Good and Bad Diets for Diabetics

Having diabetes does not mean the end of eating tasty food. You do, however, have to learn what is good and bad for your body, in order to create a balanced diet that will sustain your life while helping you to keep health problems like heart disease at bay.

What is a bad diet for a diabetic? Essentially, it would be a bad diet for everyone. That is, a diet high in fatty, overly salty, processed, or extremely sweet foods. These types of foods often have poly-saturated fats or trans fats which cannot be burned off through exercise. They merely sit in the body and clog arteries. If you have diabetes, this can be one of the worse things in your diet, increasing your chance of heart disease, stroke, and other heart complications.

This does not, however, mean that you must cut fat out of your diet forever. Some fats are healthy and necessary. It is important, if you have diabetes, to know which fats are good for you and which fats are harmful. As stated above, fats found in processed foods (as found in fast food restaurants) are not healthy. Omega-3 fatty acids, found most often in fish, can be very good for diabetics because they help reduce the risk of sudden heart attacks. When working on your diet, just remember that you can still have sugars and fats, but only in small amounts. The way these foods interact with your body increases the chance of health problems, but eliminating them completely from your diet can also have adverse effects on your health because your body needs a certain amount of fat to be healthy.

Controlling your intake of carbohydrates is also an important dietary need for diabetics. Because excess carbohydrates (any carbohydrates that you do not burn off) turn into sugar in the body, diabetics should be careful about consuming too many carbohydrates, as this can affect their blood sugar levels. Diabetics can learn about counting carbohydrates from nutritionists or a book on the subject, which can help them in deciding how much to eat at every meal.

Being diabetic does not mean limiting your diet to foods that are bland or otherwise undesirable. You can still eat the foods you like as long as you focus on portion-size. It's about ensuring that you do not eat more than your body can process, and that's a diet everyone should follow.