We recently covered food allergies and the dietary choices that make your hormones the happiest. We’re going to round out our nutritional plan by discussing two important concepts, blood sugar stability, and what it means to choose “high quality” foods. Making dietary choices that stabilize your blood sugar is one of the most important things you can do for your health.

Do you frequently get tired after meals? Is it difficult for you to make it more than a couple of hours without eating, or without drinking something besides water? These are just a few warning signs that your blood glucose (a scientific word for sugar) levels are awry. There are many health conditions that can affect glucose regulation, but diet tops the list.

Poor blood sugar regulation is so insidious because of its effects on our hormone regulation. Two hormones that shoulder the greatest burden of see­sawing glucose are cortisol and insulin.

Cortisol is a hormone your body uses to respond to stress. Metabolically, low blood sugar puts your body into a state of alarm. Cortisol is then secreted by your adrenal glands to mobilize glucose from your liver and muscles, supplying it to needy organs such as your heart and brain.

Unfortunately, continually elevated cortisol due to low blood sugar has side ­effects. Generalized inflammation, poor sleep quality, and an edgy mood are just a few conditions that can plague those swimming in excess cortisol.

Blood sugar swings make other hormones unstable, and perhaps the most strongly affected is insulin. It’s insulin’s job to drive the glucose that was provided by cortisol into the cells, where it will ultimately be used.

As blood glucose is driven up and down, insulin follows, and these insulin surges cause many other problems. Imbalances in both female and male sex hormones (i.e. estrogen and testosterone), elevated triglycerides, hypothyroidism, and osteoporosis are all possible effects of the excessive insulin surges caused by unregulated blood sugar.

This begs the question: what drives blood sugar instability? Well, lots of things, but here’s a short list:

• Sugary foods and unrefined carbohydrates. Think white rice, desserts, high­ fructose corn syrup, and pasta, just to name a few.

• Food allergies. The inflammatory response caused by allergenic foods causes you to absorb sugars more rapidly, driving your blood glucose levels up.

• Infections. Insidious bugs that can reside in the kidneys, bladder, oral cavity, or gut wreak havoc on your ability to regulate energy levels.

• Emotional stress. Those heavy emotional days drive your cortisol higher, and we know what cortisol does to your blood sugar.

In addition to avoiding foods that drive an allergic response, making good food choices for our hormones, and regulating our blood sugar; choosing foods of high quality is the icing on our nutritional cake.

The majority of dietary research and lay articles in health and fitness magazines is confined to the topic of food quality. They tend to focus on whether or not a food is:

• Carcinogenic

• Organic

• Genetically modified

• Has added hormones

• Has harmful chemicals

• Has harmful fats

Choosing high quality foods isn’t hard if you remember this: the less modified a food is from its natural state, the more likely it is to be healthy.

Unprocessed foods are your friends, so stick to the perimeter of the grocery store. This is where fruits, vegetables and unprocessed meats hang out. Once you get into the center aisles, all bets are off. Foods in the aisles all have long shelf lives precisely because they’ve been modified in some way, or have some added chemical(s).

Better yet, venture down to your local farmers market for an even better variety. There’s no such thing as shelf life in these places, making virtually any choice you make better than what you’d find in a big name grocery store.

Maintaining a healthy diet can feel like a chore. But the best part of this approach is that the rules you follow are your rules. In short, it boils down to this:

1) Avoid foods you’re allergic to.

2) Choose foods that balance your hormones.

3) Select foods that keep your blood sugar stable.

4) Invest in high ­quality foods.

The key moment is when you realize that these rules come from one guideline that’s even simpler: choose the foods that make you feel best. Not for the next ten minutes or the next couple of hours. Choose the foods that make you feel good consistently, day in and day out.

Once you follow your own dietary plan and you see how good you can feel, sticking with it won’t be a chore. You’ll simply want to do it, and you won’t know how you ever ate any other way.