Mr. Bush has decided to send 20,000 more troops to Iraq, with or without the support (and funding?) of congress.
The 64th Annual Golden Globes will be airing live tonight, (monday) from 8-11pm eastern time. Warren Beatty will be honored with a life-time achievement award.
You can read about this in other blogs.
Cinnamon may be the golden fleece for people with Type 2 diabetes.
Diabetes, though not the end of the world, makes eating a rather dreary affair. Sugar and corn syrup take on the same stigma that once belonged to cigars and absinthe.
Buffet s are an obstacle course to be maneuvered with a politician s knack for evasion. And dessert time, well. While everyone else is having kittens over the chocolate mousse, it is the diabetic s lot to smile wanly over a ripe banana, or perhaps suck it up with a sugarless sorbee.
It ain t easy to not produce insulin.
But apple pie just might be on the diabetic diet. How is this so?
Apple pie has both refined and natural sugars. Fortunately refined sugar can be substituted with Splenda in many sugarfree desserts, but apple pie? That s still sounds like a no no.
To understand, you must first have a basic idea of how diabetes works. When we eat foods, the starch and sugar in that food gets broken down into a simple sugar called glucose. Glucose circulates through the blood stream where cells can draw energy by taking in this simple sugar when needed.
Cells are able to do this thanks to a hormone called insulin, which allows a cell to take in glucose for energy or store it as fat.
There are two categories of diabetes: Type 1 and Type 2. People with Type 1 diabetes are unable to produce enough insulin, people with Type 2 do produce enough insulin but they have an insensitivity to it so their cells do not use glucose with the efficiency of a non-diabetic person.
In both cases, the result is an overabundance of glucose in the blood stream. This condition can lead to blindness, nerve and organ damage, heart problems, and difficulty healing.
So how can Apple Pie be good for a diabetic?
The key lies in the cinnamon (cinnamon cassia, not true cinnamon. Cassia is what is sold as cinnamon in most U.S.
grocery stores). Quite by accident, researcher Richard Anderson at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture s Human Nutrition Research Center discovered that cinnamon may significantly decrease blood sugar levels in diabetics, thanks to a water-soluble polyphenol compound found in cinnamon cassia. Remarkably, this compound mimics insulin, activates its receptor, and works synergistically with insulin in cells. (New Scientist, November 2003) Immediately upon making this discovery, scientists began to organize new studies to determine the ideal amount of cinnamon intake, and the long term effects of cinnamon intake on diabetics.
It is still a fairly recent achievement, and there is much more to learn. At this point in time, it is recommended that diabetics ingest no more than approximately half a teaspoon of cinnamon per day. You do not want to eat pie everyday (whether you re diabetic or not) because the adverse effects of fat and natural sugar would overcome the beneficial effects of cinnamon cassia.
Sprinkling some cinnamon on the foods you usually eat is the best method for diabetics who wish to use cinnamon in order to lower their blood sugar. But for a treat, research supports the occasional slice of apple pie.
Other articles by Alissa can be found under the MyHelium link to the right.
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