The dietary management of hypoglycemia requires that not only refined but also unrefined sugars and starches with a high glycemic index be removed from the diet. (The glycemic index measures the ease with which the starch is converted into glucose in the body, and estimates the amount of insulin needed to balance it out.) This means no sugar, no honey, no white flour, no whole grains sweetened with honey, no sweet fruits such as watermelons, bananas, raisins, dates or figs. Potatoes are too readily converted into sugar. Jerusalem artichokes are a good substitute.
People with hypoglycemia can often control their symptoms with frequent small meals containing vegetable protein every two hours. When a non-sweet fruit is eaten such as an apple, it should be eaten with some almonds or other nut or seed that slows the absorption of fruit sugar. Hypoglycemics can improve their condition with vitamins and food supplements. See the next chapter.
Allergies to foods and environmental irritants are frequently triggered by low blood sugar. Mental conditions are also triggered by low blood sugar levels, frequently contributing to or causing a cycle of acting out behavior accompanied by destruction of property and interpersonal violence, as well as psychosis and bouts of depression. It is not possible to easily deal with the resulting behavior problems unless the hypoglycemia is controlled. Unfortunately most institutions such as mental hospitals and jails serve large amounts of sugar and starch and usually caffeinated beverages, with a high availability of soda pop, candy, and cigarettes at concessions. If the diet were drastically improved, the drugs given to control behavior in mental hospitals would be much more effective at a lower dose, or unnecessary.
The insulin-cycle overworked pancreas may eventually not be able to secrete enough enzymes to allow for the efficient digestion of foods high in protein. As stated earlier, poor protein digestion leads to a highly toxic condition from putrefied protein in the intestines. This condition is alleviated by eliminating animal proteins from the diet and taking digestive aids such as pancreatin pills with meals to assist in the digestion of vegetable proteins.
Food Combining And "Healthfood Junkfood."
This brings us to a topic I call healthfood junkfood. Many people improve their diet, eliminating meat and chemicalized food in favor of whole grains and organically grown foods, but they then proceed to make these otherwise good foods into virtual junkfood by preparing them incorrectly. In my travels, I've noticed this same thing happens everywhere on Earth. What should be health-producing dietaries are ruined by frying, salting and sugaring.
Healthfood junkfoods include organically grown potato chips deep fried in cold pressed organic unsaturated canola oil (made rancid by frying) sprinkled with natural sea salt; organically grown oat and nut granola roasted with cold-pressed unsaturated oil (made rancid by roasting) hideously sweetened with honey; carrot cake made with rancid whole wheat flour, cold pressed unsaturated oil (made rancid by baking), honey, and cream cheese (salted); whole wheat cookies (stale, rancid flour) sweetened with honey, made with vegetable oil baked at high heat (rancid); whole wheat pizza vegetarian style with lots of soy cheese; whole wheat pizza vegan style with lots of real raw milk cheese; organically grown corn chips deep fried in cold pressed vegetable oil with or without natural sea salt, yogurts made from powdered milk without an active culture of beneficial bacteria and covered with highly sugared fruits, etc. These foods may well represent an improvement over the average American diet, but they still are not healthy foods, and should never be used in a diet for a sick person. Nor are they worthy of a person attempting to maximize health.
The problem with healthfood junkfoods is not their major ingredients, but how they were combined and processed and adulterated. Remember, fats, animal or vegetable, subjected to high heat become indigestible and toxic and make anything they're cooked with indigestible; salt is a toxic drug; cheese, hard enough to digest as it is, when raised to high temperatures as it is when making pizza, becomes virtually indigestible and cheese inevitably contains a lot of butterfat which, though saturated animal fat, when raised to high temperatures, still becomes slightly rancid. And all these foods represent indigestible combinations.
My clients almost never believe me when I first explain the idea of food combining. They think if it goes in one end, comes out the other, and they don't feel any unpleasant symptoms in between, then it was digested. But bad food combinations have a cumulative degenerative effect over a long period of time. When the symptoms arrive the victim never associates the food combination with the symptom because it seems to them that they've always been eating the food.
Mainstream nutritionists have brainwashed the public into thinking that we should have a representative serving from each of the "four basic food groups" at each and every meal, plus a beverage and a desert. Or, as my husband Steve is fond of quipping, a "balanced meal" has four colors on every plate: something red, something green, something white and something yellow. But the balanced meal is a gastronomic catastrophe that can only be processed by the very young with high digestive vitality, the exceptionally vital of any age, people with cast iron stomachs which usually refers to their good heredity, and those who are very physically active.