Eating With Diabetes: What About Fruit?

Eating with Diabetes: What About Fruit?

The Best Fruit Choices for People with Diabetes
Packed with vitamins, minerals, and fiber, fruit should be part of any healthy diet. As a diabetes educator, some of the most frequent questions from my clients have to do with fruit. Can I still eat fruit? How much fruit should I eat? What are the best fruits for someone with diabetes?
Most people with diabetes are worried about eating fruit because they know that fruit contains sugar. And in the past, people with diabetes were told to avoid eating sugar. While it's true that fruit contains naturally-occurring sugars—and sometimes added ones, too (more on that below)—fruit also provides a host of other healthy nutrients that are beneficial for everyone, including people with diabetes. In addition, it's important to remember that people who have diabetes can eat anything, including fruit! Here's why.
All carbohydrate-containing foods—not just those with sugar—affect blood sugar levels. It is the amount of carbohydrate you eat (not the type) that has the biggest influence on blood sugar levels. Because of this, people with diabetes can treat all carbohydrate-containing foods (including fruit) the same when meal planning. Too much of any carbohydrate at a given meal or snack will probably raise your blood sugar higher than you would like. Therefore, a big part of diabetes meal planning is devoted to carbohydrate counting or “budgeting” carbohydrates in some way. You should work with your diabetes educator or a dietitian that specializes in diabetes in order to determine how much carbohydrate you need.
If you count ca Continue reading

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What is Type 3 Diabetes?

At first blush, it may be hard to imagine a connection between type 2 diabetes and Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia. But it’s real—and it’s so strong that some experts are now referring to it as type 3 diabetes or brain diabetes. By any name, it’s the progression from type 2 diabetes to Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia marked by memory deficits and a dramatic decline in cognitive function.
While all people with diabetes have a 60 percent increased risk of developing any type of dementia, including Alzheimer’s, recent research suggests that women with type 2 diabetes have a 19 percent greater risk of a certain type, known as vascular dementia (which is caused by problems with blood supply to the brain) than men do. Overall, older adults with type 2 diabetes suffer from greater declines in working memory and executive functioning (a set of mental processes that involve planning, organization, controlling attention, and flexible thinking) than their peers do.
Granted, not everyone who has type 2 diabetes will develop Alzheimer’s disease, vascular dementia, or any other form of dementia, and there are many people who have Alzheimer’s or another form of dementia who don’t have diabetes, notes Gary Small, M.D., a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Semel Institute and author of The Alzheimer’s Prevention Program. But the reality is, “these risk factors tend to add up: If you have diabetes, that doubles the risk of developing Alzheimer’s. If you have a first-degree relative—a parent or sibling, for example—with Alzheimer� Continue reading

Smoking and Diabetes

What Is Diabetes?
Diabetes is a group of diseases in which blood sugar levels are higher than normal. Most of the food a person eats is turned into glucose (a kind of sugar) for the body’s cells to use for energy. The pancreas, an organ near the stomach, makes a hormone called insulin that helps glucose get into the body’s cells. When you have diabetes, your body either doesn't make enough insulin or can't use the insulin very well. Less glucose gets into the cells and instead builds up in the blood.1
There are different types of diabetes. Type 2 is the most common in adults and accounts for more than 90% of all diabetes cases. Fewer people have type 1 diabetes, which most often develops in children, adolescents, or young adults.2
How Is Smoking Related to Diabetes?
We now know that smoking causes type 2 diabetes. In fact, smokers are 30–40% more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than nonsmokers. And people with diabetes who smoke are more likely than nonsmokers to have trouble with insulin dosing and with controlling their disease.3
The more cigarettes you smoke, the higher your risk for type 2 diabetes.3 No matter what type of diabetes you have, smoking makes your diabetes harder to control.
If you have diabetes and you smoke, you are more likely to have serious health problems from diabetes. Smokers with diabetes have higher risks for serious complications, including:4
Heart and kidney disease
Poor blood flow in the legs and feet that can lead to infections, ulcers, and possible amputation (removal of a body part by surgery, such as toes or feet)
Retinopathy (an ey Continue reading

The Top 20 Foods for Beating Diabetes

Every time you roll your shopping cart into the supermarket, you’re making a decision that goes far beyond whether you’re going to have pork or pierogies for dinner. You’re actually choosing between being a victim and a victor. What you put in your cart goes a long way toward determining whether you’ll be compromised by diabetes or start controlling and eventually even beating it.
That’s why we’ve assembled the following list of the 20 best foods for fighting diabetes. Every time you go to the store from now on, take this list with you and check off each item. In fact, if your favourite store has a delivery service, sign up for it so your supplies are automatically replenished every few weeks.
Research proves that making a few key changes to your diet such as eating more produce, fewer refined carbohydrates, plenty of lean protein, and more ‘good’ fat’helps improve blood-sugar control and cuts the risk of diabetes-related complications. Don’t make the mistake of thinking that one or two or even five foods on this list will transform you. You need most of them, yes, even the flaxseed, because together they represent a new approach to eating, a lifestyle rather than just a diet.
1. Apples
Because they offer so many health advantages, put these at the core of your diet. Apples are naturally low in calories, yet their high fibre content (4 grams) fills you up, battles bad cholesterol, and blunts blood-sugar swings. Red Delicious and Granny Smith are also among the top 10 fruits with the most disease-fighting antioxidants.
Eat them whole and unpeeled for the Continue reading

Drinking Wine Is Linked to a Lower Risk of Diabetes

TIME Health
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Drinking alcohol—especially wine—every few days may help protect against type 2 diabetes, suggests a new study published in the journal Diabetologia. People in the study who drank three to four days a week were about 30% less likely to develop diabetes than those who drank less than once a week.
This isn’t the first study to find a link between drinking moderately—having up to 7 drinks a week for women and up to 14 drinks a week for men—and a reduced diabetes risk, compared to not drinking at all. (Heavy drinking, however, is known to increase the risk of diabetes.)
For the new study, researchers analyzed data from more than 70,000 healthy Danish adults who were surveyed about their health and drinking habits around 2007. They tracked them for five years to see who developed type 2 diabetes.
People who had the lowest risk for diabetes were those who drank alcohol at moderate—and slightly more than moderate—levels. Men who drank 14 drinks a week had a 43% lower risk of diabetes than men who did not drink at all; women who drank nine drinks a week had a 58% reduced risk.
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The timing of those drinks also mattered. Drinking three to four days a week was linked to the biggest risk reduction. For women, very infrequent drinking (less than one day a week) was also associated with slightly lower diabetes rates, compared to being a lifetime abstainer.
“For the same total weekly amount of alcohol, sprea Continue reading