Diet for Diabetic Patients

Recommendations of diabetic diet differ for person to person, based on their nutritional needs, lifestyle, and the action and timing of medications. The common recommendations of diet for diabetic patients are as follows:

If you are a diabetic patient try to avoid following list of foods.

1. Sugar, artificial sweeteners and honey.

However you may take sweetner like stevia. It is difficult to omit sugar from your diet at once, but you can decrease sugar in your diet gradually.

2. You should stop taking sweets and chocolates.

If you are in a party and want to take chocolate, then preferably try to take continental dark chocolate with at-least 70% or more cocoa solids, and try to avoid chocolates where sugar is the first named ingredient.

3.Try to avoid foods containing ingredients that end in (ol) or (ose). And these are mainly different forms of carbohydrates like fructose, glucose, dextrose.

4. Avoid grains like cakes, biscuits, pies, tarts, breakfast cereals, wheat, rye, barley, corn, rice, bread, pasta, and pastry.

5.Avoid vegetables which contain larger amount of starch and carbohydrates like potatoes, carrots, peas, beans, parsnips, and beet.

6.Also avoid fruits like water melon, mangoes, banana, Chikoos (Pakistani), jackfruit, grapes, Strawberry, and Sugarcane.

7.You may take milk but in small quantity. Avoid fat yogurts and cheeze. Also be careful not to drink too much coffee or tea and add only as much sugar as it needs.

8. Avoid commercially packaged foods like TV dinners, "lean" or "light" in particular, and snack foods, fast foods.

9. Avoid fresh fruit juices as these are highly concentrated carbohydrates. If you like fruit juices you may dilute one part of juice with 3 or 4 parts of water.

10. Always avoid saturated fats like fatty meat, full fat dairy products, butter, lard. Try to prefer unsaturated fats like olive oil, corn oil, sunflower oil, soya oil. Avoid cottage cheese as it has a high carbohydrate content and very little fat.

These are foods you can eat:

1.You may take fruits like apple, grapefruit, Lime, Peaches.

2.You must take high fibre diet. Fibrous diet is cereals, fruits, nuts, pulses, seeds, vegetables. Fibrous diet not only lowers your glucose level but also decreases blood cholesterol.

3.Always try to take whole grain rather than processed food. Pakistani and Indian people do like white rice very much, but if you are diabetic, please avoid these.

4.You may take meat of lamb, beef once or twice a week. Organ meats can also be taken like liver kidneys and heart to meat your vitamin needs.

5.Try to take white meat like poultry chicken, fish, meat duck etc.

6.You may take fish and seafood of all types. It is recommended to boil, steam, bake or grill fish rather than fry it.

7.Always prefer non-fatty dairy products such as "skimmed milk", non-fat cheese and yoghurt.

8.You may take eggs as well but try to take whitish part not the yellow one as it may increase your cholesterol level.

9.All cheeses can be taken except cottage cheese.

10.You may take all vegetables. Onion and garlic are known for decreasing blood glucose level.

All of these are foods you can or can not have. Please try to follow the recommendation and arrange your diets.