Jaggery has long been used as one of the favorites substitutes for sugar. This is particularly true for all those people who happen to suffer from diabetes. Even our elders always advise us to take a piece of jaggery after every meal. This helps in digesting the food that we have eaten. However, as we know, when you are suffering from diabetes, you need to really really careful about what you eat and what you should not eat. Hence, in this article, we try to find the answer to the question: “Can diabetics eat jaggery? Is it good or bad?”.
Table of Contents
A Little About Jaggery
Jaggery is often used instead of sugar by most of the diabetes patients. The food substance is often produced after extensive boiling and reducing the juice that you get from sugarcane. It has a good amount of iron content which makes it really good for digestion.
It is considered to be more nutritious and healthier than sugar. It is believed that jaggery is a little less refined than sugar. As a result, jaggery does have all the essential minerals such as potassium, calcium, iron, and other minerals intact. There are various benefits and risks of eating jaggery if you are a diabetes patient. Let us have a look at the same:
Benefits of Eating Jaggery in Diabetes
As already mentioned above, jaggery is less refined than sugar and hence a lot of important nutrients are present in jaggery. This includes calcium, iron, etc.
One of the other benefits of eating jaggery is that it helps a great deal in stabilizing the level of blood pressure in the body. This is very important for patients suffering from diabetes as it results in a lot of additional complications related to diabetes.
Jaggery also goes a long way in helping to smoothen the entire process of digestion. This is very important for a diabetes patient because digestion is often a problem with them and their body.
However, there are certain risks of eating jaggery that should not be ignored if you are a diabetes patient:
Risks of Eating Jaggery in Diabetes
One of the main risks of eating jaggery is that it contains sucrose. In diabetes, if you eat sucrose, there is a risk that your sugar levels will increase. Thus jaggery will have the same effect on diabetes as sugar. However, the only benefit you get is that the time after which the spike happens is longer while eating jaggery than in case of sugar. In fact, the total extent of sucrose in jaggery is around 65 to 85 percent.
Most of the doctors and other experts are always of the view that diabetes patients should have a diet that is low in glycemic index. However, the chemical composition of jaggery is such that the glycemic index is actually really high. For this reason, the experts do not consider jaggery as their favorite substitute for sugar.
Thus, you need to carefully weigh the benefits and risks of eating jaggery if you are a diabetic. Most of the doctors recommend to avoid eating jaggery and even if you do have it, you should have it within the recommended limits.