Dietary Advice for Diabetics: How to Manage Blood Sugar Throughout The Festive Season

This is a Guest Post by Mr. Lokendra Tomar, Diet Educator & Founder of Diabexy.

Festivals are the time to eat and celebrate but diabetics find it difficult to manage their blood sugar during festive seasons. What if you can guess the impact of festive food on your blood sugar before you eat them? I am sure you will be excited to learn this method. 

Yes. There is a method with the help of which you can easily guess the rise of blood sugar levels. This method is called the glycemic load calculation method. 

Diabetes is a problem of consistently high blood sugar in the blood. The amount of sugar in the blood is directly associated with the amount of sugar in the food we eat, but here is a catch. Everyone feels that he doesn’t eat much sugar in their daily diet, but their blood sugar is still high.

The glycemic load is a scientific and easy-to-calculate method to predict the amount of sugar present in the food and its impact on the blood sugar of a diabetic. 

One glycemic load is roughly equal to 20mg/dl of blood sugar. Now, this becomes very simple to understand that low glycemic load food will have less impact on blood sugar levels and high glycemic load food will have a higher impact on blood sugar. 

The next challenge is to find the glycemic load of a food item. This part is easy, as the new theory of diabetes is getting popular where people say that diabetes is reversible. The availability of readymade glycemic load charts on the internet has become easy and even some companies are also selling the glycemic load chart on e-commerce websites.  

Let’s learn few tips to make sure that you are eating low glycemic load food during festive seasons. 

Sugar-free sweets – Everyone knows that sugar-free sweets should be consumed if someone is having diabetes. Now you must check that these sugar-free sweets should not contain dextrose or maltodextrin. The glycemic load of white sugar is 65 per 100g, whereas the glycemic load of maltodextrin and dextrose is 110 and 100 respectively. They are more dangerous than white sugar for blood sugar.  

Sweets made with wheat flour – Even if sugar-free sweetener is used but the rest of the ingredients contain wheat flour, it will have a high glycemic load. It should have nuts and seed flour in place of wheat flour because the glycemic load of wheat flour is 50 whereas the glycemic load of almond flour is just 1 per 100g.

Eating frequent meals – Every time you eat something it releases some carbohydrates, and they get converted into glucose. This glucose needs insulin to facilitate its entry into the cell. If there is a deficiency of insulin in the diabetic patient, then frequently eating a lot of carbs will increase his blood sugar levels.     

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