According to Harvard school of public health: The American heart association suggests an added-sugar limit of no more than 100 calories per day (about 6 teaspoons or 24 grams of sugar) for most women and no more than 150 calories per day (about 9 teaspoons or 36 grams of sugar) for most men. With this information, we can still enjoy some sweet treats without going overboard on the amount of sugars that can damage our health. However, for adults with medical condition such as diabetes, knowing the amount of sugar contained in food can prevent symptom of hyperglycemia. On the other hand, it is possible to have hypoglycemia without having diabetes if we have low blood sugar or glucose in our body.
Carbohydrates are a great source of energy for our body, but they affect our blood sugar too. If you have diabetes, keep track of how much carbs you eat is mandatory. Always look at nutritional fact labels to count your carbs. Find the "Total Carbohydrate" number listed on a package's "Nutrition Facts" panel. Then, check the serving size and confirm the amount you can eat. Repeat this step with other foods you plan to eat. When you add all the grams of carbs to get the total carbs you should stay within your budget. For instance, most adults with diabetes have to count the amount of carbs allowed in their diet: 45-60 grams of carbs per meal and 15-20 grams per snack.
Dietary fiber, vitamin D, calcium, iron ad potassium are nutrients on the label that Americans generally do not get the recommended amount of. They are identified as nutrients to get more of. In general for daily values, if 5% or less is considered low and 20% or more is considered high. We raise our awareness in eating a diet high in dietary fiber which can increase the frequency of bowel movements, lower blood glucose and cholesterol levels, and reduce calorie intake. In addition, diets higher in vitamin D, calcium, iron, and potassium can reduce the risk of developing osteoporosis, anemia, and high blood pressure.
We need probiotics for our guts bacteria health. Always look at your nutrition facts label. For instance, my package label claims that there are 1 billon probiotics in my Açaí bowl. It means there are 1 billion colony-forming units CFUs in this case is bacillus coagulans. Bacillus coagulans is a type of good bacteria, called a probiotic. It produces lactic acid, but isn’t the same thing as Lactobacillus which is another type of probiotic. B. coagulans is able to generate spores during its reproductive life cycle. This is unlike Lactobacillus and many other probiotics. For this reason, this strain of bacteria is particularly robust. It’s able to withstand extreme environments, such as high levels of acid, in the stomach. This may make B. coagulans particularly effective at alleviating stomach distress and other ailments. By understanding the difference between different probiotics, we can maximize our health benefits.
According to Harvard Health Medical School Publishing, adopting a healthy diet can lower the risk of developing depressive symptoms. Today, fortunately, the burgeoning field of nutritional psychiatry is finding there are many consequences and correlations between not only what you eat, how you feel, and how you ultimately behave, but also the kinds of bacteria that live in your gut. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter that helps regulate sleep and appetite, mediate moods, and inhibit pain. Since about 95% of your serotonin is produced in your gastrointestinal tract, and your gastrointestinal tract is lined with a hundred million nerve cells, or neurons, it makes sense that the inner workings of your digestive system don’t just help you digest food, but also guide your emotions. What’s more, the function of these neurons — and the production of neurotransmitters like serotonin — is highly influenced by the billions of “good” bacteria that make up your intestinal microbiome. These bacteria play an essential role in your health. They protect the lining of your intestines and ensure they provide a strong barrier against toxins and “bad” bacteria; they limit inflammation; they improve how well you absorb nutrients from your food; and they activate neural pathways that travel directly between the gut and the brain. This may sound implausible to you, but the notion that good bacteria not only influence what your gut digests and absorbs, but that they also affect the degree of inflammation throughout your body, as well as your mood and energy level, is gaining traction among researchers.
As always, live consciously, eat consciously, love consciously so we can enjoy our lives to the fullest! ❤️
*Credits to Harvard Health Medical School publishing and public health department, healthline.com and fda.gov
*⚠️Disclaimer: Please consult with a physician or other healthcare professional before consuming açaí and food intakes.
Here’s an example of Nutrition Facts label from FDA
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Hey Koko now you’re talking my language! Healthy eating and awareness of the importance of a healthy balanced diet that works for us and our bodies needs.This fits in really well with Cooper27 ’s sugar challenge.
So thanks for making this great post as I agree, so let’s help one another to live our lives to the fullest. 😊
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Hi Jerry, I’m glad I am on the right track here 😁 Yes we treat our body with respect by learning how significant a healthy balanced diet is and applying to our daily lives. We know diet plays 80 percent in our well-being combined with exercises, the totality of body and mind. Cheers to learning and living to the fullest harmoniously with our 🌎! 😊🙏☀️☮️🌺
This is very helpful and informative as Hidden has mentioned-- it's perfect timing for the Sugar Free Challenge that Cooper27 is doing for all of us. Thank you for posting it.
Thank you Leah. 😊🙏I’m glad to share my awareness with everyone in HE. Sugar Free Challenge from Cooper27 is so important and we all can reach the benefits by joining it. Have a wonderful start of the week Leah! 😁🙏☀️🌻
You’re welcomed Leah. 😊 I’m glad your week is okay so far, mine too. 😁 I will continue making posts to raise our awareness for a healthy body and mind. 😁👍🙏❤️
I want to add on to what you were saying about seretonin and thank you for raising awareness about it. Many people who are depressed and anxious are not even aware that seretonin a neurotransmitter is mostly produced in the gut. Therefore a gut disease such as celiac can cause the production of seretonin to become dysfunctional. It's a tragedy that western doctors will not even look for celiac before prescribing antidepressants...If you are depressed ask your doctor to check for celiac. Thank you for sharing this essential information to help keep us healthy in body and mind. I look forward to reading all of your magnificent posts😁❤
Thank you for your add on awareness. I think you should make a post about coeliac disease awareness, that would benefit for all of us to understand the importance of guts bacteria and food intake since people might have many unexplained symptoms from bodies. Have a great rest of the day! 😊🙏☀️❤️🌺
Yes, I have celiac disease and have done a lot of research to learn more about it. I will share all I've learned with everyone in a post. Celiac needs much more awareness, specifically its effects on mental health. Thanks for the idea!😁👍🤗
Thank you for considering making coeliac awareness post, i look forward to reading it! 😁👍🙏
45-60g of carbs apply to Diabetic patients. According to cdc.gov: “On average, people with diabetes should aim to get about half of their calories from carbs. That means if you normally eat about 1,800 calories a day to maintain a healthy weight, about 800 to 900 calories can come from carbs. At 4 calories per gram, that's 200–225 carb grams a day.” Therefore it is the number they follow as we all usually do have from 3-5 meals per day. If you snack on healthy sources like nuts and fruits within the calories intake fitted for your body, I don’t see why not.
Now as always that number may go up or down, it depends on personal lifestyle also such as how active they are and what medication they take. Therefore, diabetic patients have to check their glucose level very often and follow closely to their doctors and registered dietitians instructions.
Hi KoKo , another excellent post making people aware of the calories and healthy eating we all should be looking at and a balance diet won't harm anybody. Clive X 🤗
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Thank you Clive. 😊🙏 A balanced diet that fits your body and the awareness of sugar intakes, food intakes can help us eliminating many damages to our body and mind. Have a good rest of the evening Clive! ☮️☀️🌺
Thanks for the awesome post Koko! There's a lot of good information that's important to keep in mind. I used to use the app myfitnesspal to keep track of what I ate throughout the day counting calories and macros. But it was a lot to keep track of and over time I stopped doing it. It did help me for a time when I was trying to put on weight and I did. Now I should be going the other way 🤣🤣🤣🤣
You’re welcomed Kainan. 😁🙏 Now by saying you’re going the other way and which way would that be? 🤣😂 You see when you are too focused in small detail like counting you will get exhausted. 😅 Unless you have medical conditions then yes please do, but if you are just putting on a little bit of this, a little bit of that, all you need is a balanced diet with awareness. 😁👍
losing some. Though it's not like I really need to. Yeah I was really trying my best to get to a target weight and I pretty much got there, but then what? Got to lose some? It can get real exhausting but that was the program I was doing until Covid hit and I just gave up on it. Though I do think tracking little things can get you into that right frame of mind of being aware of what you eat. Right now I'm not doing any of that, so it's somewhat harder to be aware all the time. For intense, I just binged on a lot of chocolate chip cookies and I feel bloated so to not be tempted to do that again I threw away what's left. A little bit is fine every so often, but all the sugar at once is not doing your body any good. It has to work even harder to process all that. I feel bloated!
Yes Kainan, sugar is dangerous when it is excessive as we know they say “sugar crash”. Study showed it does affect your cognitive behaviors and memory loss. Now about weight loss and how to determine: traditionally we follow BMI, however, new study shows: “People with a BMI between 18.5 and 25 are considered normal weight; between 25 and 30 is considered overweight, while 30 and higher is obese. Central obesity is defined as a waist-to-hip ratio of 0.85 or higher for women and 0.9 or higher for men.” So basically they replace BMI with waist-to-hip ratio, which is relatively easy to measure and is consistently associated with cardiovascular health and mortality risk. For women, the ideal waist measurement is less than 35 inches; for men, less than 40. Visceral fat is the killer. I think this new guideline is very realistic.
I may be a contrarian, but I don't think this is the best way to eat healthy. What we should all be doing is eating whole foods in as close to their natural state as possible. Just focusing on the nutrition labels will get you highly processed foods that have been engineered to have certain macros, but are they actually good for you? Better to steer away, I think.
Know what foods you can eat and not, and look at the ingredients to make sure it is a simple, whole food, or as close as possible.
If you only looked at the nutrition label, you might think butter and plant based spreads were identical, but comparing their ingredients, you can see they are vastly different
The former are 2 substances humans have been eating for millennia. On the latter list, sunflower oil was first produced commercially in the 19th century, and only outside Russia after the 2nd world war. Rapeseed (canola) is even more recent, dating to the 70s. Are we really sure these oils are good for us? And then they have to mess about with it, because those two oils are liquid at fridge and room temperatures. Does that messing about change the nature of the oils? I don't know, but I do know that until recently, margarine was hydrogenated, producing poisonous trans fats. I wonder whether my parents' early decline was partly due to their dutifully switching from butter to margarine in the 80s.
That's just an example. Look at the ingredients or better still, buy or grow food without a nutrition label (ie from a butcher or green grocer) and just eat it.
Hi Subtle-badger, thank you for sharing your thoughts. I do see your point in how dangerous processed food is. Whole food, naturally grown food is the best we can have. You are right, we should not just look at the nutrition labels but have the overall understanding in nutrients and diet. Yes, we are not sure supermarket oil even granola oil is good for us so limiting the usage is very important. I personal do not use any butter or margarine in my diet. It’s ideal to grow our own vegetables however we are limited in space and time so we make the best out of everything as long as we raise our awareness in healthy eating. Have a wonderful rest of the day Subtle-badger! 😊🙏🌺
Everything tends to get over-simplifies and over-generalised:If you are diabetic and in danger of having a limb amputated, eating nothing for a week or two would, I think, be Dr Jason Fung's advice.
If you are not so ill, Keto might be a good diet.
I eat carbs, including jacket potatoes as I am:
Not (pre)diabetic
Not overweight
Not hyperinsulinaemic
and I need to keep up to my target weight.
...and (apart from fuel) we eat to get protein, (including limiting amino acids) vitamins, minerals, trace elements, fibre etc.
...and I try to avoid snacks, added sugar, junk food etc. - and I rarely eat after 13:00. (Intermittent Fasting).
Hi S11m, I think things are always complicated as we see dietary changes their guidelines all the time and we try to simplify things as much as we can. If we have medical conditions, we have no choice but to stay on top of numbers. I absolutely love intermittent Fasting as it can help me reboost my metabolism.
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It's Sugar Awareness Week 8th-14th November. 
How do I start eating healthy and maintain a diet?
