Reduce Your Risk of Diabetes by Focusing on Diet
Diet and the Diabetic
Keeping your weight under control and eating a healthy diet is beneficial for a variety of reasons, namely lowering your risk of certain diseases. Diabetes is one disease in which your risk is lowered if you eat healthy and aren’t overweight. Focusing on diet efforts now can mean you will be less likely to develop diabetes when you’re older.
Weight Is a Factor
Being overweight significantly increases your risk for type 2 diabetes. So obviously restricting caloric intake and getting to a healthy weight is beneficial for preventing diabetes. A recent study out of Great Britain has shown that changing diet can have a profound impact on impaired glucose tolerance and developing diabetes.
More Than Vanity Is At Stake
Many people are motivated to lose weight by a desire to look good and feel better about themselves. Improved self confidence can be one result of weight loss that occurs when you diet, but increased risk of diabetes is definitely a positive result as well. Type 2 diabetes used to be a disease whose onset occurred during middle-age. With the increase in obesity across all age levels, younger Americans, including teens, are now getting diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
Eating Right
What types of food are best to eat to avoid type 2 diabetes? This answer is debatable. But one sound piece of advice is to cut back on the quantities of foods that you eat. There is an old wives tale that you should not eat more than what you could fit on a saucer at one sitting. This is good advice that still applies to modern diets. It reduces the tendency to overeat. The study described above suggests that olive oil and fish high in omega fatty acids, both part of the Mediterranean diet, are very important for diabetics to eat.
Similar restrictions should apply to liquids. Unless you are drinking water or a beverage like green tea, you should limit your consumption of almost all beverages. Most of these beverages contain coffee, sugar, or alcohol. These types of substances should be limited in everyone’s diet.