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Concept
Diet in diabetes
Summary
A diabetic diet is a diet that is used by people with diabetes mellitus or high blood sugar to minimize symptoms and dangerous complications of long-term elevations in blood sugar (i.e.: cardiovascular disease, kidney disease, obesity).
Among guideline recommendations including the American Diabetes Association (ADA) and Diabetes UK, there is no consensus that one specific diet is better than others. This is due to a lack of long term high-quality studies on this subject matter.
For overweight and obese people with diabetes, the most important aspect of any diet is that it results in loss of body fat. Losing body fat has been proven to improve blood glucose control and lower insulin levels.
The most agreed-upon recommendation is for the diet to be low in sugar and refined carbohydrates, while relatively high in dietary fiber, especially soluble fiber. Likewise, people with diabetes may be encouraged to reduce their intake of carbohydrates that have a high glycemic index (GI), although the ADA and Diabetes UK note that further evidence for this recommendation is needed.
People with diabetes can eat any food that they want, preferably a healthy diet with some carbohydrates, but they need to be more cognizant of the carbohydrate content of foods and avoid simple sugars like juices and sugar-sweetened beverages. For people dependent on insulin injections (both type 1 and some type 2 diabetics), it is helpful to eat a consistent amount of carbohydrate to make blood sugar management easier.
To date is no consensus that eating a diet consisting of any particular macronutrient composition (i.e.: the ratio of fat, protein, and carbohydrate in the diet) is more beneficial for diabetics. However, research on diabetic diets is limited due to the nature of nutritional research. Studies in this space tend to be observational as opposed to experimental, relatively short in duration and have relatively poor compliance due to the difficulty of controlling the diets of study participants at all hours of the day for extended periods of time.
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