Nov 23 2008
Diet For Diabetes
Creating a diet for diabetes requires you to manage your carbohydrate intake. Knowing how much carbohydrate is contained in what you eat and how quickly particular foods will cause your blood glucose level to rise helps you to manage the amount and types of food you eat, and ultimately allow you to easily manage your diet for diabetes.
There are two common ways of managing your carbohydrate intake with a healthy diet for diabetes: the glycemic index and carbohydrate counting.
The Glycemic Index
The glycemic index (GI) is a ranking of carbohydrate-containing foods based on their effect on your blood glucose level. Foods that are digested slowly have a low GI rating and foods that are quickly absorbed have a high rating.
The index is useful when creating a healthy diet for diabetes because you can help to keep your blood glucose level in the recommended range by monitoring the GI rating of your food. If you eat too many high GI foods, your blood glucose level rises sharply and falls quickly. For this reason eating more low and medium GI foods than high ones balances your blood glucose level.
However, the GI of a particular food only tells you how quickly or slowly it raises blood glucose when eaten on its own. With any diet for diabetes, you usually eat a mixture of foods in any one meal – bread is often eaten with butter or margarine, and potatoes with meat and vegetables, for example.
Combining foods with different GI ratings changes the overall GI of meal. Therefore, the way to use the GI is as a guide to creating your diet for diabetes and to what low GI foods to include in a meal or snack to lower the overall effect on your blood glucose level. If you eat a baked potato (high GI), for example, adding baked beans (low GI) reduces the overall GI of the meal, as well as helping to balance your meal,
When building your diabetes diet plan, it’s also important not to confine yourself solely to low GI foods: this could lead to more hypos, especially if you are taking tablets or insulin, because this might result in you having more insulin in your system than you need. Some low GI foods are also higher in fat – peanuts, for example – so they are not the best choice if you want to eat healthily.
Carbohydrate Counting
Carbohydrate (CHO) counting is a way of assessing how much carbohydrate you are eating so that you can calculate how much insulin you need. If you were diagnosed with diabetes in the 1980s, you may have been taught CHO counting as a method of blood glucose control.
At that time, it was thought that if you managed your type 2 diabetes diet and you ate similar amounts of carbohydrate at set times each day, your blood glucose level would be the same every day. But CHO counting in this way wasn’t very effective and meant restricting your food intake to match your insulin, so it is no longer popular.
Today, CHO counting is being used in conjunction with rapid-acting insulins to give people more freedom about what they eat and how they manage their diet for diabetes.
It is most valuable if you have Type 1 diabetes because you choose what to eat and then match your quick-or rapid-acting insulin doses, via injection or insulin pump, to the amount of CHO the food contains.
To establish your personal quick-or rapid-acting insulin to carbohydrate ratio you need, you need to find out how much insulin you need for every 10g of CHO (for example) you eat. If for example you need 1 unit of insulin for every 10g of carbohydrate, your ratio will be 1 unit to 10g CHO. You can then use this when creating your diet for diabetes to calculate how much insulin you need whenever you eat any carbohydrate-containing food.
If you are finding it difficult to control your blood glucose and you are prepared to carry out more frequent blood glucose testing and assess your food and insulin doses throughout each day, your health professional can help you to find out more about using this-method to help you create a healthy and enjoyable diet for diabetes.