More than 4.5 million people are affected by diabetes in France.
They are forced to monitor their blood sugar levels several times a day and to control their diet.
So to give or restore the opportunity to diabetics to taste French pastries, Alixe Bornon, herself ill, has created revolutionary recipes in her two Parisian shops.
The National Congress of the Francophone Diabetes Society opens Monday in Strasbourg.
An important appointment since according to the European Center for the Study of Diabetes, more than 4.5 million French people were affected by the disease in 2019. Therefore, it is forbidden to eat too much sugar for those who suffer from it, like Alixe Bornon.
But the one who is now a pastry chef has decided to revolutionize French recipes to make desserts, chocolates and cookies accessible to diabetics.
"Very gourmet" pastries
"I have completely changed the recipes", exclaims Alixe Bornon at the microphone of Europe 1. To adapt the classics of French pastry making to people with diabetes in her two Parisian shops, she had to redouble her inventiveness.
"I removed the two major foods from baking that raise the blood sugar level: sugar, therefore sucrose, and white wheat flour, very refined, which creates a very rapid rise in sugar levels. I replaced a legume with alternative flours, such as lupine flour. For sucrose, there is coconut sugar and natural sugars from plants, "she explains.
>> Find the morning show of the day in replay and podcast here
Yet this pastry chef assures us, the taste remains almost the same: "this is where the magic happens" ', slips Alixe Bornon.
She nevertheless admits that "we feel that it is less sweet" even if her pastries remain "very tasty".
Just like her favorite cake, which she recreated: Paris-Brest.
"Usually, it's not the least sweet dessert and the fat month. But I managed to create a recipe, precisely, which does not affect blood sugar. It was a lot of research and development," admits- she does.
Diabetes, "it's self-monitoring all the time"
What animates this pastry chef every day is to be able to offer desserts, chocolates but also ice cream to people with diabetes or to those who want to indulge themselves healthily.
And this also because Alixe Bornon has had diabetes since the age of 13.
These daily deprivations, she no longer wanted to live them.
"It's self-monitoring all the time, every second, every moment. Night, day. And it never stops. It's a disease that we cure, diabetes, but that we do not cure. not ", she confides on her illness.
"It is the plague, the disease of the 21st century", proclaims Alixe Bornon.
To cope with her illness, she has to take insulin shots six to eight times a day.
So she wanted to bring some relief to the lives of diabetics.
And she hopes to soon be able to do it throughout France, and even internationally.