diabetic diet

One of the most important things for a diabetic to do is control his or he diet. While everybody should strive to eat as well as possible, for a diabetic, this is even more critical. In this article, I'm going to cover some basic things that a diabetic should do when planning a diet.

It is extremely important for a diabetic to keep his weight down. So all diets have to be structure to achieve this goal. There are many ways to go about doing this, but probably the easiest is to count calories. The question is, how many calories should a diabetic get per day? To simplify this process, take your ideal body weight, which can be calculated by starting with 100 pounds and adding 5 pounds for every inch over 5 feet. So, if you're 5' 5" tall, your ideal body weight, as a diabetic, should be 125 pounds. Then for every pound in your ideal body weight, you should eat about 15 calories per day. So, a person who's ideal body weight should be 125 pounds, they should be eating about 1875 calories per day.

Aside from watching your calories, a diabetic also has to watch his sugar intake. Many diabetics think this just involves refined sugar products such as donuts, cakes and pies. The truth is, a diabetic has to be careful of any kind of sugar, even natural sugar that is contained in fruits. The reason is because there body doesn't produce enough insulin so even natural sugars can raise the blood sugar level. Everybody is going to be different, but a good rule of thumb is no more than one serving of fruit per day.

The hard part about balancing a diabetic's diet is that carbohydrates need to be limited. However, because of this, it is important to eat foods that have a little higher fat content. The problem with this is that these foods are generally not very good for you. So, in order to compensate for this, it is recommended that a person with diabetes eats foods that contain monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fats, which are much better for you than saturated fats.

The key to a diabetic's diet is counting carbohydrates. A gram of carbohydrate contains about 4 calories. So, if you are on that 1875 calorie diet, you want to each about 50% of those calories in carbohydrates, or about 938 calories. Dividing that by 4, you want to have about 234 grams of carbohydrates in a day. While that may seem like a lot, it's not. One slice of bread alone is 15 grams of carbohydrates. Most foods have carbohydrate information on the package.

By following these few simple tips, it becomes a lot easier to control your diabetes.

new research

A study conducted at the Depart-ment of Endocrinology and Metabolism, IPGME & R and SSKM Hospital, Calcutta investigated an Ayurvedic herbal compound containing guar gum, methi, tundika, and mesha shringi.

Sixty-seven diabetic patients and 12 nor-mal subjects were selected for a clinical study, which consisted of 2 phases. In phase 1 of the study, out of 25 diabetics (both insulin dependent and non-insulin dependent) only those in the age group of 41-50 years (i.e. 11 cases) showed lowering of mean high blood sugar level in all samples from 1/2 an-hour to 2 hours with the test drug. But in phase 2 of the study there was lowering of blood sugar level with the Ayurvedic compound and with 2 of its constituents (i.e. guar gum and methi) when used separately in 42

Non-insulin dependent diabetics: - While there was some blood sugar level lowering effect with guar gum and methi when used separately in 12 normal subjects in phase 2 study, it was not as significant as the insulin-lowering effects of the Ayurvedic compound.

The report concluded that the results indicate that the Ayurvedic herbal compound is effective as an adjuvant to conventional treatment for non-insulin dependent diabetics.