat it; if it isn’t you won’t. ____________________________________________________________________
Have a great 4th of July? (Clearly I did: I’m a bit late with this post.) Independence Day is a good time to reflect on the American spirit, the unique virtues as well as the defects that influence how we live, eat, and die. We are the world’s true pioneers. No other country is so innovative. We invented democracy (with a little help from the ancient Greeks), for goodness sake. And we invented processed foods, soda pop, fast foods, and diet drinks. We love change. What other nation would so recklessly experiment with food innovations—like getting half our calories from sugar and other refined carbs—of unknown consequence?
Books on Diabetes
I like to collect old books on nutrition, not because they’re old, but because they offer lost dietary wisdom. Here, for example, is the English biochemist R. H. A. Plimmer in his 1925 book, Food, Health, and Vitamins:
“The Americans, with their love of candy, are the largest sugar eaters in the world. Incidentally, cancer and diabetes, two scourges of civilization, have increased proportionately to the sugar consumption.” (Bold face added.)
We should have listened to Dr. Plimmer. I have another book, not as old but just as revolutionary, by John Yudkin, with this long but descriptive title: Sweet and Dangerous, The new facts about the sugar you eat as a cause of heart disease, diabetes, and other killers. (First published in England as Pure, White and Deadly.) Yudkin was the first to speak clearly about the dangers of our growing love for sugar. People value these books: A used copy of Sweet and Dangerous is offered today at $100 while a copy of Pure, White and Deadly requires $199.
Of course you can get the information updated at a lower cost with Nancy Appleton’s book, Suicide by Sugar: A Startling Look at Our #1 National Addiction. Scary titles.
What Causes Diabetes?
Diabetes comprises a disease family that includes type 1, type 2 and gestational diabetes. Type 1 diabetes, perhaps 5% of all cases, is an autoimmune disease of children that destroys insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. The cause is unknown but a near-normal lifespan is now possible through improved medical technology.
Type 2—the subject of this post—is an increasingly common consequence of the modern lifestyle. How common? Twenty-six million Americans have Type 2 diabetes, a chronic disease that leads to other diseases, such as heart disease, stroke, and cancer. Seventy-nine million of us are prediabetic and at risk for full-blown diabetes. These days, diabetes is a growth industry.
So what causes type-2 diabetes? This will drive you crazy but despite all the research, scientists don’t know for sure. We think of diabetes as the sugar disease but it’s more complicated. Not everyone who eats a lot of sugar gets diabetes. There are other factors, including diet, family history, overweight, and lack of exercise.
The best book I’ve read on sugar and disease is Gary Taubes’ Good Calories, Bad Calories; Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease. My conclusion after reading Taubes: The best way to avoid the risk of overweight and diabetes is to bring sugar intake below the American Heart Association recommendation (6 tsp daily for women, 9 tsp for men), eat a whole foods diet, and exercise at least three hours weekly. The Healthy Changes of the last six months build a foundation for doing this.
Where do we get most of our dietary sugar? Sugary drinks (addressed here) and snacks!
Healthy Snacking
We talked about snacking in a prior post and implemented the Healthy Change of using a snack plate. (Confession: I sometimes forget and need to remind myself to do this.)
Four principles for healthy snacking:
1. Commercial snacks are usually the unhealthiest food in the store and the worst value for your money. Remember: money spent on unhealthy snacks is a vote for that company to succeed.
2. Watch for “boredom” snacking and substitute other forms of variety, like a walk, a chapter from a favorite book, calling a friend, or, ahem, checking your favorite nutrition blog.
3. The key to healthy snacking is to eat a good (low G.I., whole food) breakfast. Our worst snacking habits arise from stimulant-craving due to skipped breakfasts. (The danger of coffee, I suspect, is less about the coffee and more about habitually skipping a nutritious breakfast.)
4. If your waist size is greater than your goal, eat a healthy breakfast and don’t snack after 8:00 pm.
We’ll talk more about healthy snacks and proven waist-reducing habits in the next post, but just to remind, snacks can be organized in these groups:
• Veggies
• Fruits
• Nuts and seeds (including popcorn)
• Cheeses and yogurt
• Leftovers
• Home-made snacks (like crackers or cookies from healthy recipes).
Which brings us to the healthy change of the week:
If we don’t have unhealthy snacks in the home (or office), we won’t eat them. If we have healthy snacks available, it’s likely we will eat them. Pretty simple. Got a nasty snack you can’t resist? Buy just one serving, once a week. The experience of many is that as you eat better, you’ll also snack better.
Budget Wisdom: As an experiment, wander the grocery store snack aisles and look at the cost per ounce. Then compare to the cost of fruits and vegetables or other healthy snack ingredients. With the exception of certain nuts and seeds, which I love, you save by buying healthy snacks.
Please comment: Share your favorite healthy snacks. We’ll collect your favorites into the next post.
Need a reminder? Download our Healthy Change reminder card. Print and fold, then place in your kitchen or on your bathroom mirror to help you remember the Healthy Change of the week.