Welcome to the new Community Health and Wellness blog from the Bigtown Hospital. The purpose of our blog is to provide you with information and tips for how to manage your diabetes. Our first blog post is about the substitutions you can make on foods that will help manage your type 2 diabetes.
First off, we'd like to explain the disease diabetes mellitus. Diabetes is a disease that occurs when your blood sugar, also known as blood glucose, is too high. Your blood sugar is your main source of energy, and it comes from the food you consume. Your pancreas creates a hormone called insulin, which helps the glucose from the foods you eat get into your cells to be used as energy.
There are two types of diabetes.
-Type 1 diabetes: a chronic condition to which the pancreas produces little or no insulin.
-Type 2 diabetes: is the most common type of diabetes, it's a chronic condition when your blood sugar, blood glucose, is too high because your body doesn't use insulin properly.
The Mayo Clinic explains: "Type 2 diabetes is an impairment in the way the body regulates and uses sugar (glucose) as a fuel. This long-term (chronic) condition results in too much sugar circulating in the bloodstream. Eventually, high blood sugar levels can lead to disorders of the circulatory, nervous and immune systems."
In addition to the two main types of diabetes, there is a third kind: pre-diabetes. Health Direct says: "Pre-diabetes means your blood sugar levels are higher than normal, but not high enough to meet a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes. Without lifestyle changes, a person with pre-diabetes is at high risk of going on to develop type 2 diabetes."
Knowing this, the name of the game for managing your diabetes is diet control. Yes, insulin helps. But if your blood glucose is poorly managed or too high for too long, you can become insulin resistant. Which is very, very bad. With proper diet, you can decrease the chance to become insulin resistant, reduce the side effects of diabetes, and live a mostly normal life.
This video gives you a quick run-down on the basics of diabetic diet.
This video gives more of an in-depth overview of eating with a diabetic diagnosis. Basically, you want to
reduce the amount of simple carbs that you eat. So, things like candy, sugar,
and soda pop. You want to eat more complex carbohydrates. You want to eat more
fiber. At the risk of grossly over-simplifying the process, your body uses
energy to move fiber through your digestive tract.
You also want to increase the amount of animal proteins that you consume (if possible). The trick to this is you want to do it in a healthy manner. So no, hamburgers and bacon every day is not a good healthy idea for a diabetic.
So, for example, if you wanted to eat a frozen pizza, you absolutely can! You just need to look for the right product and eat that. So instead of eating a Red Barons pepperoni pizza, you should look for a pizza with cauliflower crust.
A diagnosis of diabetes is a large life changing event. But it does not mean that your life is over. You just have to adjust a few things in your daily life, and you can live a healthy, happy life.
Resources:
Living with Diabetes
10 tips for healthy eating with diabetes
Diabetic diet
DISCLAIMER: This is for a class assignment; it is not a real blog.
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