Diabetes and diet are two problems which are closely related. A study by American Diabetes Association revealed that nearly 90% of diabetes type 2 patients are overweight.
Diabetes type 2 has a history of being the most common form of diabetes. With this diabetes, your body is either not producing enough insulin or your cells ignore the insulin.
Insulin is hormone inside our body that transport the sugar from the blood into the cells. When failure of this transporting happens, glucose can builds up in blood instead of being transported into cells. That congestion can leads into trouble.
This diabetes type 2 can lead into a heart disease, stroke, kidney problem, and various of others complications.
If your body has the characteristic of an apple shape, you will face a greater risk of type 2 diabetes. Apple shape characteristic has more fat around your middle instead of your hips.
Since 90% of the diabetes type 2 patients are overweight, then diabetes and diet both are problems that must be solved together, then by paying more attention toward your weight you can help yourself dealing with diabetes type 2.
Let's revisit the diets that can help lower your weight while also dealing with your diabetes.
- Low carbohydrate diets
Carbohydrate is famed for being the common enemy of diabetes patients. Thus it becomes the foundation of the low carbohydrate diets. The low carbohydrate diets control your carbohydrate intake so that lower blood sugar level can be attained.
However not all carbohydrate is created equal. Patty Latham, M.S., R.D., registered dietitian, said that many healthy foods contains a lot of carbohydrates as well as fiber.
Whole grain foods, fruits and vegetables donate the fiber and essential nutritions to your body, so make sure you don't quickly exclude this healthy carbohydrate rich foods from your meals plan.
- Low fat diets
Fat is the number one culprit behind heart disease, cholesterol problems and blood pressure problems.
Eliminating fat consumption is definitely a good thing to do in your diet, however many of us fall into consuming the "low fat" version of our favorite foods instead of replacing the foods with healthier one.
Read my entry about the calories inside low fat foods, the "low fat" version of foods don't always contribute significantly lower calories. And reduced fat foods can possibly be richer in carbohydrates.
For example, a fat free foods can contain higher sugar because they replace the fat that was removed. And this piling up of sugars can do serious problems to your health. And bear in mind that people tend to consume more of the "fat free" version of foods.
So you should reduce your fat but also stop consuming those highly processed foods, turn your view into nature provided ingredients instead.
- Low calorie diets
This can be the best diets for diabetes patients, as described by Latham.
Provided that the diet restricts calorie intake and suggesting a high nutrition intake daily, lower levels of fasting insulin, fasting glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol can be attained.
Low calorie diets can also directly lower your excess fats and sugar. So this makes a good diet for diabetics that should manage their weight and also sugar level.
A low calorie fad diet(see lemonade - master cleanse diet recipe, cabbage soup diet recipe) won't make a good diet for longer term. Fad diets are short term diets that cater the quick weight loss but you can't do the fad diets forever.
So a good action would be to follow up your fad diets with regular diets and exercises which you should stick to for lifetime.