Dietician Explains How To Manage Diabetes With Nutrition

For many people with diabetes, managing the symptoms often requires medication.

But Dietician who spoke to THE WHISTLER has suggested that nutrition can play an important role in keeping the patient healthy with type 1 or type 2 diabetes.

According to Mrs. Chioma Mmiriukwu, a registered Dietitian/ Nutritionist, diet can help keep blood sugar within the target range or bring it back down if it spikes.

She said there are three types of diabetics, namely: type one, type two and gestational diabetes caused during pregnancy.

She explained that type one is insulin dependent, meaning that the person’s body would be dependent on external insulin(a hormone responsible for carrying the sugar to different cells and tissues of the body) to survive.

“Type 2 is non insulin dependent, although there are some type 2 that may require insulin at some point depending on how their body is tolerating the other hypoglycemics medications. Some might have adverse reaction to the drugs,so the endocrinologist might have to introduce insulin.”

Managing Diabetes With Diet

Mmiriukwu explained that there are three ways to manage diabetics, which are: diet with medications, oral hypoglycemics, and diet with exercise.

“There is something I say to my patients, the sugar you are trying to control comes from the food , so to control the sugar you have to control the quality of your food.”

She said diabetic patients would have to put into consideration the following to better manage their condition:

Quality Food

The quality of food matters because if your food is lacking in fibre and low fat it will be difficult to control the sugar. In controlling diabetes we are looking at the quantity of carbohydrate that we eat and how fast they are digesting .

When the food is high in fibre(That indigestible part that delays the digestion of carbohydrate) , like vegetables, digestion of carbohydrate(Sugar) will exit into the bloodstream so fast.

So for someone that is diabetic and the person eats 100granms of sugar in a particular breakfast , which of course will enter the bloodstream. But if that meal is accompanied by fibre , we discover that the 100grams of sugar won’t all move into the bloodstream at the same time. So that the insulin present will not be overwhelmed by a surge of sugar coming in at the same time.

We also have to make sure that you don’t add a lot of fat to the food, like oils, cutting out visible fats from your protein sources like your chicken, beef and avoid frying of food. This is because too much fat increases the caloric value of a meal and then reduces the sensitivity of the insulin.

Food Quantity

This differs from person to person as it needs to be based on your physical activity level, age and a lot more. But when you have more vegetables on your plate, you will discover that you will not eat so much carbohydrate, this makes it easy to control your blood sugar and equally your weight. Weight control is one thing that is paramount to managing diabetics.

Timing

Timing is important. Oftentimes people say because I checked my sugar this morning and its high let me not eat breakfast so i can burn it out.It doesn’t work that way. Having a regular meal time is very important , so that they will be able to have a good flow of sugar into the bloodstream in the right quantity.

Having a situation where you eat plenty of food at a time and it gets high and you stay for a prolonged period of time without eating, by the time you want to eat you will be hungry and might not portion and this spikes the sugar.

Secondly, avoid late dinners, if you eat late there are very high chances that your sugar level will be high the next day because by night you are already winding down to bed

She however advised Nigerians to inculcate the habit of eating minimally processed food.