PROOF BANANAS AND SUGAR AREN’T EQUAL

THE graphs, right and below, show how Michelle and my own blood sugar reacted over two hours, after consuming each of the ‘challenge’ foods: a banana and six teaspoons of sugar, and a portion of white rice and ten teaspoons of sugar.

The red line in each graph shows what happened when we consumed pure sugar, and the blue line represents the foods.

Note that we have put the start of each line on our graph at zero – but this doesn’t mean our blood sugar level was zero (we’d be dead if it was).

In fact our blood sugars were slightly different at the start of each experiment, and we’ve presented the data like this so it’s easy to compare the changes caused by each food.

It’s clear blood sugar begins to increase sooner when pure sugar is consumed.

‘Pure sugar doesn’t need much breaking down in the digestive system, so gets into the blood faster,’ explains Dr Katerina Petropoulou, who ran our experiment.

‘For both of you the total amount of sugar that got into the blood was greater when you ate pure sugar. The response was normal – and what you would expect. Eating a banana or rice is clearly not equivalent to consuming pure sugar.’