Cooking For Diabetics

Cooking for diabetics is a task that needs careful planning. As the cook who is creating food for diabetics you need to think about your meals in advance and ideally plan food from specific recipes. With a little preparation cooking for diabetics is a breeze.

Many diabetics find the glycemic index (GI) a really helpful indicator to use when choosing what foods to prepare and eat the glycemic index is a measure of how much a given food raises blood glucose. Therefore a low GI food does not raise blood glucose as much as a high GI food.

As you know, we want to avoid spiking up blood glucose levels when we are cooking for diabetics, so we want to ideally choose as many foods as possible that have a low or medium GI. But what are some example foods with their GI?

Low GI foods are those like pasta, lentils, corn, and oatmeal. Medium GI foods are those like pita bread, brown rice and couscous. High GI foods are those like white rice, melons, white bread and corn flakes. Generally speaking, the more processed and cooked the food, the higher the GI value is likely to be.

So when cooking for diabetics we want to choose ingredients that are raw and unprocessed. But keep an eye on the actual base GI values because some raw unprocessed foods do have a high GI!

GI is an excellent indicator for the impact that a particular food is going to have on a diabetic, but it says nothing about the nutritional value of the food in question. So don't just blindly use GI when deciding what foods to cook. You need to also think about providing a balanced diet containing. The diabetes food pyramid is a good resource here.

When cooking for diabetics, I find that it helps to follow cookbooks and recipes.