Diet and Health FAQ

Tagged As: Recipe diet healthy food

Question:
G'day G'day Folks, A healthy diet is a way of eating that that reduces risk for complications such as heart disease and stroke. Healthy eating includes eating a wide variety of foods including vegetables, whole grains, fruits, non-fat dairy products, beans, and lean meats, poultry and fish. There is no one perfect food so including a variety of different foods and watching portion sizes is key to a healthy diet. Also, make sure your choices from each food group provide the highest quality nutrients you can find. In other words, pick foods rich in vitamins, minerals and fiber over those that are processed. People with diabetes can eat the same foods the family enjoys. Everyone benefits from healthy eating so the whole family can take part in healthy eating. It takes some planning but you can fit your favorite foods into your meal plan and still manage your blood glucose, blood pressure and cholesterol. I wonder how many thought that was me talking. It wasn't. Check out ... Basically, IMHO it is pretty sound advice and it comes from the ADA. So what is the fuss about? What drives the regular spats overs the advice given by the ADA? Well to throw in my 2 cents. The paragraphs written above by the writers for the ADA are so general they are hard to disagree with. Eating healthy food instead of junk food is a pretty good start. People are likely to be healthier if they eat vegetables, if they eat whole grains rather than milled grains, if they eat some fruit, if they eat non fat dairy products, beans, lean meat, poultry and fish. As I have said about the Atkins diet, Atkins is low carb for the unambitious the ADA guidelines given here are for the unambitious. The basic ideas are pretty good but can easily be improved. It will surprise many to find the ADA funded research comparing their basic diet with one that replace some carbs with cis monounsaturated fatty acids and found the LATTER superior. One just wouldn't know it from reading the paragraphs above. One might be left with the notion that vegetables are vegetable are vegetables yet the truth is that some are more beneficial and easier to manage safely than others. One might not grasp that temperate fruit especially berries are often far better choices for T2 diabetics than tropical fruit. There are things like glycemic load, glycemic index and antioxidant capacity. One might not grasp that some fish eg wild sockeye salmon have certain benefits. Or that there are significant benefits in eating shellfish. Given the general tenor against fats one might not grasp that fatty fish and even fish oil have benefits in lowering blood triglycerides. One might not grasp that nuts are good for most people since they are not mentioned and besides they are high in fat. IMHO start with the ADA if you must. Then take the time to educate yourself fully.

Answer:
Hi Quentin, you had some fun doing that bit of writing, I'm sure. And if that part you quoted coming under the heading *What is a healthy diet?* would be followed by *Just eat to your meter and stay below 140!* I wouldn't mind. Instead we find the *Food Guide Pyramid* the new form of which doesn't differ very much from the old one, and then *Rate your plate* telling us, that one quarter of of our healthy plate should contain potatoes or rice or the rest of the broad bottom of that pyramid. Don’t get me wrong: I like potatoes and I like rice and all the rest of it and with 1 unit of Apidra per 2g of carbs I can manage to stay on the low side of 140 at about an hour after eating. But what happens to people like Alasdair, when they are told to follow that ADA advice totally blind, because it is officially (even ADA officially) not necessary for them to watch and control their bgs? They spike with every healthy meal and are officially told to believe the contrary! And still I wouldn’t mind if it were only the ADA officials’ eyes to turn blind (and ...) with those spikes. - Sorry Quentin, but I have great difficulties to accept that part of behaviour of all the ADAs around the world as legal. It is not right. And it is not based on any science