Pastas, white flour and bread, most breakfast cereals, polished rice, are all refined carbohydrates and have a similar effect on your low blood sugar levels (hypoglycemia) as does sugar itself.

White sugar is 'pure' as the advertisements have described it, but it is so pure that it contains no enzymes, minerals and vitamins. In fact it is 99% sucrose and contains absolutely no goodness at all.

It has to rob the missing enzymes, minerals and vitamins from reserves in your body or from other food you eat. The colour of molasses shows how much goodness has been extracted. It tells us which minerals and vitamins are missing in sugar itself. So these elements need to be robbed to allow metabolism of sugar.

To stop eating sugar is not as simple as cutting sugar out of tea or coffee because a look at labels in the supermarket show that it is in a surprising number of products. When shopping check for the following on the packaging: sugar, sugar syrup, glucose, corn syrup, invert sugar, cane syrup, natural sweetener, dextrose and sucrose.

There is no nourishment in sugar and, especially with the vast quantities in modern diets, should be avoided by hypoglycemics. In normal food there are natural starches and sugars, along with proteins, fats, minerals and enzymes.

These slowly release sugar into the blood as fuel when the body and brain requires it. Sugar not only leaches the body of essential vitamins and minerals but also sets off the up and down cycles of blood sugar levels (hypoglycemia).

The constant imbalance, over time, causes hypoglycemia. This must be seen as a warning before diabetes, heart and kidney diseases take hold.

The other big areas where sugar is found in the western diet is in actual candy, chocolates and cold drinks. Today Americans consume 150 lbs of sugar per person per year; up from 125 lbs in 1980.

Overweight populations are now a definite problem. A quarter of Americans now eat a ½ lb of sugar per day. They are mainly unaware of this as it is in the vast quantities of processed foods they consume.

Excess sugar and refined products lead to the well known hypoglycemic symptoms of lack of concentration, irritablility and unprovoked anxieties, which if ignored, lead to insomnia and exhaustion.

But it needn't develop like this. It is very easy to start understanding your own symptoms. There is now a lot of research published on Hypoglycemia (low blood sugar levels). Since no-one else is going to help you, it is your responsibility to seek out this information especially as it is now readily available.