Once again, compliments of JDRF, here’s the Holiday Edition of The Hidden Carbs Quiz! Type 1 diabetes isn’t a reason to go cold turkey on all of your favorite foods. Test your carbohydrate comprehension and prepare for all the food you’ll gobble up this holiday season.
Click on This Text to Take the Hidden Carbs Quiz!
Expert Advice: How to Enjoy Thanksgiving with Diabetes was presented by Suvarna Sheth on dLife.com, 22 October 2018.
Thanksgiving is not as hard as some holidays as the eating frenzy tends to only last only one day. The problem is the overindulgence that can last from morning until night!
So it can not only throw your blood sugar off for that day, but it is often hard to get back on track the following day. People tend not to want to exercise when they overeat or feel sluggish.
Exercise is like “invisible insulin,” it helps sugar get out of your blood and into your cell. So start off Thanksgiving day with a long walk or bike ride to prepare you for the day. You can also take a walk after dinner to help balance your blood sugars before diving into that dessert.
The key to your diet is having a plan. Read more: How to Enjoy Thanksgiving with Diabetes
And more on CARBS …
How a Low-Carb Diet Might Help You Maintain a Healthy Weight by Anahad O’Connor of The New York Times, 14 November 2018.
It has been a fundamental tenet of nutrition: When it comes to weight loss, all calories are created equal. Regardless of what you eat, the key is to track your calories and burn more than you consume.
But a large new study published on Wednesday in the journal BMJ challenges the conventional wisdom. It found that overweight adults who cut carbohydrates from their diets and replaced them with fat sharply increased their metabolisms. After five months on the diet, their bodies burned roughly 250 calories more per day than people who ate a high-carb, low-fat diet, suggesting that restricting carb intake could help people maintain their weight loss more easily.
Read more: How a Low-Carb Diet Might Help You Maintain a Healthy Weight
DOCUMENTARY: Madness, The Cost of Carbs: An Interview with Bethany Reynolds McKenzie was reported by RD Dikerman of ASweetLife.org, November 2018.
I think we are up against a lot of issues when it comes to unraveling the bad guidelines and the deeply instilled beliefs that people with diabetes can eat anything and just give insulin.
- First, I think that people, in general, want to eat whatever they want. We live in a culture of convenience and most readily available food is full of carbs and sugar. When a parent has learned that their world has just been turned upside down and their child has diabetes, they want to cling to any piece of normal they can. If they’re told not to change their diet, that is one piece of normal for them to retain.
- Next, I think we are up against a lack of education. Managing diabetes with a low carb diet also requires some special techniques. If endocrinologists and diabetes educators aren’t taught these techniques, they are more likely to frown upon a low carb diet with their patients. The rebuttals that kids need carbs to grow or for their brain development are often too alarming for most parents to overcome even though it is well established in the literature that these things are not true.
- Finally, I think that industry has a stronghold on making sure the guidelines don’t change.
Read more: Madness, The Cost of Carbs
And the sad “other” side, from the American Diabetes Association: American Diabetes Association’s New FoodHub Disappoints, as reported by Jessica Apple on ASweetLife.org, October 2018.
The American Diabetes Association launched a new site, the DiabetesFoodHub, where you can find hundreds of recipes that may give you a headache, brain fog, body aches, make you sluggish, unable to focus, exhausted, nauseated, tearful, and like the life is being sucked out of you.
A few days ago when I received the Asso
ciation’s press release about the new FoodHub, I was hopeful. Maybe, just maybe, things were changing. Maybe the Association was going to stop telling people with diabetes to eat carbohydrates to treat their disease of carbohydrate intolerance. No more raisins soaked in orange juice and sprinkled with powdered sugar. No more fruit salad with honey yogurt or banana split sundaes. No more sugar as an ingredient in a steak recipe. But, alas, the plethora of recipes guaranteed to raise your blood sugar no less than 100 points is intact. And the Association’s unwillingness to acknowledge the powerful positive effect of a low carb diet on diabetes management is as evident as ever in the new FoodHub.
While users can search the Hub for recipes by category like, high-in-fiber, there is no low carb category (despite the fact that it has some really low carb recipes like mini veggie frittatas). Instead, we get lower carb.
Read more: American Diabetes Association’s New FoodHub Disappoints
