The Diabetes Lifestyle - Maintaining the Quality of Life
Diabetes Diet - it is essential in fighting diabetes to change your diet avoiding things which will elevate blood glucose levels.
It is virtually impossible to combat diabetes without a carefully structured diet. Diabetes frequently afflicts the better off because as they become wealthier they tend to eat less fresh fruit and vegetables and more junk fodd coupled with less exercise.
Processed foods, of course, do not help with additives such as "high fructose corn syrup" making even non-diabetics showing pre-diabetic blood sugar levels after consuming them (this particular sweetener is often called something that looks innocuous such as modified corn starch).
Fats are also very much in the frame with hydrogenated vegetable oils or trans fats asthey are often known becoming infamous for their damaging effects on health. Trans fats have been linked to diabetes as a side conclusion following studies on their effect on the incidence of heart disease which was also found to be a major contributor. One European country, Denmark, has even banneed them as food ingredients.
As a result of the outcry against trans fats food manufacturers looked around for a cheap alternative - solid at room temperature but cheap to produce. Alarmingly, they have come up with interesterified fats - a mouthful to prounce although you do not want a mouthful of it! These fats involve mixing 2 fats one which is liquid at room temperature and a smaller quantity of a solid fat and chemical treatment causes the fats to exchange a portion of the molecule randomly. This produces a mix which is solid at room temperature but made up of fats which do not occur in nature and which the body has no means of dealing with. You should look for descriptions of fats or oils with the word "modified".
For Diabetics these fats are even worse news than for non-diabetics. They increase blood sugar levels and depress insulin levels - a double whammy.
The only option for diabetics is to avoid these man-made fats and alternative sweeteners and opt for natural food. Regarding carbohydrates sugars are to be avoided and any starch which will turn into pure sugar in the blood stream. High fiber carbohydrates are much better because they take a lot of energy and time to digest and the sugar hits the bloodstream in a far more controlled way.