Reading Nutritional Labels for Diabetics

Video Transcript

Carbohydrates are our primary source of energy. The body uses carbohydrate just like the car uses gasoline. And, so the body basically runs on carbohydrate. Carbohydrate is the scientific term for all forms of sugar in a food. Now, what often gets confusing is when we read a food label that tells us about how much carbohydrate or sugar is in a food we often get confused about what it means when it says carbohydrate and what it means when it says sugar. One of the things you need to know, is that the sugar content of any product is part of the total carbohydrate not separate. There's a tendency for people to think that it's separate. And, often times when you find out you have diabetes the first thing you do is look at the sugar content and think oh well this is what I need know. But, in fact the sugar content is usually a fraction of the total amount of glucose in that food. In most products, the sugar content is twenty percent of the total glucose. And, that's because the sugar content is referring to simple sugars or table sugar. Whereas, eighty percent of that product contains what we call complex sugars. But, the more common term is starch. So, when you're looking at a food label and you look at the total carbohydrate you're getting all the information you need about the sugar of that product. You're getting the information about how much starch is in there and how much simple sugar is in that product. When you look at the food label and you look at that term total carbohydrate, that's the number you want to count when you're trying to decide how much carbohydrate you need to take in. Now, one good thing to note is that fiber is technically a carbohydrate. But, it does not go in your bloodstream. So, you actually don't have to count the fiber content of that food. So, what we generally tell people to do is subtract that number. For example, let's say you're eating the Fiber One cereal and we know that the Fiber One cereal is twenty-five grams of carbohydrate for a half a cup. However, eleven of those twenty-five grams are fiber. So, you're only going to count fourteen grams as far as what's going to affect your blood sugar.