Thursday 21 October 2010

The curse of pizza!

Pizza!!!!!!

Nothing horrible about that you may think, they look and smell so good, the melted cheese mmmmm. Yep thats what we thought, most children love pizza, all four of mine do.
However, what it does to a diabetics blood glucose levels is another story altogether. It is the food of the devil, a monster in our mist, it is the thing that nightmares are made of. It will have us parents pacing the floorboards all night scratching our heads, and wondering why once again we let them eat it.


The simple answer to this question is that we don't want to say NO to our children again. We are always saying 'you can't eat that', 'its full of sugar', 'I've not carb counted that, so no' it goes on and on. Our heart breaks at the fact that our children can not be carefree about their food, can't  have a bag  of crisps just because they fancy them. So when they look at us with their sad eyes, and ask for the pizza, we give in and say yes.

Then the fun begins.....

High fat foods such as pizza can cause a delay in the absorption of the carbohydrates for 2-3 hours after eating and can elevate the blood sugar for up to 8 hours.

So..... what does that mean? Simply put it means that because the body is working at digesting the fat first it doesn't work on the carbs. Meanwhile, the insulin is starting to work on the carbs that aren't there yet which in turn results in a hypo! This hypo needs to be treated, so extra carbs are given. This raises the blood sugars levels (obviously! Thats why we give it), the blood sugars continue to rise as the body is now begining to absorb the carbs from the pizza, however by now the insulin levels have peaked and are now on their way down, so there is not enough to work on the carbs, and this results in the high levels for up to eight hours!

So there you go, that is why I think that pizza is the food of the devil! Even though I know  all of the above is going to happen, I also know that when a certain young man requests pizza for his dinner he will have it, and enjoy every mouthful

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