Diabetic Diet & Blood Gluecose

I don’t have enough money to buy strips for my glucose meter and need some help in getting some for free or at a reduced price.

Your doctor or whomever you are seeing for your diabetes should have free meters. My endo gives me free meters at least once a year. The doctors usually have them courtesy of the pharmaceutical companies. Also, free diabetic clinics usually have them too. Also, there is an on-line American Diabetes Association.com who can help you too with not just this but various services esp. if you are low income and not able to get your supplies.

Hope this helps.

I can’t believe its not butter!
Margarine though. Seriously.

My guess is no. But worth asking?

Yes. There are sugar free hot chocolate mixes in the supermarket. They are made with Splenda or another artificial sweetener. Chocolate, in its purest form doesn’t have sugar in it, the problem is the sugar added to it to make it sweet.

Paragraph on how Development of diabetes is directly related to feedback system, In your description describe how the feedback system works, organs, & molecules involved, also the direct effect of breakdown of a feedback system.

Does this bit of your homework really need to be explained? Glucose is high, pancreas releases insulin to bring it down. Glucose is low, pancreas releases glucagon to bring it up. It’s a feedback system. Diabetes is when the insulin either can’t be made, not enough can be made or the insulin doesn’t work as well as it should and therefore the glucose level stays high.

A. Stroke
B. Kidney Failure
C. Cancer
D. Blindness

I googled it and it looks like diabetes increases the risk for all of these, but that can’t be right. So do you know the answer?

Cancer is the least attributed to diabetes of all your options, although some researchers have argued that diabetes may also increase your risk of cancer.

We *know* that uncontrolled diabetes can cause cardiovascular disease, blindness, and kidney disease/failure. Cancer is just the most controversial of all those in your list.

My mom thinks I may have diabetes, mostly due to my constant thirst and more frequent urination. I also get numb/cold hands and feet very easily, though I have for years.
Tomorrow we will be seeing my step sister, who has diabetes, and would like her to use one of her test strips, what can I do before to make it more accurately show if I do in fact have diabetes or not? Should I eat more sugary foods, less, or nothing at all?

1) eat as you would
2) make sure a new lancet is in the device to poke your finger
3) wash and dry your hands

When you are trying to follow a diabetic diet, do you count carbs or NET carbs? For example, steel cut oatmeal has 27 g carbohydrate but 3 grams of fiber, for 24 g of net carbs. Which should I go by?

Theoretically you’re supposed to subtract the fibre but I find that it doesn’t work that way on me. In the example you gave, the oatmeal would affect me as 27g of carbs (verified by testing blood sugar after eating) and I know this is the same for many other foods. So I count the total amount.

You will only find out how YOUR body works by testing your blood sugar.

I have often noticed that diabetics are often overweight. Why is this? Is diabetes caused by being over weight in the first place, or is being fat an effect of having diabetes?

Obesity and diabetes have a very close connection. Eighty to ninety percent of patients who have diabetes of any type were also diagnosed as overweight or obese.

Understanding the relationship between obesity and diabetes has allowed doctors to come up with certain measures in preventing the occurrence of the disease.

Being overweight can produce an abnormally high amount of stress in your body. It makes your system less capable of controlling the amounts of glucose that is produced.

Aside from that, obesity can also lead to insulin resistance.

So even though you still do not have diabetes, you are eventually going to develop the disease if you fail to bring your weight back to normal in the future.

Obesity and diabetes have one common denominator: weight gain. Obese people are very prone to diabetes while diabetic patients always have a tendency to gain weight.

But aside from that, those who take in insulin to treat certain types of diabetes are also very prone to gaining weight.

This is primarily because there are more amounts of glucose that enter into the cells rather than being eliminated out of the body.

These are stored up as fat and when accumulated at high amounts, can lead to weight gain.

What are the treatments for obesity and diabetes?

One of the best ways to treat both obesity and diabetes is a change in lifestyle. Exercising more and turning to a more well-balanced diet have been proven to help patients reduce weight and battle diabetes at the same time.

Doctors highly recommend that diabetic and obese patients shift to a high fiber, low carbohydrate and low glycemic index diet. Regular exercise has been proven to help as well.

Twenty to thirty minutes of moderate activity can do wonders to your health. These changes in lifestyle can help you target both obesity and diabetes.

Patients who are taking insulin shots are recommended to control their food intake as well. As mentioned before, the increased amounts of glucose that is permitted to enter into the cell through insulin shots can be stored up as fat.

And hence, patients who continue to eat as much as they did before are most likely to gain even more weight. So when taking these shots, try to eat lesser amounts of food to prevent unhealthy weight gain.

Both obesity and diabetes should never be taken for granted because these conditions can cause serious complications.

source:http://www.healthcarenets.com/

My son is only 13 years old right now and the doctor said we ought to be careful with what we give him because his blood sugar is high.

Take a look at the website for Diabetes UK it has loads of dietary advice for adults and children – I think it will help you to plan a healthy diet for him

My dad was recently diagnosed with type 2 diabetes even though he eats fairly well and excersizes. He seems pretty upset of his new much less yummy diet. Is anyone diabetic or know a diabetic they cook for? Id like to learn how to make less unpleasant food for him. Websites and/or recipes are appreciated, as well as tips such as "replace butter with this" or "leave out this it doesnt affect taste much". Thank you!

In the website below you will know what to eat what not to eat and how much. All in one week.

http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm

This table includes the glycemic index and glycemic load of more than 2,480 individual food items. Not all of them, however, are available in the United States. They represent a true international effort of testing around the world.

The glycemic index (GI) is a numerical system of measuring how much of a rise in circulating blood sugar a carbohydrate triggers–the higher the number, the greater the blood sugar response. So a low GI food will cause a small rise, while a high GI food will trigger a dramatic spike. A list of carbohydrates with their glycemic values is shown below. A GI is 70 or more is high, a GI of 56 to 69 inclusive is medium, and a GI of 55 or less is low.

The glycemic load (GL) is a relatively new way to assess the impact of carbohydrate consumption that takes the glycemic index into account, but gives a fuller picture than does glycemic index alone. A GI value tells you only how rapidly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar. It doesn’t tell you how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of a particular food. You need to know both things to understand a food’s effect on blood sugar. That is where glycemic load comes in. The carbohydrate in watermelon, for example, has a high GI. But there isn’t a lot of it, so watermelon’s glycemic load is relatively low. A GL of 20 or more is high, a GL of 11 to 19 inclusive is medium, and a GL of 10 or less is low.

Foods that have a low GL almost always have a low GI. Foods with an intermediate or high GL range from very low to very high GI.

Both GI and GL are listed here. The GI is of foods based on the glucose index–where glucose is set to equal 100. The other is the glycemic load, which is the glycemic index divided by 100 multiplied by its available carbohydrate content (i.e. carbohydrates minus fiber) in grams. (The "Serve size (g)" column is the serving size in grams for calculating the glycemic load; for simplicity of presentation I have left out an intermediate column that shows the available carbohydrates in the stated serving sizes.) Take, watermelon as an example of calculating glycemic load. Its glycemic index is pretty high, about 72. According to the calculations by the people at the University of Sydney’s Human Nutrition Unit, in a serving of 120 grams it has 6 grams of available carbohydrate per serving, so its glycemic load is pretty low, 72/100*6=4.32, rounded to 4.

My normal food is Beef vegtable soup and American chili. These are my staples. Steaks and salads , Veggies and some fruits.
Butter is fine . Rice , potato;s and breads are mainly out.
This disease is for life. So start today to eat healthy. You can search all you want , but this way to eat is great. So many foods to chose from.
Couple this with exercise and you have a winning combo.

Take care ,
Buff