Diet for diabetics

When I was first diagnosed with diabetes I went to a two day class on food for diabetics. Pretty much they spend two days saying "look at the label and see how much carbohydrates is in a serving. If it's more that 15 then that's a lot of carbohydrates, if it's less than 15 then that's low. Low is good, high is bad".

It turns out that's not actually so helpful. It's a nice place to start when menu planning for a diabetic, but it's a long way from getting the job done.

The truth is that we don't really know what an optimal diet is. We learn something new about what might be relevant almost everyday. At least we might learn if we're paying attention closely enough.

Some of the recent news comes from a couple of articles in Journal of the American Medical Association.

Chowing down on lentil soup and pasta seems to be the way to go if you have type 2 diabetes.

A new study found that a diet of "low-glycemic foods" -- such as beans, nuts, peas, lentils and pasta -- was superior to a high-cereal-fiber diet when it comes to lowering blood sugar

Pasta is ext4remeely high in carbs and I'd been taught that I shoulld stay away from foods with very high carb counts. But I guess that's not all there is to is and that some high carb counts are better than others.

Carbohydrates in a low-glycemic-index diet are absorbed through the small intestine and converted to blood sugar at a slower rate than higher glycemic foods, meaning blood sugar is more stable, the researchers said.

Hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) levels, a longer-term measure of blood sugar levels, decreased by 0.5 percent in people on the low-glycemic-index diet, compared with a decrease of 0.18 percent in the alternate group.

The VA has recently moved away from suggesting testing your blood sugar seve3ral times a day to the use of A1c two or three times a year to check blood sugar control. But they hav e done a horrible job of explaining to p0atients why they're doing that.