Can Type 1 Diabetics Eat Sugar Free Candy?

There are always questions asked as to what a diabetic patient should or should not include in his or her daily diet. Diabetes is complicated and as such, it is very natural to be skeptical about adding a particular food product in your meal plan. Today’s discussion revolves around the inclusion of the so-called sugar-free candies in the meal plan of a type 1 diabetic patient. So, join in for the article “Can Type 1 Diabetics Eat Sugar-free candy?”
Meaning of Sugar-Free
To start with, it is imperative we know the very meaning of the term sugar-free. According to the Food and Drug Administration, sugar-free means something that has less than 0.5 grams of sugar in one serving. In sugar-free foods, the sugar is substituted with either the artificial sweeteners or the sugar alcohols.
Typically, most of the artificial sweeteners are sweeter than even sugar but they do not break down in the body and hence, have no effect on the levels of blood glucose in most of the cases. Sugar alcohols, on the other hand, are less sweet than sugar and have an effect on our blood sugar levels as they are partially absorbed in our body. Let us learn more about sugar-free candies and their effect on the patients suffering from type 1 diabetes.
Can Sugar-Free Candy Raise Your Blood Glucose?
The question “Can Sugar-Free Candy raise Your Blood Glucose?” has become very common and the answer to the same is a Yes, it can. Let us understand how the same can happen:
When you say, sugar-free, it does not necessarily mean that the candy has no form of sugar or calories. There are a lot of things Continue reading

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Sweet Potatoes and Diabetes: Are Sweet Potatoes Good for Diabetics?

Diabetes is a complicated disease to handle, you always need to be careful of what you are eating and in how much quantity. As such, there are a lot of questions as to whether including a particular vegetable in the daily diet of a diabetic is safe or not. In this article, we shall explore more about the relationship between sweet potatoes and diabetes.
Let us analyze and see whether including the sweet potatoes in the daily diet of a diabetic patient is healthy or not.
Carbohydrates and Sweet Potatoes
Let us first understand how carbohydrates are related to sweet potatoes or how much carbohydrate does this humble vegetable contain.
It is known that a medium sized sweet potato contains somewhere around 25 to 26 grams of carbohydrates. Included in this is around 3.8 to 4 grams of fiber.
If you take a cup and mash the sweet potatoes in the same, you will get around 58 grams of carbohydrates and around 8 grams of fiber.
Read Also: Best Low Carb Snacks for Diabetics
What makes the sweet potatoes healthy for a diabetes patient is the amount of dietary fiber found within the carbohydrate. This helps in stabilizing and maintaining a healthy level of blood glucose or blood sugar in a diabetic patient.
Reasons Why Sweet Potatoes are Good for Diabetes Patients
Following are a few reasons why sweet potato is a good vegetable option for all the diabetes patients:
The natural sugar present in sweet potatoes is considered healthy as it helps in controlling the blood sugar levels in the patient’s body. This also enables the vegetable in increasing the body’s sensitivity towards the ho Continue reading

The History of Diabetes

For 2,000 years diabetes has been recognized as a devastating and deadly disease. In the first century A.D. a Greek, Aretaeus, described the destructive nature of the affliction which he named “diabetes” from the Greek word for “siphon.” Eugene J. Leopold in his text Aretaeus the Cappodacian describes Aretaeus’ diagnosis: “…For fluids do not remain in the body, but use the body only as a channel through which they may flow out. Life lasts only for a time, but not very long. For they urinate with pain and painful is the emaciation. For no essential part of the drink is absorbed by the body while great masses of the flesh are liquefied into urine.”
Physicians in ancient times, like Aretaeus, recognized the symptoms of diabetes but were powerless to effectively treat it. Aretaeus recommended oil of roses, dates, raw quinces, and gruel. And as late as the 17th century, doctors prescribed “gelly of viper’s flesh, broken red coral, sweet almonds, and fresh flowers of blind nettles.”
Early Discoveries-Human Guinea Pigs
In the 17th century a London physician, Dr. Thomas Willis, determined whether his patients had diabetes or not by sampling their urine. If it had a sweet taste he would diagnose them with diabetes mellitus- “honeyed” diabetes. This method of monitoring blood sugars went largely unchanged until the 20th century.
Despite physicians’ valiant efforts to combat diabetes, their patients remained little more than human guinea pigs. In the early 20th century, diabetologists such as Dr. Frederick Allen prescribed low calorie diets-as little as 450 Continue reading

The Best and Worst Fruits to Eat If You Have Diabetes

Good news for fruit lovers everywhere: eating fresh fruit is associated with a lower risk of diabetes and a lower risk of complications if you already have the disease, according to a new study published in PLOS Medicine.
Featured recipe: Fresh Fruit Salad
If you've been steering clear of fruit because of the sugar content, there's no reason to do so, according to this study. Over a seven-year time period, researchers analyzed the diet and health outcomes of more than 500,000 Chinese adults. The researchers found that higher fruit consumption was not associated with higher blood sugar, even for people with diabetes. Adults who consumed fruit more frequently actually had a lower risk of developing diabetes.
The study only analyzed fresh fruit consumption, not dried fruit or fruit juice, so we turned to a few registered dietitians and certified diabetes educators to clarify the best and worst fruits, appropriate serving sizes, and how many carbohydrates you should get from fruit each day.
First it's important to note that "diabetes care is individualized," says Staci Freeworth, RD, CDE, and professor of nutrition at Bowling Green State University. This is why it is important for people with diabetes to see a certified diabetes educator (CDE). These specialists can break down how many carbohydrates you should be eating each day based on your individual needs and health history.
Best Fruits to Eat
Recipe to Try: Purple Fruit Salad
Whether you have diabetes or not, the consensus from dietitians is the same regarding which fruits are best to eat.
"The best fruits for everyone to Continue reading

CABG Appears Superior to PCI for Patients With Type 1 Diabetes, Multivessel Disease

The observational findings support existing recommendations favoring surgical revascularization in patients with diabetes.
BARCELONA, Spain—Over the long term, patients with type 1 diabetes and multivessel coronary disease fare better with CABG than with PCI, a population-based cohort study suggests.
Those findings, reported by Martin Holzmann, MD, PhD (Karolinska University Hospital, Stockholm, Sweden), at the European Society of Cardiology Congress 2017 here and published simultaneously online in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology, are consistent with both US and European guidelines, which recommend surgical revascularization over PCI in patients with diabetes.
“Our findings indicate that for patients with type 1 diabetes, CABG instead of PCI should be the preferred strategy for multivessel revascularization,” Holzmann said during his presentation.
Even so, he and his colleagues say in the paper that their “findings should be interpreted with some caution because of the observational nature of the study, and maybe more importantly, the large differences in risks in the first year of follow-up, indicating that there were large inherent differences in risk at baseline between the PCI and CABG groups.”
CABG has consistently been shown to improve outcomes over PCI in patients with diabetes—in the BARI and FREEDOM trials and in a subgroup analysis of the SYNTAX trial, for instance. But Holzmann noted that none of those studies has performed subgroup analyses based on the type of diabetes; this could be important when considering the findings because Continue reading