Diet plays a significant role in controlling the diabetes. The diabetic diet may be used alone or else in combination with insulin doses or with oral hypoglycemic drugs. Main objective of diabetic diet is to maintain ideal body weight, by providing adequate nutrition along with normal blood sugar levels in blood. The diet plan for a diabetic is based on height, weight, age, sex, physical activity and nature of diabetes. While planning diet, the dietician has to consider complications such as high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels.
The views on what a good diabetes diet means have undergone numerous revisions. You should, of course, consult your health care advisor for details about your recommended diabetes diet. In general, good diabetes nutrition involves being aware of the nutritional information of what you eat and its impact on your blood glucose. You need to balance and track food, medication, and exercise. Eating regularly, and on-time, helps to avoid low-blood glucose. Learning about body mass index and the glycemic index of foods can also be helpful.
The goals for a diabetic diet are basically to achieve near normal blood glucose levels and protect the heart and cholesterol levels. It is also important to manage or prevent the complications that can come about from diabetes. Diabetics are at risk for a number of medical complications, including heart and kidney disease. For this reason it is important to also limit fat intake. Avoid saturated fats and trans-fatty acids such as hard margarine and fast food. Monounsaturated fat is preferred such as virgin olive oil or canola oil.
Polyunsaturated oils are also good such as sunflower oil. Consume plenty of fiber-rich foods such as whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables. Nuts and seeds are also good.. When choosing foods with sugar, choose fresh fruits, but do so in moderation. Eat plenty of dietary fibre (brown rice, wholewheat bread, oats, unsifted maize meal, fresh, unpeeled, raw fruits and vegetable, and legumes, such as cooked, dry beans, peas and lentils and meat substitutes made from legumes like soya)
Eat less fat, especially less saturated fat (found in fatty meats, poultry skin, butter, 2% or whole milk, ice cream, cheese, palm oil, coconut oil, trans fats, hydrogenated oils, lard, and shortening). Choose lean meats and meat substitutes. Switch to low-fat or fat-free dairy products.
Two effective meal planning approaches for people with diabetes are Carbohydrate Counting and the Food Exchange System. Talk to your dietitian or diabetes educator about the approach that is best for you. Your dietitian or diabetes educator can help you determine how many grams of carbohydrate you should eat at each meal or snack. You and your dietitian can create a meal plan that fits your lifestyle, budget, food preferences, and eating habits.
Pre Diabetes Diet Plan
Finally there seems to be a paradigm shift in treating diabetes. Both patients and doctors are trying t prevent this disease rather than cure it. The wonderful thing about pre-diabetes is that it can be completely reversed. The key is to change what you eat and get physical exercise daily. It's a proven fact that excess body fat is a major contributor to the development of diabetes, so losing the extra weight is the best way to reverse the condition.
Changes to your eating habits are crucial, and the reasons are two-fold. By changing what you eat now, you can stop making all the functions of your body have to work harder to keep you alive. Also, by changing your eating style, you can lose the extra body fat at a much faster rate.
When you constantly eat a lot of refined white sugar, flour, and other simple starches, you are stressing your body's natural functionality. The body is designed to extract the nutrients from foods we eat, and put them to good use as needed. It's also designed to filter out the useless materials in our foods. Feeding it too many useless sugars makes it constantly have to work to remove the excess from the body, and this can place unnecessary stress on the pancreas.
The constant onslaught of sugar and starches in our diet is one of the reasons pre-diabetes and diabetes is so prevalent in our society. The pancreas has to deal with the constant up and down roller coaster we create with our blood sugar levels. Starchy foods, in the form of junk foods and sweets, spike our body's blood sugar levels. The pancreas responds by pumping out extra insulin, and sometimes it needs to compensate a lot more than normal to deal with super high sugar spikes. The final result is that the body's muscle and fat cells stop resonding and become insensitive to insulin.
When the excess sugar is removed from the blood stream, the body thinks it's starving because the blood sugar levels are so low. The end result is a craving for sweets. This creates the blood sugar roller coaster that's hard on your body, and in time the pancreas will stop being able to deal with those large sugar spikes. When the pancreas is unable to manufacture enough insulin to handle the raised blood sugar levels, diabetes has developed.
All this can be avoided by simply changing what you eat on a daily basis. A proper diet takes stress off the pancreas, and in turn it is able to continue working properly for a much longer period of time. When combined with weight loss and herbal remedies, sometimes the pancreas can even be healed of any damage it may have endured due to those ongoing sugar spikes in your system over the years.
Exercise is the second part of reducing pre-diabetes. This is because exercise helps stimulate our bodies to lose fat faster. Once we have changed our diet, we will gradually start losing weight over time if we are consistent with the changes we've made. By exercising daily, our bodies are able to burn fat faster, and this results in our bodies using insulin properly since it is no longer being stored as fat and is now building muscle.
Note: The FDA may not approve some statements in this article. This article is for informational purposes only and should not be taken as professional medical advice.
Both Peter rodrick & Clara Myers are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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