In order to understand what nutrition should be for diabetes, you must first find out what this term means.
Diabetes mellitus refers to a number of endocrine disorders in the body that are associated with a lack or complete absence in the body of insulin - a hormone that is produced in the pancreas by the so-called islets of Langerhans. Sometimes it is not insulin deficiency that leads to the disorder, but its incorrect “chemical behavior” (interaction with other hormones). In all these cases, the amount of glucose in the body increases sharply, the metabolism is completely disrupted, water is not retained in the body and internal organs. Untreated diabetes can lead to blindness, leg amputation, and death.
However, today, doctors are quite easy to cope with diabetes. New medicines, a good lifestyle and a balanced diet allow a diabetes patient to lead a full life, no different from healthy people. At the same time, proper nutrition in diabetes is even more important than taking drugs: it is it that can prevent the onset of exacerbations. In addition, it has been quite reliably established that very often, or rather, almost always, diabetes is a side effect of obesity. In the practice of treating this disease, there are numerous cases where loss of excess weight led to the stabilization of glucose and the normalization of metabolism without the use of drugs.
So what is a nutritional treatment for diabetes? This is a meal that meets certain requirements, individual for each patient.
Diabetes in someone upsets the protein balance, in someone - carbohydrate or fatty, and in severe cases, the metabolism is completely disrupted.
It is this feature that determines nutrition in diabetes. The patient is prescribed a diet with the exclusion of certain products, the restriction of others, an increased number of third.
However, it is not easy to determine the amount of necessary substances in food: they cannot be measured with a glass or spoon, and it is impossible to remember the chemical and enzymatic composition of all products.
Therefore, to determine the required amount of carbohydrates in the diet, doctors introduced the concept of a bread unit. It is equal to 15 grams of carbohydrates that the body absorbs. Therefore, according to doctors who promote proper nutrition for diabetes, you can eat anything, but so much so that the number of products does not exceed 18 or 25 (depending on the degree of the disease) bread units. This calculus was introduced specifically for insulin diabetics. One unit corresponds to half a glass of oatmeal or 30 grams of bread, 1 apple or 2 pieces of prunes. Usually, doctors give patients a special table in which you can find the "capacity" of all products.
The second principle is the energy balance of food. The patient should eat so much food to fully cover his energy needs, but not to exceed them. This means that a loader working on unloading wagons and a writer sitting at a computer, with equal physical parameters, should eat different amounts of food.
Nutrition for diabetes implies another principle: the balance of proteins, fats and carbohydrates. However, this applies to nutrition not only for sick people.
Finally, diabetics should eat at least 5-6 times a day.
There are several diets designed specifically for patients with this diagnosis. All of them take into account the characteristics of patients. For example, obese people are advised to eat more kale, other vegetables. Those who have impaired liver function are given soy, oatmeal, buckwheat, but are not recommended to eat meat or fried foods.