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Can what you Eat cause Type 2 Diabetes?
Prepared by Lynn Maarouf, M.S., R.D., L.D. - Stark Diabetes
Center The incidence of Type 2 diabetes is increasing at an alarming rate, not only in America, but also in the rest of the world. An increase in weight can cause "insulin resistance". Not getting enough exercise and weight gain can decrease your body's ability to use insulin. It's a simple equation. Move a little more, eat a little less. As the food supply improves, people everywhere are eating more and exercising less. What most of us need to do is work on balancing our intake of calories with our output of energy. A little more exercise and a little less food. This may sound too easy but it in fact true. Recent studies have shown that a high intake of fat is the main dietary factor in Type 2 diabetes. Since fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrate or protien, fat contributes a significant amount of calories to our diet. Let's take a look at what happens when you take a healthy food and fry it. Here are a few examples of how adding fat can increase the calorie content of foods:
These are just a few examples in a list of many but the message is pretty clear. Frying the foods above increased the total calories by 643. The meal with baked foods was less than 500 calories. The meal with fried foods was over 1,000 calories. Much of the time it is not what you eat but how what you eat is cooked! Now lets talk about balancing your act. If you couldn't balance your check book you would not survive for long, but few of us think about trying to balance what we eat with the amount of exercise we do and that's exactly the problem. Most of us are eating more calories than we are burning up. That is the reason the average American is 30 pounds overweight and why our incidence of Type 2 diabetes is increasing dramatically. When we look around we may not feel like we are any more overweight than anyone else, but that is because almost everyone else is overweight, too. Remember, weight gain increases our body's resistance to the insulin we make. Does everyone who gains weight get diabetes? No. Only people who have inherited the gene for diabetes will develop Type 2 diabetes. Think about the extra 600 calories that were added in the previous fried meal. Do you have any idea how much exercise it takes to burn off 600 calories? Much more than you think. A person who weighs about about 150 pounds and walk at about 3 miles per hour burns up about 5 calories per minute.
5 calories per minute x 30 minutes = 150 calories Oooops. Still not good enough. What has happened is that you would have to walk at a rate of about 3 miles per hour (20 minute mile) for 2 hours to burn up 600 calories. To burn up that left over 43 calories would take another 9 minutes. Two hours and 9 minutes worth of walking at a pretty good clip to up 643 calories that is mostly oil. Do you have time to walk for 2 hours every day or would it be better to eat less fried food? Take the salad dressings and margarines you add you add into account, too. These are also sources of added fat and calories.
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