People with diabetes can still eat mooncakes, if they learn to eat smart and properly control their blood-sugar levels, a physician said yesterday.
As many people with diabetes or “the three highs” — high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure and high blood sugar — often ask doctors whether they are allowed to eat mooncakes during the Mid-Autumn Festival, ShuTien Clinic’s Metabolism Department director Hung Chien-te (洪建德) said yes, but added several provisos.
If people with diabetes pay attention to the glycemic index (GI) and the calories they eat, and take their prescribed medication, they can eat mooncakes to celebrate the holiday, but excessive eating is not suitable for people with diabetes or the three highs, or anyone for that matter, Hung said.
“A food’s GI is defined as the incremental area under the two-hour blood-glucose response curve after a healthy person consumes 50 grams of the available carbohydrates,” Hung said, adding that a diet with a lower GI can help control blood-glucose levels in people with diabetes.
He said the calories in a mooncake are mainly from starch (flour), sugar and fat (oil), and as both starch and sugar affect blood-sugar levels, carbohydrates should also be factored in.
A person with diabetes should obtain 40 to 60 percent of their total daily caloric intake from carbohydrates, so, for example, a man with diabetes who needs a daily intake of 2,000 calories per day would need to consume about 275 grams (about 1,100 calories) of carbohydrates per day, he said.
Hung said that if such a man consumed a piece of mooncake weighing 67.5g to 75g — about 350 calories — then he would have to not eat a bowl of rice — about 200g and 320 calories — that day.
However, he urged people with diabetes, but who “have poor control over their blood-sugar levels, do not take their medication regularly, do not know their glycated hemoglobin level,” people with the three highs and on a controlled diet, or people with eating disorders, to avoid eating mooncakes.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
UNAWARE: Many people sit for long hours every day and eat unhealthy foods, putting them at greater risk of developing one of the ‘three highs,’ an expert said More than 30 percent of adults aged 40 or older who underwent a government-funded health exam were unaware they had at least one of the “three highs” — high blood pressure, high blood lipids or high blood sugar, the Health Promotion Administration (HPA) said yesterday. Among adults aged 40 or older who said they did not have any of the “three highs” before taking the health exam, more than 30 percent were found to have at least one of them, Adult Preventive Health Examination Service data from 2022 showed. People with long-term medical conditions such as hypertension or diabetes usually do not
POLICE INVESTIGATING: A man said he quit his job as a nurse at Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital as he had been ‘disgusted’ by the behavior of his colleagues A man yesterday morning wrote online that he had witnessed nurses taking photographs and touching anesthetized patients inappropriately in Taipei Tzu Chi Hospital’s operating theaters. The man surnamed Huang (黃) wrote on the Professional Technology Temple bulletin board that during his six-month stint as a nurse at the hospital, he had seen nurses taking pictures of patients, including of their private parts, after they were anesthetized. Some nurses had also touched patients inappropriately and children were among those photographed, he said. Huang said this “disgusted” him “so much” that “he felt the need to reveal these unethical acts in the operating theater
Heat advisories were in effect for nine administrative regions yesterday afternoon as warm southwesterly winds pushed temperatures above 38°C in parts of southern Taiwan, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 3:30pm yesterday, Tainan’s Yujing District (玉井) had recorded the day’s highest temperature of 39.7°C, though the measurement will not be included in Taiwan’s official heat records since Yujing is an automatic rather than manually operated weather station, the CWA said. Highs recorded in other areas were 38.7°C in Kaohsiung’s Neimen District (內門), 38.2°C in Chiayi City and 38.1°C in Pingtung’s Sandimen Township (三地門), CWA data showed. The spell of scorching