David’s Diabetes Diet

The food choices on my diet are easy. What I eat must taste great and provide great nutrition. Great taste is subjective and certainly varies from person to person. But great nutrition is objective.

All of us are still learning about nutrition. But we do know the foods that are good for us and those that we should avoid.

So why is the diabetes diet the most controversial part of controlling it? The controversy rages over just one issue – whether we should be eating a low or high carb diet.

The most appropriate level of carbohydrates is the only controversial part of the American Diabetes Association’s new nutrition recommendations. But my diet is a moderate one, and you can tweak it to include the amount of carbohydrates that you decide to eat.

What I eat keeps evolving. In the dozen or so years since I got my diabetes diagnosis my diet has changed dozens of times. Nutrition has become one of my biggest interests, and I think about what to eat more than I think about sex. Not many men can say that!

Judging from the questions I get from my correspondents, women think about diet a lot more than men do. I guess that this is because they generally shop and cook for their families.

Several recent questions, in fact, prompted me to weigh in here with my diet recommendations. For example, Kelly would like to retrain her husband, her son, and herself to eat better. Mary Lee wants to know the easiest eating plan to follow. Kabir wonders if I could make a list of foods that boost our health, conform to the glycemic index, and are full of antioxidants.

I don’t have to make a list of the best foods. George Mateljan, the founder and original owner of Health Valley Foods, has thought about food even more than I have. His site has a superb list of the world’s healthiest foods.

I generally agree with George’s food choices. But I am more concerned with the glycemic values of foods than he is, because he writes for a more general audience than for those of us with diabetes.

My pantry is pretty bare compared with what most people have. I like to keep it as simple as possible.

I keep my recipes simple too. When there are more than six ingredients – including two or three spices – there are too many for me. My diet would make Linus in the Peanuts comic strip happy. He decided not to drink something when he saw what it said on the side of the package. “It’s full of ingredients!” he exclaimed.

My diet includes almost all the fruits and vegetables. Generally, I prefer to steam my vegetables, although the microwave is great for winter squash and boiling is best for greens, like chard. I go easy on some of those so-called root vegetables – the ones that grow underground – especially potatoes and beets. I also go easy on dried fruit, like raisins, dates, and prunes. They are certainly great in low doses, but eating a lot of them spikes my blood glucose.

Legumes are a wonder food. Chana dal, garbanzo beans, kidney beans, soybeans, lentils, and others (all except broad beans) are low glycemic and high in protein.