First the bad news. There is no “diabetes diet” as such.
A diabetes diet is simply a healthy nutritional plan for eating high quality foods to help control blood sugar levels. This type of diet benefits healthy people as well as diabetics, and that means your whole family can adopt the “diabetes diet” and eat the same stuff.
If you have diabetes, or prediabetes, you should contact your doctor and ask them for help in planning your diet. Depending on the type of diabetes you have, you may also require medications.
The diet will probably include regular meals and snacks, plus a lot of the following foods:
- Fresh fruit and vegetables.
- Eat fish instead of red meats.
- While grain foods.
- Low GI starchy foods.
- Legumes and lentils.
- Low fat diary products.
- High fibre foods like wheat bran.
- Nuts.
The general rules of a healthy diet apply. You should obviously be limiting saturated fats which are a major concern for everyone, but particularly diabetics who are at a higher risk of cardiovascular disease anyway. You can do this quite easily by limiting the amount of solid fats you eat, like butter and shortening.
Also avoid alcohol or sugary sweets and puddings.
Reducing foods that can raise your cholesterol is also a good idea. Eat lean meats, avoid egg yolks and use low fat dairy products.
Exercise and Diet go hand in hand in combating Diabetes
A diet on its own is only half of the equation. Increasing the levels of exercise can increase the amount of blood sugar that is used for energy, however, talk to your doctor before starting any exercise program.
Is there a Cure for Diabetes?
The diet that diabetics are put on is designed to treat the symptoms of the disease, and not the cause. That is one of the problems with conventional medicine, it often treats the symptoms with drugs but that does little to cure the underlying cause of the problem. For diabetics, medicine doesn’t hold out much hope. Diabetes is incurable – I am sure your doctor has told you that. However, what if there was a cure for diabetes? What if you could reverse diabetes. I think you should read my article “Is there a cure for diabetes”, as there are those out there who claim you can cure diabetes naturally.