My cousin was recently diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. My family and I were thinking of going to spend Christmas with him, and bring him Christmas dinner and maybe a cookbook to get him started on his new dietary life.
However, we have no idea where to turn for diabetes-friendly recipes or cookbooks. Anything in a small-town Texas barbeque vein would be particularly appreciated. Please shower me with your collective doper wisdom!
look for low carb cook books, per my dietician eating a relitively small amount of carbs throughout the day is the best way to maintain your optimal blood sugar level.
I don’t know of any specific cook books but “the kitchen counter cooking school” is one that has helped me recently but it might be too girly and/or basic for him. I just roasted my first chicken based on instructions in that book.
You might want to ask your friend about what kind of diet his doctor recommended. There is no “diabetic diet” that is the same for everyone, despite what the thousands of books and websites would make you think.
Ignore almost everything by the American Diabetes Association as they want diabetics to eat entirely too many carbs. I have been able to maintain almost normal blood sugar levels at all times by following the advice of Dr. Richard K. Bernstein. He has a diet book called the Diabetes Diet. But I also strongly recommend his original book “The Total Diabetes Solution.” I am not type 2, but rather Type 1.5 (Latent Autoimmune Diabetes of Adulthood), so if I can achieve normal blood glucose, a Type 2 most certainly can.
But be warned, this is very low carb eating.
I like this one quite a bit, too: Low Carb 1-2-3: 225 Simply Great 3-Ingredient Recipes by Rozann Gold. It lays out, very simply, some really good recipes using very few ingredients. It also breaks down each recipe by carbs, protein, effective carbs, fat, etc. It is a very useful book.
I apologise for the hijack but Frilly, what kind of medications are you taking or are you maintaining this with diet and exercise only? From what I have read most of the information on what to eat are geared towards people who are taking insulin shots so they can adjust their medication vs what they eat. I am pretty recently diagnosed and only taking 1 medication that is supposed to help boost my pancreas into making more insulin and then diet and exercise but it is a struggle since there doesn’t seem to be a good corallary between what i eat and what my blood sugar is and defiatly going from a fast food eating couch potato has been hard. the really annoying part is that even though I am eating heathier and less calories and exercising more, my weight is not decreasing.
I know so few people who are sucessfully managing thier type 2 diabetes consistently it quite suprised me how many are blowing it off.
This isn’t exactly a cookbook, but if the restrictions on pasta are too much for you, here is something you definitely have to try - Dreamfields pasta.
According to their website, they process the flour so that most of the starch (???) is not digestible and passes through your GI tract. I don’t know how accurate their claim is, but they say that there are only 5 grams of digestible carbs per serving.
It also tastes no different from normal dry pasta like Barilla - at least to me. I don’t know how popular it is, but my local Stop and Shop supermarket carries it. I think you can also order from the company.
Dana Carpender’s low-carb cookbooks have always been useful to me.
Bernstein’s diet recommendations are extremely low carb. IIRC, 6 carbs for breakfast, 6 for lunch, 12 for dinner. For those not used to carb-counting, a standard slice of whole-wheat bread has about 22 carbs in it. So you’re eating not even a half a slice of bread at most. Ever.
When you say “there doesn’t seem to be a corollary”, how are you checking? If you eat a meal entirely without carbs, are you seeing an increase? Try checking at hourly intervals after meals. It takes a while to see patterns, but they’re there. Just keep trying.
Pardon me for hijacking the hijack, but my husband is a Type 2 who manages to keep consistent and good control over his blood sugar so I’ll enter $0.02.
My understanding (which might be contradicted by one of our MD’s, so if they say otherwise go with them) is that when you’re an uncontrolled/undiagnosed diabetic you body is not efficiently using your food. Think about it - instead of burning sugar your body is dumping it into your urine. Those calories are certainly not going to your waist! When you start taking medication, though, your body stops dumping those calories and starts using them - which is why weight gain is such a common “side effect”. Suddenly your body is able to use those calories again.
In other words, yes, you’re eating fewer calories but your body is running so much more efficiently on medication it still has a surplus and doesn’t need to dig into the fat stores/lose weight. Yes, it’s perverse. Diabetes is a perverse condition, perhaps you’ve noticed?
Second thing to know - every diabetic is different. People are diabetic for different reasons. My husband is diabetic due to an infection that destroyed part of his pancreas. Other people are diabetic due to auto-immune disease. For others, weight is a HUGE factor… but there are skinny diabetics, too, even diabetics underweight who should gain weight for optimum health. Your task is to find out what works FOR YOU. That will take some work and patience and experimentation.
Most diabetics find restricting carbs helps.
Many, but not all, find whole-grains better than refined grains
Losing weight is hard, but if you can do it most diabetics who lose weight find it improves their health. As an example, my husband lost 40 pounds after diagnosis and as a result needed only half as much medication. He was also told to lose this weight gradually. He took two years to take off those pounds, or less than one pound a month. It’s not how fast you lose it, it’s that you keep it off.
Illness can increase your blood sugar even if nothing else changes. So can extreme stress. In very extreme cases a Type 2 who otherwise does fine on just oral medication may require a shot of insulin. There is nothing wrong with that. Well, there’s something wrong that’s causing the problem, but using a shot of insulin when medically appropriate is a proper course of action. It’s much better than risking your sight or kidneys. It’s not a failure to do this, it’s being responsible for your health.
Many small meals throughout the day often work better than one big meal. Unfortunately for Hubby, for decades he’d only eaten one, large meal a day. He said changing to eating many times a day was, for him, the hardest part of learning to control his diabetes
And yes, a lot of Type 2’s blow off all the hard word, become fatalistic, etc. It’s because the illness doesn’t destroy you quickly. You can “get away with cheating” for a bit, because you can ignore the damage being done.
My doctor has me checking on a rotating schedule, 1st thing in the morning one day, 2 hours after a meal and then bedtime. Because the fasting test was my highest I started testing every moning as well and then rotating the rest. My mornign highs have gone down to 30 to 30 points and i am not having the ultra lows (ultra for me, normal for healthy people).
I met with a dietician who recommended 3 to 4 servings of carbs at each meal and 1 to 2 servings in between for snacks. each serving is 15grams of carbs. I try to eat most of my carbs in the form of non starchy vegtables but I don’t think I have ever eaten a meal without carbs of some kind. Somedays eating within these parameters my blood sugar is reasonable another day eating the exact same meal will have it elevated. Not eating seems to make it worse higher than eating.
I got sick with a nasty cold a few weeks ago and i can’t seem to get rid of it and that may still be having an effect.
I keep a diary of what I eat along with my exercise and blood sugar levels and I am cooking most of meals at home.
My doctor thinks I am doing well but I am frustrated without more rapid progress and I am sure no one wants to hear about the digestive issues. :rolleyes:
thanks for advice and letting me hijack.
adhemar: go for a few days with little/no carbs, if you can, just to give yourself a sort of baseline. Even a day (or one meal!) can be interesting. Then start adding carbs back, and keep track of what kind of carbs. Not all carbs are the same, and what you can tolerate and how much is a very personal thing. For example, I can eat the exact same amount of carbs of french bread versus a bagel. The bread? I’m fine, I dose for it, it works out great. The bagel? Super high, every time. I’ve gone so far as to make bagels myself and meticulously weigh out every single bit of carb I put in to make sure I’m not carb-counting wrong. Same result. There’s just something about bagels that I can’t figure out, so I don’t eat them very often. (I make up for the horrible deprivation that is NO BAGELS by eating far too many croissants, which I tolerate JUST FINE, HA!)
Don’t give up, you’ll figure it out with some time. But yeah, it’s horribly frustrating at first. All I can say is that it gets better, and easier. There’s a combination that works for everyone, you just gotta figure it out.
I recommend (per Bernstein) that you check your BG several times a day until you get a sense of what is happening. I initially checked upon waking, before breakfast, then ONE hour post meal (when you peak), and two hours post meals. I also checked any time I felt “hypoglycemic,” which as you know occurs at what regular people consider normal BG in someone used to higher numbers. And if I was very, very sleepy or had a headache, I also checked, usually to find my BG was really high at those times.
I don’t understand the recommendations to ONLY check 2 hours post meal, because you are completely missing your peak, and so never know how high your BG is actually going. “Control” is not only that you normalize at 2 hours, but that you never hit those really high peaks at all. Once you get a sense of what a particular type of food does for you, or a particular number of carbs does, you don’t have to check, you just know.
And this is what drives me insane about ADA recommendations. I don’t believe any diabetic can eat what amounts to 60 grams of carbs and maintain any sort of real control. Control is NOT having a BG < 180, it is having a BG < 140, the number at which cellular damage occurs, AT ALL TIMES. It means NEVER going above this number. A normal pancreas RARELY allows BG above 120, no matter how many carbs are consumed.
Bernstein DOES recommend really low amounts of carbs. It is 6 carbs with breakfast, 12 with lunch, and 12 with dinner. I started off within those numbers, slowly adjusting until I found what my own personal carb tolerance is. It seems I can eat about 20-25 grams of a complex carb and less than 10 of a simple carb. So I can eat a decent serving of whole wheat pasta, say, but cannot eat a bowl of cereal AT ALL. I can eat a sandwich made with very low carb wheat bread (Pepperidge Farms has one that is 12 grams carb per slice), and maintain a decent BG–provided it is a cheese sandwich or some other form of protein. If I try to make the same sandwich on sourdough bread, which is 24 grams carb per slice, my BG spikes massively. I can eat almost unlimited amounts of salad and green vegetables, which are also carbs, but it is the form of carbs that matters most. And if I eat with fats/oils and protein, the carbs have less effect. So I always start off with 2 cups of salad or veggies and this really DOES make a difference. But you have to eat fats to slow down the breakdown of the carbs. Low fat eating is not good for diabetes.
As for supplements, there is good research to support several. The ones I take that seem to have made a positive difference are alpha lipoic acid and fenugreek. I am a very scientifically-oriented person, as a veterinarian, so I keep meticulous records of everything I eat and precisely how it affects my BG. Within 3 weeks of starting to take the alpha-lipoic acid, my BG was consistently 30-40 points lower with the same foods (except my nemesis, cereal). I have recently added fenugreek, and cannot tell you if it is a positive yet. But here are some links to studies:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/biof.5520100212/abstract
Chromium and vanadium also have potential for helping to control BG and insulin, but I don’t like the taste chromium gives me and vanadium acts too much like insulin for me to be comfortable with its use at this time.
As for exercise, the more muscle you build, the more sensitive you will be to insulin. If you are type 2, you want to increase insulin sensitivity. I weight train, and I also do low heart rate aerobic exercise (running). My exercise tolerance is greatly decreased since developing diabetes, but if you are able to at least walk after a meal, you will help the glucose get transported into your cells.
I am still in the “honeymoon” period, and do not yet take insulin, though I am told with my type of diabetes, I will be insulin dependent in a matter of time. If you are type 2, you can completely reverse diabetes in some cases.
But honestly, I do not believe you can eat the volume of carbs your nutritionist has you eating and be able to gain control. And again, control is NOT keeping your BG < 180 2 hours post meal. That is a fabrication of the ADA that will lead to excessive diabetic complications. By eating very low carb, taking alpha lipoic acid and fenugreek (maybe), and building muscle and staying active, I am normalizing my BG–and I only have a few active beta cells left.
Take some time and read this essay about how and why the ADA set their ridiculous standards here: http://www.phlaunt.com/diabetes/14046782.php
This subject is not nearly as cut and dry as you’re portraying it; there is no solid evidence that short-term spikes cause long-term damage. There are plenty of people who live to a ripe old age with no complications following the ADA guidelines.
Personally, I think Bernstein’s diet recommendations are highly unhealthy; eating less that 30 carbs a day long-term requires that you make up for it with fat and protein. I don’t believe that’s healthy. I’ll take short-term spikes and a diet that includes fruit, vegetables, and healthy grains any day.
Of course, everyone’s different, and what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. But I think that portraying diabetes as a disease that is only controllable through a highly restricted diet is incorrect; eating ultra-low-carb is one way to control it. Other ways to control it include other types of diets, exercise, and/or drugs. Any of these methods can be used to decrease your risk of diabetes complications. The important thing is that you don’t just ignore the diabetes and assume you’ll be fine. Ya gotta do something, but luckily, you have a lot of different options available.
I would like to recommend and excellent and authoritative source for those who would like to herbs and supplements in conjunction with whatever conventional treatments they rely on. It’s called the Natural Medicines Comprehensive Database. It’s almost exclusively a fee-based site, but there are a few things you can see for free. They offer a lot more than the name might imply so if take or have thought of taking supplements, please read its list of features.
It costs $92/year for web access but is steeply discounted for multiple years.
just to give you a few data points. I was diagnosed 2 months ago and had a fasting bg of 356 when I went to the doctor for a bladder infection and they sent me to the emergency room. I was put on Gyburide and a week later started doing the testing. My fasting bg at that time was in the 180s but 2 hours afte a meal would drop to 110 and sometimes even lower. when it was that low I felt weak and shaky so even though I was not truly hypoglycemic I felt like I was.
Now my fasting bg is in the 150 range which is still too high, it also goes up when I have missed eating a snack and then when I ate white bread and a salad that had more carbs than I thought but still was in the range of what I was normally eating, it shot up to 180. I can eat the same thing one day for lunch and my bg is 120 and another day is 140. This is where my frustration is coming from. x+y should always =Z not q sometimes darn it. Another frustration is overeating carbs at night has a benficial affect on my fasting BG whearas eating my normal lean meat and lots of non starch veggies makes the next morning higher so i either have higher at night or higher the next morning. I don’t want either to be higher. 
My only symptoms of higher bg is hunger. I take snacks of raw broccoli and cauliflower with a low carb salad dressing, a big container of chicken or turkey and some low fat cheese.
It doesnt help that I started with being sick and have also been sick for a couple of weeks with a cold AND have a stressful job and it is a stressful time of year. From what I have been told both of these will adversely affect your bg levels.
Frilly I will look at those suppliments you mentioned and will try some tests at an hour after eating ( I try not to go more than 3 hours without eating).
thank you everyone for taking time to send advice.