Diet for Diabetics
The goal in controlling diabetes is to maintain blood glucose levels as close to normal as possible for diabetics: 80-140 mg/dl fasting or 100-180 mg/dl one or two hours after meals. The best way to do this is to eat the healthiest diet you can and lose weight.
You have probably heard all kinds of horific things about a diabetic diet (for example, no desert or alchohol for the rest of your life) and how difficult it is to follow. You may believe you practically have to be a chemist to work out all those food exchanges and calorie and carbohydrate calculations. None of this is true.
Yes, you are going to have to get your nutritional act together, and yes, you will have to think about what you eat and plan for certain events. But it's not nearly as bad as you think it's going to be. Scientific thinking about a diabetic diet has changed in recent years. Things used to be very rigid, with instructions to eat a half a cup of this and no more than a quarter cup of that, and there were strict exchange groups. And it used to be true that you could never put a drop of sugar in your mouth and that carbohydrates in general were strictly limited.
Things have changed for the better for diabetics. Now, if your blood glucose is in reasonably good control, you can eat a much wider variety of foods. What you really have to watch out for is fat, but everyone should be doing that. Understand what you are eating, plan what you eat, control the amount, and decide when you are going to eat it. If you can do this, you have gone a long way toward controlling your diabetes.
While you need to do what you have to do to keep your blood glucose in control, you also need to eat the way you like to eat and keep at least some of your lifelong food habits intact. Several years ago, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services issued a general guidelines for a healthy diet for everyone. It's included suggestions were to eat a variety of foods, lower dietary fat, particularly saturated fat and cholesterol, increase intake of starch and fiber, avoid too much sugar and sodium (salt), especially in processed foods, and drink alcoholic beverages only in moderation.
The agency publicized these recommendations in the form of a pyramid. Breads, cereals, rice, and pasta form the base of the pyramid (six to eleven servings recommended every day). The next level up is vegetables (two to three servings) and fruits ( two to four servings), the second to top level includes milk, yogurt, and cheese (two to three servings) and meat, poultry, fish, eggs, dry beans, and nuts (two to three servings). At the top of the food pyramid are fats, oils, and sweets (use sparingly). This is how you should be eating.
***The ADA recommends:
In general, every day you should eat:
Three to four servings each of fruit and vegetables (twenty to thirty-five grams of fiber) Three servings of foods from bread, cereal, rice, and pasta group Two to three servings of food from the meat, poultry, fish, dry beans, eggs, and nuts group (10 to 20 percent of daily caloric intake should be from protein) Two to three servings from the dairy products group Only sparing intake of fats, oils, and sweets (no more than 30 percent of total daily calories) No more than 3,000 mg of sodium (2,400 mg for people with hypertension)