To a Diabetic, Foods Are All About Counting Calories, Carbs and Fiber
Anyone who looks at a lavish spread at a party would see the foods they would like to head for.
When a diabetic faces a tempting situation like this, they see grams of sugar, ounces of carbohydrates and they probably see a PowerPoint presentation of the nutritional facts to do with the spread too.
Diabetics weren't born this way of course - it's not a natural talent.
It's just that when you have diabetes, Type I or Type II, every single thing on your plate has the potential to harm you.
When you are caught in a situation like that, it's easy to have your mind think like a nutritional label.
In some ways, you could argue that Type I diabetes was even more serious than Type II.
At least with Type II, you have a good chance of completely avoiding it if you live a healthy and responsible lifestyle.
Type I though is an autoimmune disease.
Your own body thinks the pancreas is the enemy and kills it off.
Up until a few years ago, if you had Type I diabetes, you were a dead man Today, with artificial insulin Type I isn't a death sentence.
But you have to be careful every minute of the day.
To a Type I diabetic foods of every description have to appear as a bunch of precisely measured nutrients.
Before you bite into a slice of bread, you have to wonder how much glucose it has in it, and how much carbs.
If you're diabetic, foods and their labels become your whole world.
Here's how you get started making attrition labels work for you.
The first thing you want to cast your eye on a package label is the list of all the ingredients.
The heart is one of the first casualties of a diabetic condition.
Look out for foods that are healthy for your heart - that would mean all whole-grain foods, and mono unsaturated fats such as olive oil in peanut oil.
What you need to make sure your food doesn't contain is, any fat that is hydrogenated.
It would be a lot easier on you to know where exactly to look for these.
You need to remember that on a nutrition label, whatever ingredient there is the most of will appear near the top.
If you are diabetic, foods that have carbohydrates need as much of your attention as the ones with sugar in them.
If you just judge what to buy by the amount of sugar in it, you could easily end up cutting all nutritious sweet foods such as fruits and milk out of your diet altogether.
And you might fill up on foods that have no sugar in them but have plenty of carbs - grains and the like.
As far as the body is concerned, carbs are the same as sugar, and you need to count carbs just as well as you do sugar.
What is more, as much fiber as you have in your food, you get to forget about as much sugar or carbohydrates.
That's right - if the package says that it contains 10 g of fiber, that means you can allow yourself an extra 10 g of sugar.
Fiber is anti-sugar.
To every new diabetic, foods that they declare to be sugar-free on the label appear to be their new best friends.
There's just a little complication here.
Sugar-free foods to begin with are sweetened with sugar alcohols.
Look on the label for anything that sounds like sorbitol (or anything else that ends with "ol").
You can consider that food to have half as much regular sugar as they declare it has sugar alcohols.
And anyway, a sugar-free cookie is not necessarily carbohydrates free too.
And that could be converted to sugar by your body.
When a diabetic faces a tempting situation like this, they see grams of sugar, ounces of carbohydrates and they probably see a PowerPoint presentation of the nutritional facts to do with the spread too.
Diabetics weren't born this way of course - it's not a natural talent.
It's just that when you have diabetes, Type I or Type II, every single thing on your plate has the potential to harm you.
When you are caught in a situation like that, it's easy to have your mind think like a nutritional label.
In some ways, you could argue that Type I diabetes was even more serious than Type II.
At least with Type II, you have a good chance of completely avoiding it if you live a healthy and responsible lifestyle.
Type I though is an autoimmune disease.
Your own body thinks the pancreas is the enemy and kills it off.
Up until a few years ago, if you had Type I diabetes, you were a dead man Today, with artificial insulin Type I isn't a death sentence.
But you have to be careful every minute of the day.
To a Type I diabetic foods of every description have to appear as a bunch of precisely measured nutrients.
Before you bite into a slice of bread, you have to wonder how much glucose it has in it, and how much carbs.
If you're diabetic, foods and their labels become your whole world.
Here's how you get started making attrition labels work for you.
The first thing you want to cast your eye on a package label is the list of all the ingredients.
The heart is one of the first casualties of a diabetic condition.
Look out for foods that are healthy for your heart - that would mean all whole-grain foods, and mono unsaturated fats such as olive oil in peanut oil.
What you need to make sure your food doesn't contain is, any fat that is hydrogenated.
It would be a lot easier on you to know where exactly to look for these.
You need to remember that on a nutrition label, whatever ingredient there is the most of will appear near the top.
If you are diabetic, foods that have carbohydrates need as much of your attention as the ones with sugar in them.
If you just judge what to buy by the amount of sugar in it, you could easily end up cutting all nutritious sweet foods such as fruits and milk out of your diet altogether.
And you might fill up on foods that have no sugar in them but have plenty of carbs - grains and the like.
As far as the body is concerned, carbs are the same as sugar, and you need to count carbs just as well as you do sugar.
What is more, as much fiber as you have in your food, you get to forget about as much sugar or carbohydrates.
That's right - if the package says that it contains 10 g of fiber, that means you can allow yourself an extra 10 g of sugar.
Fiber is anti-sugar.
To every new diabetic, foods that they declare to be sugar-free on the label appear to be their new best friends.
There's just a little complication here.
Sugar-free foods to begin with are sweetened with sugar alcohols.
Look on the label for anything that sounds like sorbitol (or anything else that ends with "ol").
You can consider that food to have half as much regular sugar as they declare it has sugar alcohols.
And anyway, a sugar-free cookie is not necessarily carbohydrates free too.
And that could be converted to sugar by your body.
