Wednesday, July 6, 2011

Maximize Food Labels to Your Diabetes Advantage

Having diabetes includes being more meticulous on what food to eat. Choosing the food to take can be assisted by the guide food labels offer. You can actually maximize food labels for your diabetes meal planning.

Being diabetic means you have to give more attention in choosing food. Diet is equally important as your diabetes treatment. You exactly must know what food you should ideally take. Reading food labels can help you a lot in choosing your food in a more detailed manner.

Ingredients

When scrutinizing food labels, looking at the ingredients is important. Be more keen on ingredients that are friendly to the heart such as soy, oats, whole-wheat flour and monounsaturated fats like canola, peanut and olive oils. Avoid those that have hydrogenated oil. Ingredients suggest if the food is unhealthy or not.

Ingredients are usually listed by weight in descending order. Those with more weights are found at the top, followed by the items with lesser weights.

Sugar

If you are more concerned about sugar, in food labels, you may examine carbohydrates too among the ingredients, not just sugar. This is extremely important for your diabetes. Take note of the total carbohydrates grams and this should include complex carbohydrate, fiber and sugar.

Sugar-free products

Remember that sugar-free products do not necessarily mean carbohydrate-free. This also applies to products with “no sugar added” labels. Albeit these foods do not have high-sugar ingredients and there was no sugar added during its processing or packaging, they might still be high in carbohydrates.

Sugar alcohols and products containing them (such as xylitol, sorbitol and mannitol), also have calories and carbohydrates.

Food labels are indeed useful especially if you have diabetes and are more cautious on healthy food for your diabetes management.

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