Diabetes-Smart Eating

If you are a healthy individual, your dietary habits play a major role in maintaining your health. If you have diabetes, however, your food and beverage choices are absolutely essential for keeping you alive. More than that, making the right dietary decisions can improve your situation!

Diabetes is a disease wherein elevated glucose (sugar) levels in the bloodstream cause widespread, systemic damage in the body.

Most people are reasonably familiar with some of the health risks that stem from diabetes, including heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, and blindness. Well, contributing factors to these health risks also put your feet in danger.

Excess sugar causes problems in your body’s circulatory, immune, and nervous systems. Your feet rely on these systems—as does just about every physical part of you—in different and connected ways.

The circulatory system provides oxygenated, nutrient-rich blood down to the tissues (muscles, bones, skin, etc.) in your lower limbs, and then returns the blood back to the heart to continue the cycle. Diabetes causes restricted blood flow, which means the tissues in your lower limbs do not receive adequate nutrients.

Diabetes also impairs the immune system, rendering it somewhat ineffective against the threat of microbial invaders (viruses, bacteria). Wounds in the lower limbs are unable to heal in a timely fashion, which allows more opportunities for contaminants—ones the body cannot fight off—to enter.

Now, you might take this for granted, but being able to feel pain is actually a good thing. Whereas pain obviously doesn’t feel good, it does let you and your body know there’s a problem. Too much sugar damages the nerves responsible for transmitting signals to the brain. As such, diabetes steals your body’s natural ability to recognize existent issues.

All of this means you MUST manage your blood sugar levels. To do so, you need to practice diabetes-smart eating. This entails:

• Eating the right foods. Your regular diet simply must be centered on foods that are rich in fiber and healthy (complex) carbohydrates. (When you get down to it, this is also true for individuals who aren’t diabetic!) What this means is eating plenty of fresh vegetables, nuts, legumes (beans, etc.), low-fat dairy products, and whole grains. Doing so helps with both digestion and regulation of blood sugar. Also, adhering to a proper diet—we can help you with this!—will ensure you aren’t eating sugar-laden foods.
• Avoiding—or, at the very least, limiting—sugar in your diet. Whereas your diet should be full of healthy carbs, you need to avoid simple carbs (which include sugars). You’re probably already quite aware of the fact candy is bad for you, but keep in mind you should also pass on baked goods made from refined (“white”) flour. The processing of this kind of flour leaves a product that spikes blood sugar, which is clearly not what you want.
• Avoiding soft drinks. This certainly ties in with the previous point, especially because of the incredibly high sugar content found in soft drinks (and certain juices). When deciding which kinds of beverages to purchase at the grocery store, make sure you read the labels to see how much sugar they contain. At restaurants, pass on soda and other sweet beverages, and instead order unsweetened tea, drink water, or order black coffee with just cinnamon in it (this is surprisingly delicious and the cinnamon helps to regulate your blood sugar levels!).

This is a good starting point for diabetes-smart eating, but even better is consultation with medical professionals. We can make further recommendations, give advice, and even recommend dieticians who specialize in dietary plans for diabetic individuals.

For more information—and to create your diabetic foot care plan—come see us at our Roseburg podiatrist office. Call Wilks Advanced Foot Care today at (541) 673-0742 to request your appointment.