Stevia and Diabetes

What is the connection between stevia and diabetes? How can stevia help maintain your optimal blood glucose levels? You may be surprised with how this natural plant based sugar substitute can actually help you reduce your risks of suffering from diabetes.

About Diabetes:

Diabetes is one of the fastest growing diseases in the world, slowly becoming a worldwide epidemic and already is a major cause of death in many countries. Currently it affects 140 million people globally and is predicted to exceed 300 million in about fifteen years time.

Diabetes makes you prone to high blood pressure, causes decreases in blood flow, changes in vision, blindness, stroke and heart disease.

 

Lack of exercise or regular activity, genetics, obesity and sugar consumption are among the main reasons for diabetes growing so rapidly around the world. Contemporary diets are filled with processed carbohydrates, saturated fats and sugar.

As not much improvement is recorded in terms of drug treatment of diabetes, the only thing you can do to protect yourself from this nasty disease with serious complications is to change the way you live: simply change your diet and exercise!

Sugar and Stevia:

Most of you have sweet cravings from time to time and you tend to satisfy this by eating high fat and high sugar candies, cakes, cookies and by drinking sugar laden soft drinks. An average person in United States consumes approximately sixty kilograms of sugar each year.

You all know that sugar is evil, it is almost as addictive as drugs, it spoils the chemical balance in your body, strips your body off the essential minerals and reduces the level of your immunity towards illnesses and makes you fat as the unburned sugar is easily converted into fat.

This is when the safe and healthy sugar substitutes come into play. Unfortunately aspartame and other chemical sweeteners come with several bad side effects and stevia is the only natural plant basedsweetener available in the market with no or very little reported side effects. It originates from Paraguay and Brazil, has been used for sweetening purposes and medicinal properties for many centuries.

Stevia and Diabetes Facts:

• It is interesting that diabetes seems to occur less frequently in countries in which stevia is commonly used as a sweetener. Stevia has been used in the treatment of diabetes with success in Germany and Japan as well its native Latin American countries like Paraguay and Brazil.

• 4 milligrams of stevia per pound of body weight is currently considered safe, based on lab studies with rats. This is valid for humans as well, so you can consume stevia within the specified limit.

• Sugar raises your blood glucose, while aspartame only contributes to your sugar cravings. Stevia has the ability to not raise the blood glucose levels and to even lower it if your blood sugar is too high, while satisfying your sweet tooth. So this is great if you are on a low carbohydrate diet as a diabetic.

• More interestingly, it does not seem to lower blood sugar levels in normal people.

• Stevia is claimed to stimulate the insulin release and enhance theglucose tolerance, another reason why it may be attractive as a sweetener to diabetics.

• It also seems to assist in treating other conditions that come with diabetes, such as high blood pressure, slow healing wounds and edema.

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