How to Eat for Balanced Blood Sugar
The following article was written by Heinen’s Chief Dietitian, Melanie Jatsek RD, LD. Click here to learn more about Mel’s personalized nutrition coaching services. Please consult your healthcare provider before making any substantial changes to your diet.
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Managing a disease, like diabetes, isn’t easy, but it doesn’t always have to be gloom and doom. Here’s some good news: There are simple behaviors you can adopt to help you manage disease and improve your overall health.
In this post, I share how indulging in an Fx™-based diet can help normalize elevated blood sugar. The emphasis here is on consistency and patience.
The whole process of eating for healthy blood sugar is a lot like planting a garden. When you plant a tomato seed, it doesn’t sprout the day after you plant it, but if you water it with consistency, within five to six days—bingo, a sprout! If you expected a juicy red tomato on day seven, grew impatient, and yanked the sprout from the ground because it wasn’t happening fast enough, you’d never know what it’s like to experience the deliciousness of a fresh tomato. It takes time. So why should it be any different for us?
Before we dig into any diet details, let’s first understand more about this condition affecting millions of people across the globe.
Diabetes Defined
Diabetes is a condition caused by prolonged high blood sugar due to a problem with the hormone insulin. It develops when the pancreas either makes no insulin, not enough insulin, or plenty of insulin, but the cells become resistant to it. The result in all cases is too much sugar in the blood.
The Effects of Diabetes
When blood sugar remains high over time, it can cause any number of health complications, including:
- Cardiovascular disease: disease of the heart and blood vessels
- Neuropathy: nerve damage in the legs and feet
- Retinopathy: disease of the retina of the eye
- Kidney disease
The Underlying Cause of Diabetes
When you eat a carbohydrate-containing food like fruit, starchy vegetables, beans, bread, pasta, or sweets, your body breaks it down into glucose (sugar) molecules. Circulating glucose in your blood signals your pancreas to produce the hormone insulin to carry the glucose out of your blood and into your cells, where it can be used for immediate energy or stored for later use.
When your cells reject insulin, they are “resistant” and said to be in an “insulin resistant” state. This means glucose remains in the blood, creating an eventual diabetic/pre-diabetic state.
Aside from type 1 diabetes, where the pancreas makes little to no insulin, it is believed that insulin resistance is the real cause of excess sugar in the blood (as what happens in type 2 diabetes).
So, what contributes to insulin resistance? It’s a combination of factors, like sleep deprivation, the amount and type of food you eat, lack of physical activity, and unmanaged stress.
To improve your insulin sensitivity and achieve balanced blood sugar, let’s dive a little deeper into nutrition.
How Food Affects Insulin Sensitivity and Blood Sugar
Countless books have been written about diet and diabetes and I’m not here to debate any of them. Rather, I want to offer a science-based approach that makes sense. What’s more, it’s a plan you can follow for the rest of your life without feeling deprived.
You’ve probably heard well-meaning people suggest that if you have diabetes or pre-diabetes, you should avoid or drastically cut carbohydrates from your diet. It seems like reasonable advice, doesn’t it? Afterall, if carbohydrates break down into glucose (sugar), and too much sugar in the blood is dangerous, then eliminating carbohydrates should take care of the problem. You may have even witnessed this for yourself if you regularly check your blood sugar and notice a spike after eating a handful of grapes or a ripe banana. It seems to confirm the “carbs-are-bad-for-blood sugar” theory.
The problem with this theory is that it’s oversimplified and neglects an important side of the story: your baseline level of insulin resistance.
It turns out that carbohydrate-rich foods will spike your blood glucose if and only if your baseline level of insulin resistance is already high. And what causes insulin resistance? It’s not insulin itself. It’s actually eating too much dietary fat, which creates the symptom of excess insulin in your blood.
The truth is that healthy carbohydrate-rich whole foods only require large amounts of insulin when the total amount of fat in your diet is also high. So, if your meals are weighed down with butter, cheese, oils, and fatty meats, your body will demand more insulin to process the carbohydrates you eat. The longer this goes on, the more insulin resistant you can become.
Improve Insulin Sensitivity with a Low-Fat, Whole Food, Plant-Based (WFPB) Diet
You can gain insulin sensitivity very quickly by following a whole food, plant-based (WFPB) diet and by reducing (not eliminating) the amount of fat you eat. If you are a meat-eater, you can achieve even better results when your portion of animal protein is more like a small side dish than a main course.
When it comes to carbohydrates, it’s important that we don’t lump them all into the same category. Sugary foods and beverages and refined flour products (bread, crackers, pizza, snack foods, etc.) are not good for blood sugar, but the carbohydrates under Fx Pillars 1, 2, 4 and 5 are:
- Fresh or frozen leafy greens
- Fresh or frozen plain fruits and vegetables
- Legumes (peas, lentils, and beans)
- Whole intact grains (sprouted if you can): steel cut oats, quinoa, brown rice, farro, buckwheat, barley, etc.
We must not forget that our bodies were designed to safely shuttle glucose into our cells with the help of insulin. When this glucose comes from healthy and wholesome sources, we get the bonus of a whole slew of vitamins, minerals, antioxidants, and other health-protective components, including fiber.
After a short time eating this way, you may notice these, and other welcomed benefits take shape in your life:
- The ability to go 4 hours between meals without feeling ravenous
- Regular bowel movements
- More physical energy
- Improved mental clarity
- Healthier skin
- Improved sleep quality and duration
A One-Day Low-Fat WFPB Meal Plan
Here are a few meal suggestions to give you an idea of what a low-fat WFPB day of eating looks like in real life. Feel free to add a small portion of animal protein if you’d like, such as one Heinen’s pasture-raised egg or a few ounces of omega-3-rich fish (wild salmon, tuna, mackerel, sardines), Pasturebird chicken, Force of Nature grass fed bison, or Heinen’s grass fed beef.
- Breakfast: Cinnamon Quinoa Breakfast Bowl or Golden Hour Smoothie
- Lunch: Wild Rice and Mushroom Soup or Spring Vegetable Salad with Wasa sourdough crispbread
- Dinner: Mediterranean Zucchini Pasta Salad or Kale White Bean Skillet
- Snacks: Fresh fruit; Raw vegetables with Esti baba ghanoush for dipping; Balanced Tiger nutrition bar; Navitas Power Snacks
Key Takeaway
We all want good health, but we must put in the work to make it happen. I can’t think of anything more rewarding than seeing the fruits of my “labor” in the form of balanced blood sugar and a body full of energy, mental clarity, and an appetite satisfied by wholesome food. Trust me when I say that it doesn’t take much to experience results you can see and feel. The key is consistency!
Source: Mastering Diabetes: The Revolutionary Method to Reverse Insulin Resistance Permanently in Type 1, Type 1.5, Type 2, Prediabetes, and Gestational Diabetes by Cyrus Khambatta, PHD and Robby Barbaro, MPG
