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Diabetes Diet

Diabetes Diet

How Much Protein Do You Need?

One of the most important diet questions for people with diabetes is to decide how much protein you need to eat each day. Yet it’s something that few people consider.

While the debate still rages over how many grams of carbohydrates and fats that we should eat, people with diabetes tend to ignore the key role that this third macronutrient plays. Your body uses protein to build and repair bones, muscles, cartilage, skin, and blood as well as to make key chemicals in our bodies, including enzymes and hormones.

Not until a couple of years ago did I pay much attention to how much protein my body needs. Only when I adopted a vegetarian diet in addition to the low-carb lifestyle that I have followed for years to manage my Type 2 diabetes, did I realize I would need to get more protein now that I don’t eat fish or meat.

If you are a vegetarian, like me, or a vegan, you are a part of a large group of people who need to make a special effort to get enough protein.  The people who are trying to lose weight also need to give attention to how much protein they consume. But if you have kidney disease, one of the potentially most serious complications of diabetes, the amount of protein you eat can be even more important.

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Diabetes Diet

You Can Keep Off the Weight You Lose

The “Biggest Losers” didn’t keep off the pounds they lost. If you believe the stories in the media how 14 of them regained most of their weight, you could give up hope of ever being able to maintain a normal weight.

But their failure doesn’t mean that you can’t succeed.

If you have type 2 diabetes, nothing makes it harder for you to manage it than being overweight or obese. This extra weight stops the glucose in your blood from getting to the rest of your body that needs it for energy. When you don’t keep your blood glucose level in the normal range — below 6.0 percent — you increase your risks of complications exponentially.

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Diabetes Diet

How to Manage Your Diabetes with Coffee

Coffee can reduce the blood glucose levels of people with type 2 diabetes by improving insulin sensitivity. This is the conclusion of a study just published in the International Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences.

This cross-sectional study compared four groups of people:

  • 48 people who have type 2 diabetes and do drink coffee
  • 42 people who have type 2 diabetes and don’t drink coffee or any caffeinated beverage
  • 143 people who don’t have diabetes and do drink coffee
  • 57 people who don’t have diabetes and don’t drink coffee or any caffeinated beverage

All of the coffee drinkers in the study had drunk 3 to 4 cups of filtered coffee daily for at least 16 years. And all of the people with diabetes in the study took oral diabetes drugs and were free of diabetes complications.

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Diabetes Diet

Eat Saturated Fat to Help Avoid Diabetes

A new study demonstrates that the fat in dairy foods — which is mostly saturated  — can reduce the risk of diabetes. Its findings challenge the U.S. government’s current “Dietary Guidelines for Americans.”

The American Heart Association published the study online a few days ago before printing it in a forthcoming issue of the association’s peer-reviewed journal Circulation. While only the abstract is free online, a representative of the lead author, Dariush Mozaffarian, M.D., the dean of Tufts University’s School of Nutrition Science, send me the full text, which I carefully studied. The seven other researchers are professors at Harvard and Tufts Universities, including two of the best known and widely published nutritionists in the country, Walter Willett, M.D. and Frank Hu, M.D.

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Diabetes Diet

Four Ways to Make Vegetarian Sandwiches Without Bread

If you follow a very low-carb diet, you may have assumed that sandwiches were off limits for you. And if you are also a vegetarian, you were probably certain that they were out of bounds.

Because a sandwich by definition is a light meal made of two pieces of bread with some filling, it’s got to have far too many carbohydrates for those of us who have diabetes. Eating so much bread would blow up our blood glucose level.

Bread is high-carb

Two slices of the typical whole-wheat bread sold in the United States have 24 grams of carbohydrate, and that’s not counting what we put between the slices. Those two slices alone would provide nearly half of the 50 grams of carbohydrates per day in a very low-carb diet.

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