Meal Planning

Diabetes requires tighter control on blood glucose levels. Blood glucose can be primarily managed by diet, exercise and medication. Education and awareness play an important role in diabetes management.

Focus here is the balanced diet or rather how to plan your meals to have tighter control on blood glucose levels.

Comprehensive, meal planning for diabetes involves above shown seven elements.

Calories

Grey indicates, this number is specific to each individual and is calculated. Calories help determine how much food we need on daily basis or for each meal. It is estimated based on age, gender, activity level, weight goal many more. Calories of food items is easily available on the internet or on the food labels. However, there is a bit of math involved to calculate the calories of a meal, since it is constituted of numerous items.

Calories are related to body weight, take for example, you will not gain weight by drinking water, because water has 0 calories in it, most other food items have calories, some less some more. Some food items have calories but no nutrients, like Soda, these are empty calories and offer no benefit to our body, Alcohol is another one.

Carbohydrates in grams

Red indicates it is important to exercise tighter control on these numbers. Monitoring carbohydrate intake is a key strategy in controlling glycemic response. Carbohydrates can be monitored using Carb counting .

Carbs in food raise blood glucose faster. Be mindful, there is a concept of Available Carbohydrates, that indicates carbohydrates digested, absorbed and metabolized in the body.

In simple terms same meal may have a different change in blood sugar level in different people, or even it may be different for the same individual at different times.

Glycemic Load

Glycemic response, refers to change in blood glucose after consuming a food item or meal.

Glycemic load is included as it takes into account amount and type of carbohydrates and may have slight advantage for diabetics.

Simple Definition of Glycemic Load:

It is a number associated with each food item or meal which indicates (in relative sense) how much blood glucose could be elevated by eating the said food item or meal. It takes into account quality and quantity of carbohydrates in a food item or a meal.

Technical Definition:

Glycemic Load = Glycemic Index of food item * Carbs in grams in food item/100

Is simple terms, Glycemic index is number for each food item that indicates how fast it will raise blood glucose or how fast it will break down and get absorbed in blood.

With diabetes, it is better to consume food items or meals with low glycemic load, so lower the glycemic load better it is for diabetics.

Per research or studies conducted, following values are suggested for Glycemic load with diabetes:

Per serving <20
Daily Glycemic load <= 100
Which means you may have to portion your meals, if single serving has glycemic load of about 30 or more.

There is plenty of information available on glycemic load of individual food items, however, challenge is to calculate the glycemic load of a meal, which is constituted of several food items.

Fat in grams

Yellow indicates, lower the better, so keep any eye on these numbers.

With diabetes it is important to protect heart. Blood lipid (fats) levels are important to heart health. Both cholesterol and triglycerides in blood are called lipids. So it is a good idea to monitor you daily fat consumption or eat low fat foods. Fat counting may be another dimension to your meal planning. To compound it further, there are good fats and not so good fats.

Following guidelines can help monitor fat:

1. Total daily calories from fat 25% - 35%
2. Calories from saturated fats no more than 7%
3. Calories from polyunsaturated fats 10% or less
4. Calories from monounsaturated fats 20% or less
5. Also keep Cholesterol at or below 200 milligrams a day

Sodium in milligrams

Per stats about 67 percent diabetics have blood pressure. If this is the case, it is a good idea to watch daily Sodium intake. Table salt is a form of Sodium, 1 gram of table salt has about 400 mg of Sodium. A Good pinch of salt is about 1 gram of salt. Recommended daily intake of sodium for blood pressure is about 1500 mg, which is equivalent of 7.5 grams of salt. In simple terms, watch your daily intake of salt, try not to consume more than 1 teaspoon of salt. Be mindful, there could be Sodium in other food items besides salt. Unsalted foods are usually low in sodium.

Sodium is listed on the food labels, most of the time it ranges from 12 to 18 as a percentage.

Fiber in grams

Blue indicates, higher content has beneficial effect.

Fiber is another ingredient in food item, which is considered beneficial for diabetic diet. Fiber does not offer any calories, however, it is good for digestion tract and blood glucose control. Specifically soluble fiber is considered good for blood glucose control.

Use following Guidelines to monitor Fiber intake:
20 – 30 gm of fiber every day

Nutrition

Nutritious balanced diet is key to our health. Try not to consume empty calories, meaning a food with calories but no nutrition, e.g. most of soft drinks, alcohol etc. Green beans, almonds are full of nutrients, again balanced diet, we can’t consume green beans and almonds only since we need other nutrients too. Age, medical condition, lifestyle, they all play important role in determining the balanced diet for our body.

Consider five key elements:

1. Proteins
2. Fats
3. Carbohydrates
4. Vitamins
5. Minerals

Right mix of above five elements can be a balanced diet. This mix varies depending on age, medical condition, gender etc.

First we need to know the right mix, then we need to find the diet that complies with the mix. It may seem bit complicated but well designed diabetes Softwares do it.

DiaBeTecH takes into account meal matrix in addition to other factors to offer dietary guidance or even completely plan meals for whole week.