Healthy eating tips for Diabetics for the holidays

With November being Diabetes Awareness Month and November 14 bring World Diabetes Day, The Madill Record researched and asked professionals for healthy eating tips for Diabetics. We also know how difficult it can be to eat healthy around the holidays.

Veronica Riera-Gilley PharmD, BCGP of the Prairie Fire Pharmacy Consulting, LLC, and who also partnered with Corner Drug in Madill said there a few things to remember.

Choose whole foods

“Eat foods as close to the way they were found in nature. Eat them without additional preservatives, or artificial colors or flavors. Examples of whole foods include but are not limited to apples, carrots, celery, broccoli, chicken breast, quinoa, rice, and beans,” Riera-Gilley said.

The less ingredients, the better

“Look for 5 ingredients or less on the label,” she noted. The more ingredients a product has means the product is “more highly processed and is likely to have more sugar, fat, preservatives, and artificial colors or flavors to cover up the poor quality of the food.” Extremely processed foods such as chips, cookies, chicken nuggets and boxed foods have minimal nutritional value.

If you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it.

Whole foods and healthy ones contain simple ingredients that people can recognize and pronounce. Complicated ingredients that are hard to pronounce are not recognized are preservatives and artificial.

Choose naturally colorful foods

Riera-Gilley said that nature makes food that are good for us very colorful, so we notice them and they look appetizing to us. Naturally colorful foods like strawberries, blueberries, bell peppers, red cabbage and sweet potatoes are loaded with antioxidants and beneficial nutrients that are needed for cell health.

Be careful if the label calls the product healthy

“If the label makes a health claim, it still probably isn’t healthy,” Riera-Gilley said.

“We all know that trans fats have a very negative impact on our heart health,” she continued. “You probably thought you were doing something good when you bought a product that was labeled with Zero Grams Trans Fat. Did you know that a food labeled to have Zero Grams Trans Fat still has Trans Fat in it? Food Manufacturers are allowed to say that your food has zero grams Trans Fat in it if the amount of trans fat is less than 0.5 grams per serving. By the time you eat all the servings in a package, your grams of trans fat add up.”

To help you with Thanksgiving dinner, here is a diabetic friendly recipe.