9 Foods You Should Be Eating For Type 2 Diabetes

9 Foods You Should Be Eating for Type 2 Diabetes

1 / 10 Healthy Food Choices for Type 2 Diabetes
Paying attention to what you eat is essential for controlling your weight and blood glucose levels when you have type 2 diabetes. While this means knowing which foods to limit or avoid, it’s just as important to know which foods are the most beneficial to you — and how to include them in your meal planning.
“When it comes to eating a healthy diet for type 2 diabetes, balance is really the key,” says Kelly Kennedy, RD, resident nutritionist for Everyday Health. “Many people think that they have to avoid carbohydrates if they have diabetes, but this is not the case. Instead, it's important to focus on eating approximately the same amount of carbohydrates from healthy sources, such as dairy foods, legumes, fruit, and whole grains, at each meal.” Also make whole foods — such as fruit, vegetables, lean proteins, fat-free or non-fat dairy, whole grains, and healthy fats — your go-tos. “Those provide the most nutritional ‘bang for your buck,'" Kennedy adds. Continue reading

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Regular alcohol drinkers have lower risk of diabetes, according to a huge new study

There's a new checkmark in the 'drinking isn't all bad for you' column.
According to a new study that looked at more than 70,000 Danish people, those who drink small to moderate amounts of alcohol on a frequent basis are less likely to develop diabetes than people who don't drink at all.
To be clear, these results shouldn't be seen as license or encouragement to drink freely as a health-promoting exercise.
But they do provide further evidence that, for some reason, people who drink moderately are less likely to suffer from certain illnesses, including some cardiovascular diseases and type-2 diabetes.
Regular drinking and diabetes
For the new study, researchers wanted to see how much alcohol consumption was associated with the lowest diabetes risk, and determine whether the type of alcohol or the frequency that people drank mattered.
Using data from the Danish Health Examination Survey, they looked at the drinking habits of 28,704 men and 41,847 women, and tracked whether those people developed diabetes within approximately five years. The researchers excluded anyone who already had diabetes, was pregnant at the start of the study, and didn't provide information on their alcohol consumption.
The results showed that the study participants least likely to develop diabetes drank 3-4 days a week. For men, those who drank 14 drinks per week had the lowest risk, as the chart on the left shows below. For women, those who drank nine drinks per week had the lowest risk, as the right-hand chart shows.
Risk for diabetes in 28,704 men (a) and 41,847 women (b) from the general Danish pop Continue reading

My Seatmate Thought Type 1 Diabetes Was Contagious

Diabetes activist Quinn Nystrom has written a memoir called If I Kiss You, Will I Get Diabetes? It unflinchingly chronicles her process to accepting her diagnosis at the age of 10. In this condensed excerpt from her memoir, she discusses how difficult it was to return back to school after her diagnosis, especially when confronted with diabetes ignorance.
Class had just started when my seatmate got up to talk to our teacher, Mr. Johnson. Instead of the usual single chair/desk combo, our history room had small tables with two chairs. We had been in these seats for three months, and Jacob was okay. He wasn’t nice, but he wasn’t mean, either.
Jacob walked back to our desk and sat down without looking at me. After class, Mr. Johnson asked if he could see me. I went up to his desk, wondering if I had bombed last week’s test. Mr Johnson glanced at me, and then cleared his throat.
“Jacob has asked to change seats,” he said, looking down at his hands. “He heard that you have diabetes and is concerned that it could be contagious.”
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Blood rushed to my head. I looked at Mr. Johnson stone-faced, but my mind was roaring. How did Jacob find out? He didn’t even know my last name. Only a handful of my closest friends knew that I had been diagnosed. Now the whole school knew?
I wanted to die.
I can’t do this.
I won’t do this.
Jacob is an idiot. Even a fool knows diabetes isn’t contagious. Mr. Johnson should have sent Jacob to the principal’s office for a verbal beating. Last week I had friends and a life and a future.
When I was capable of speaking, I told Mr. Continue reading

Diabetes Apps Increase User Engagement But Should Be Doing Opposite

People with diabetes increasingly turn to smartphone apps to help them manage their condition, and people like my son, a young adult who has lived with type 1 diabetes (T1D) for fifteen years, now have more than 100 to choose from on iOS or Android devices.
Researchers from the University of Florida recently took a look at these apps, and found it difficult to tell whether or not they were actually useful, though they gave many of these apps high marks for aesthetics and engagement.
Speaking from the perspective of someone who has spent these last 15 years living with diabetes in our home and working with thousands of people living with this challenging chronic disease, the vast majority of these diabetes apps do not work for most people with diabetes and are ultimately not useful, and here’s why: managing a chronic disease is exhausting, and tools to support people should be about giving people their time back, not asking them to devote more of it by “engaging” with your product.
There are better ways to use technology to manage chronic conditions.
Living with Diabetes
People living with diabetes—including my son and many colleagues of mine — spend an inordinate amount of time every day taking blood sugar readings, entering numbers on an insulin pump, recording their meals, reordering supplies and prescriptions, exercising, and keeping a daily log of their activities, illness, stress, and moods, and carbohydrate intake.
Going to bed at night does not offer relief from the routine. People with diabetes and, for children living with the disease, their parents, lose Continue reading

Are You at Risk for Type 2 Diabetes? Learn Common—and Not So Common—Risk Factors

Diabetes is not a rare condition – in fact, it’s an epidemic in the U.S. More than 30 million Americans have type 2 diabetes and another 84 million have prediabetes, a condition of elevated blood sugar levels that often leads to type 2.
Why do so many Americans have type 2 diabetes? Experts say this major public health problem is due to an aging population, increasing obesity rates and rising sedentary lifestyles.
But it’s largely a preventable epidemic and you can offset your risk of developing type 2 diabetes by understanding common—and some not-so-common —type 2 diabetes risk factors, such as:
Body Composition
You’ve probably heard that being overweight raises your risk. But it’s not really about the number on the scale, it’s about your body composition. If you have higher body fat percentage, your cells may be less sensitive to insulin. Being overweight and/or living a sedentary lifestyle tend to raise your body fat percentage.
However, even if you’re at a healthy weight, you’re not necessarily off the hook. You can still be at risk if you’re metabolically obese at normal weight—more commonly known as “skinny fat.” When you’re metabolically obese, you have a normal weight but are out of shape and have low muscle mass.
Aging is also tied to this risk factor. As you age, your metabolism and physical activity levels typically slow, causing you to gain fat mass. This is why the risk for type 2 diabetes begins rising after age 45.
Eating healthy and strength training can help maintain a healthy body composition. Talk to your doctor before beginn Continue reading