Diabetic-friendly Recipes

The Diabetic Diet

• Diabetes is a disease that requires you to inject insulin directly under the skin. The only method of taking insulin is by having shots, because if insulin would be taken as pills, the digestive juices in your stomach would disintegrate the insulin as soon as you would swallow the pill. This insulin may have an unbalancing effect for your organism and you might gain weight radically when taking insulin. Therefore people that have diabetes also need to undertake a healthy, balancing diet.

• Patients that have diabetes type 1 should take on a diet with approximately 35 calories per kg of body weight (or 16 calories per pound) each day, while patients with diabetes type 2 usually need a diet consisting of an average of 1600 calories per day. These numbers are not fixed numbers of course, as each patient may vary in age, activity level, weight, frame and sex, thus the calories needed will vary with each individual.

• When taking up a diabetic diet, make sure that carbohydrates are somewhere around 50 percent of your daily calorie count because lower carbohydrate intake is associated with lower sugar levels in your blood. Carbohydrates make your blood glucose level go up, so the more carbohydrates you eat, the higher the sugar in your blood will go. This is an essential element of any diabetic diet.

• The amount of food you eat is in close relation with your blood sugar control. If you eat more food than is recommended, your blood sugar goes up. Although foods containing carbohydrate have the most impact on blood sugars, the calories from all foods will affect blood sugar. The only way you can tell if you are eating the right amount is to carefully measure your foods. Also, it is important to divide your carbohydrates out throughout the day to avoid sugar "loading.”

• So if you are suffering from diabetes and want to maintain a healthy body and a normal weight, you need to take up on a diabetes diet. The best thing to do is visit a doctor or nutritionist who can give you professional advice, but if you think you can manage on yourself, remember these few, basic, extremely important rules: count your carbohydrates, count your calories and make sure no unnecessary fat will enter your body.