HOW FOOD CAN CONTROL DIABETES?

Diet and Diabetes control
Good nutrition plays an essential role in controlling your diabetes. Although diabetes medication and insulin injections are available, diet control is always required for diabetes. Diet Control means knowing how to eat and select foods in moderate amounts to meet your specific needs as well as to control your blood sugar levels, fat level in blood, and blood pressure. Diabetes patients must change inappropriate eating habits to be more qualitative. Changing eating habits takes time and patience, but it is worth doing. This will prevent or delay diabetes complications, which will occur in the future.

How to start diet control?
Diet control is NOT starving and it should begin with:
- Weighing and measuring your height to calculate your moderate weight and consider if you should gain or lose weight
- Knowing how to choose the eatable foods and avoidable foods
- Daily food amounts of each meal are different for each individual depending on gender, age, weight, and individual activities

Selecting types of food for diabetes patients
Unlimited eatable foods
Low-calorie foods with fiber are all green vegetables and white vegetables such as ivy gourd, Ipomoea, white lettuce, cabbage, luffa, cucumber; spices; and beverages such as green tea without sugar.
Avoided foods
- Desserts or food with added sugar such as many kinds of Thai desserts like Thong Yip, Thong Yord (eggdrop sweet), Kha-nom Chun (layer sweet), Thua Bpab
- Beverages with added sugar such as soft drinks, canned fruit juice, honey, tonic drink and flavored milk
- Fermented food, dried food, salted snacks such as potato chips, instant noodles.
- Alcohol drinks
Eatable foods, but should limit amount
- Foods from rice, flour, glucose (carbohydrate) such as sticky rice, non-glutinous variety of rice, noodles, egg noodle, green-gram noodle, bread, boiled rice-flour noodles, macaroni, taros, potatoes, corn. They cause high glucose levels in blood and obesity.
- Meats or protein nourish the body and helps the repair of body tissue. You should have low-fat meats such as fish, pork, or chicken with lean fat or protein from vegetable such as Tofu.
- Fat should be consumed with limited amount of serving as it has a high cholesterol content. You should also avoid animal fat such as pork oil, chicken oil as it causes high fat level in the blood leading to Atherosclerosis and Arteriolosclerosis.
- Fruits such as orange, banana, papaya, watermelon should be eaten in moderation as they cause high glucose levels in blood.
- Milk should be fresh milk or non-flavored skim milk at a moderate amount.
Selecting type of snacks for exercising
- 1 portion of fruit such as 1 orange, 1 apple, a glass of milk, or a slice of bread is recommended for exercising for less than 30 minutes.
- Snacks, which consist of flour, meat, and low fat like Chicken Sandwich is recommended for exercising for less than 45 minutes.
- Increase more snacks in case of exercising longer and can eat again after finishing exercise. The right snacks for each diabetes patient must be evaluated from glucose levels in blood and type of exercise.

Further information please contact "Diabetes Center" Bangkok Hospital Phuket. www.phukethospital.com
e-Mail: info@phukethospital.com