Issues to be Aware of in a Diabetic Diet
Diabetes can be effectively controlled with regular exercise and eating a healthy diabetic diet. If you are a diabetic, the two main issues you should be well aware of in a diabetic diet plan are the sugar and fat intake.
Constant weight control is essential to prevent excessive weight gain that can contribute to a number of different problems.
If you are a diabetic, you become tuned into what you are putting into your body. Ideally, you should be eating as much raw, unprocessed food as possible, but you will still probably be consuming packaged foods. If you want to do this in a healthy way, you need to be aware that what some manufacturers put on a label is not always straightforward.
Are Food Labels really what they say they are?
For example:
- Fat free must be less than 0.15 per cent fat.
- Reduced fat should be at least a 25% reduction from the original food or product.
- Low fat must contain less than 3 per cent for solid foods and less than 1.5 per cent for liquid foods.
- No added sugar in a product means the product must not contain any added sugars, but says nothing about the natural sugar content. Fruit juice is an excellent example here.
People suffering with diabetes must also keep in mind that fats, sugars and salts can be also added in many forms and scattered throughout the ingredient list without actually being labelled as fat, sugar or salt.
Always look at the fine print as fats can be labelled as:
Dripping, butter, shortening, coconut, coconut oil, Palm oil, copha, cream, sour cream, mayonnaise, vegetable oils and fats, hydrogenated oils, full cream milk powder, eggs, mono / di or tri glyderides. None of this mentions the quality of the ingredients, which is another issue.
Sugars can be labelled as:
Brown sugar, corn syrup, dextrose, disaccharides, fructose, glucose, lactose, golden syrup, honey, malt, maltose, mannitol, maple syrup, molasses, monosaccharides, raw sugar, sorbitol, sucrose and xylitol.
Much of the advice given by a dietitian is to follow a diet that is healthy for both diabetic and nondiabetic, without distinction. The key is moderation in everything.
A good diabetic diet has an emphasis on reducing the amount of sweet foods, especially cakes and biscuits and increase the intake of complex carbohydrates by eating more brown rice and whole foods. Medication is not always necessarily the answer to control diabetes as regular exercise and a diabetic diet is quite effective.
How much exercise does a diabetic need?
There is medical evidence that regular exercise can actually help prevent a person developing diabetes and help with its control. The muscles of the body uses glucose during exercise, resulting in lower overall levels of blood sugar. The minimum recommended amount of exercise to be effective is 20 minutes at least three times a week.
And of course it’s important to consult your doctor before taking a new kind of exercise, especially if you have additional health problems, along with diabetes. Exercise alone is not sufficient to help control diabetes, which means that a diabetic diet is a must!
Moreover, there are some diabetic patients for whom this is not enough and medication is necessary. Most drugs are taken orally for diabetes. A diabetic may be prescribed a drug or a combination of several drugs to adequately control their diabetes.
Effective management of diabetes can usually be achieved through adherence to proper diet and exercise for diabetics on a regular basis.
