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• Choose an overall balanced diet that emphasizes fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.

Avoid foods you do not cook yourself, due to the high risk of hidden sugars and fats. Likewise, when eating out, avoid anything with sauces. Go for dishes that are lightly frilled, steamed or poached.

There is a growing body of evidence that suggests that artificial sweeteners actually promote weight GAIN, not weight loss. If you must have something sweet, try using honey, or apple juice.

Look at places in your diet where you can cut down on sugar, for example, in your beverages.  If you drink a lot of fruit juice, go for the fresh piece of fruit instead for all the nutrients, plus fiber, and the satisfaction of eating food.

If you can’t live without coffee or tea, cut back on the sweetener, and, why not try more milk instead. Choose skim, and make yourself a latte or iced latte with mainly milk and a bit of coffee.

If you are  a heavy soda drinker, instead of soda, what about a fruit smoothie? You will  not only feel like you are having a treat, you will be be stopping yourself from overeating and getting more calcium in your diet.  In addition, you will be using fresh, natural ingredients, not the suspect artificial sweeteners.

When looking to your diet for disease prevention, emphasise natural foods, not pre-packaged convenience foods. Try to wean yourself and your family off the soda habit and watch the pounds come off.

Continued in Diet and Disease Prevention Part 14

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The following recommendations are a summary of the major research that has been carried out on what you can do to prevent diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

• Maintain a desirable weight for your height and build.

• Limit the saturated fat in your diet to no more than 7% of total calories.

• Get at least 15% of total fat calories from monounsaturated fat.

• Limit dietary cholesterol to less than 200 mg per day, which requires restriction of all dietary sources of cholesterol, including eggs and shellfish.

• Get at least 25 g of fiber per day; include several servings of whole grains and plenty of soluble fiber in your diet.

• Aim for eight servings per day of a variety of fruits and vegetables. At least one vegetable should be dark green and at least one fruit or vegetable should be orange or red.

• Restrict intake of refined carbohydrates such as white flour and sugar, or any packaged products with sugary ingredients like high fructose corn syrup.

Continues in
Diet and Disease Prevention Part 13

Your Diet and Type 2 Diabetes continued

What you need to know about Metabolic Syndrome

Metabolic Syndrome is a condition characterized by a group of diagnostic test findings, including elevated blood glucose levels, high triglycerides, low HDL cholesterol, high blood pressure, and obesity.

Metabolic syndrome is associated with an increased risk of diabetes, heart attack, and stroke.

About one in four U.S. adults has metabolic syndrome, according to a report in the October 2004 issue of Diabetes Care. An earlier study of 6,436 men and women, using data from 1988 to 1994, revealed that just over 24% of Americans age 20 and older met the criteria for metabolic syndrome.

In the current study, researchers looked at data collected between 1999 and 2000 on 1,677 people. They found that U.S. adults were growing worse, not better, as the century drew to a close, with more than 27% of Americans diagnosed with metabolic syndrome.

Especially high was the number of women with the syndrome, which increased by 24% between the two study periods compared with a 2% rise among men.

Increased waist circumference, high triglycerides, and high blood pressure accounted for much of the increase in women.

Overall, the researchers estimate that 64 million U.S. adults now have metabolic syndrome.

To stop any further rise, the investigators in the study urge “comprehensive approaches for improving nutrition and physical activity habits that target both individuals and the population.”

Type 2 Diabetes is the most common type of diabetes. Type 2 Diabetes develops when the pancreas cannot make enough insulin to overcome the body’s resistance to insulin action. Metabolic syndrome is believed to be a form of pre-diabetes.

Diabetes has numerous side effects related to it, ranging from kidney damage (nephropathy), to nerve damage (neuropathy), to blindness (diabetic retinopathy), as well as heart disease and severe circulatory problems that can result in lower limb amputation.

In Diet and Disease Prevention Part 12, you will learn more about the specific dietary recommendations to ward off diabetes and metabolic syndrome.

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What Is Diabetes?
Diabetes mellitus is a metabolic disorder with abnormally high blood glucose levels (hyperglycemia) as its most prominent feature.

During intestinal digestion, carbohydrates and proteins are broken down into simple sugars and amino acids, respectively.

The liver converts all of the sugars and some of the amino acids into glucose, a simple sugar that is used for energy by every cell in the body.

Glucose passes from the bloodstream into the cells with the help of insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas (a pear-shaped organ located just below the stomach).

By attaching to receptor sites on the surface membrane of a cell, insulin promotes the movement of glucose-transport proteins from the interior of the cell to its surface, where they bind with glucose and carry it into the cell.

In diabetes mellitus, several problems may interfere with this process: pancreatic insulin production may be partially or completely impaired, or body cells may become unable to respond to normal amounts of insulin efficiently.

In Type 2 diabetes mellitus, also once known as adult-onset diabetes, insulin production by the pancreas is only moderately reduced, but your cells are unable to respond efficiently to insulin—a condition referred to as insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance is thought to be a forerunner of diabetes.

The onset of type 2 diabetes is usually gradual and tends to affect people over age 40, particularly those who are overweight.

Infrequently, an adult may develop type 1 diabetes. In Type 1 diabetes, the pancreas makes  no insulin. It used to be referred to as juvenile diabetes, but now, because we are seeing so many young people with Type 2, it is no longer classified in that manner.

Diet and Disease Prevention Part 11

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Your Diet and Type 2 Diabetes

Diet and diabetes are inextricably linked. Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disorder in which you stop producing your own insulin, which helps your body utilize the food you eat in a healthy and balanced way.

Type 2 diabetes is when you do produce insulin, but there is something wrong with the whole process of utilization.

This condition is commonly termed insulin resistance, and can be seen as a type of pre-diabetes.

Metabolic syndrome, recently posited by Johns Hopkins, is a cluster of symptoms which can also be a precursor of diabetes.  In this article, we will outline diabetes, both type 1 and type 2.

We will also discuss the latest facts and figures on metabolic syndrome.

Diet and Disease Prevention Part 10
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