Diabetic Menu Guide

The print media and the internet provide ample sources of recipes and complete meal plans that are tailored to the needs of the diabetic person. Some searching and sampling is necessary but something suitable to meet almost any tastes can be found with sufficient effort.

The American Diabetes Association lists several meal planning options including carbohydrate counting, the plate proportion method, and the Diabetes Food Pyramid. The latter divides foods into six categories and lists individual foods and serving sizes for the food items in each group and from this it is relatively simple to build a meal plan to suit personal tastes and food preferences.

Construction
From a somewhat more theoretical approach, to assist in understanding the principles involved in actually constructing a diabetic menu for a meal or for a day, the following guidelines are offered here.

What do we need to know, even before we look at actual food choices?

To construct a menu, we need to know how many calories it must provide to meet the energy demands of the individual to whom it applies. Calorie requirements for a person vary depending on the degree of activity involved in performing their daily work duties and in their lifestyle pursuits, and in the body weight they wish to maintain.

Another factor influencing the choice and quantity of food items for a menu is the personal preferences involving the ratios of carbohydrate, proteins, and fat amounts. Your doctor or health care team may give instructions on that. The American Diabetes Association recommends a relatively high 55 to 60% of total calories consumed each day should be derived from carbohydrates, and the association, like the diabetic associations of most countries, does not favor a low carbohydrate approach. Not all doctors who treat diabetes agree with this.

To illustrate the use of the above-mentioned factors, let us take as examples, a male and a female, each 50 years of age, both with a moderately active lifestyle.

The female is 5 feet 5 inches tall and weighs 135 pounds.
The male is 5 feet 8 inches tall and weighs 165 pounds.

To maintain that weight and activity condition,  the female should consume approximately 1700 calories daily and the male should consume approximately 2180 calories daily.

So with the knowledge of those values and the personal food preferences of each person, a suitable meal plan can be devised to meet all conditions.

But an additional set of information is required, we need to know the calorie, carbohydrate, protein, and fat content, of the specific food items from which to choose the menu items, the meat, the potatoes, whatever. That information is available but it takes a lot of searching to locate it and the full range of nutrients is not easy to find in one place.

However, I have compiled my own list of about 80 popular everyday menu items that does show the food item’s contents of carbohydrate, fat, protein, and calories.  Click to go to the Table of Nutritional Values.

By referring to this list, it becomes easy and takes little time to determine a menu item’s nutrient values. With a chart for entering those values, similar the to one I show below, the totals can quickly be determined. If a specific food item is not listed, the values for a comparable food can usually be used as an approximation.

As an example of the above explanation, let us compare a fairly hearty American style cooked breakfast with a normal but usually filling cereal breakfast.

Hearty breakfast
2 fried eggs and ham, hash browns, 2 slices of whole-wheat toast with jam or marmalade, 1 cup of coffee with cream.

Alternative, Cereal breakfast
I cup of dry cereal such as Cornflakes, Cheerios or Weetabix – with ½ cup of milk or Vanilla Soy milk, 1 cup of sliced fresh strawberries, 1 slice of whole-wheat toast and jam, 1 cup of coffee with cream.

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Related posts:

1. The Diabetic Menu — a serious challenge
2. Diabetic Menu: Constructing a Diabetic Meal Plan