Dieting And Diabetes A Healthy Pair?

Diabetes has a direct impact on blood sugar levels, making your diet the most critical factor in the management of the disease. This doesn’t mean that you need to follow a specific diet, as diabetes management does not require restrictive dieting, but healthy and balanced eating. This is why a variety of eating styles can work so long as they provide you with optimal nutrition and don’t cause a spike in blood sugar levels. So, when coming up with a diabetes diet plan, you should first keep a few points in mind.

Diabetes Diet Guidelines

Pick Healthy Carbs

Choose healthy slow-digesting and non-starchy carbs that are rich in nutrition and dietary fibre. This means ditching highly processed foods like bread, white rice, biscuits, pastries, chips, and so on. Instead fill up on whole grains, fresh fruits, vegetables, pulses, and unsweetened dairy. When choosing these foods, look for varieties that have a lower glycaemic value.

Cut Back On Salt

High salt intake increases the risk of hypertension and heart disease, which is a common diabetes complication. Cutting back on pre-packaged foods and limiting salt intake in home-cooked meals can help significantly.

Get Healthy Protein

Opt for healthy protein sources from eggs, fish, and leans meats, while avoiding red meats and processed meats that are linked to heart disease. In case you’re looking for a diabetes diet for vegetarians, you can get your protein from pulses and nuts, as well as dairy.

Choose Healthy Fats

While saturated fats from red meats, butter, biscuits, and pastries should be avoided, healthy fats including monounsaturated fats and omega-3 fats are great for your health. These are mainly found in fatty fish, as well as in nuts, seeds, and healthy oils like olive oil.

Good Diabetes Diet Choices

The best diabetes diets are eating plans, rather than restrictive diets. These include the following:

DASH Diet 

Named the ‘Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension’, the DASH diet is regarded by most health care experts as one of the healthiest diets, not just for heart health, but also for diabetics.

The diet is high in whole foods including fruits, veggies, grains, and low-fat dairy. It also includes some amount of fish or lean meat and legumes, as well as nuts and seeds.

The Mediterranean Diet

This is again one of the most highly regarded diets for a wide range of healthy benefits and is again dominated with a high intake of vegetables, nuts, and healthy fats from fish and nuts. Most of your calories will come from whole grains, fruits, veggies, and beans, while some come from dairy.

It also calls for a moderate intake of healthy fats and high-quality protein from foods like eggs, fish, avocados, and olive oil, limited to a few servings a week.

Plant-Based Diet 

This is the ideal diabetes diet for Indians due to our largely vegetarian population, but you can also adapt that DASH diet or Mediterranean diets to keep them meat-free. A plant-based diet doesn’t just exclude meat but also cuts out dairy products.

Ideally, this diet should be modified to include some amount of dairy products and eggs if possible to ensure a healthy intake of protein and other nutrients that cannot be obtained from plant-based sources alone.

Worst Diabetes Diet Choices

Diets that severely restrict calorie intake or exclude entire food groups are best avoided as they can cause nutritional deficiencies and other complications. When it comes to diabetes and keto diets, opinion is divided as there are some benefits from high protein diets. However, severely limiting carb intake can lead to nutritional deficiencies, while high protein intake can increase the risk of kidney complications.

Similarly, intermittent fasting is not a good choice for diabetics although it may offer benefits to otherwise healthy individuals. This is because extended periods of fasting can cause a dangerous drop in blood sugar levels. Likewise, all diet and ‘diabetes friendly’ packaged foods should be treated with skepticism – in other words, diabetes and diet soda, diet chips, or diabetic chocolates are not the healthy choices that they may appear to be.

Keep in mind that in addition to following a healthy and balanced diet, you should also limit portion sizes, instead opting for more frequent meals as this helps stabilize blood sugar levels.

Reference Links:

1. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20833988/
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3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5439361/
4. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7468821/
5. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6153574/
6. https://medlineplus.gov/lab-tests/ketones-in-urine/