|  | Conditions Treatments | Diabetes

Diabetes Meal Choice Tools

Diabetics deal with the health challenge that occurs when the body doesn't properly make and use insulin. Insulin breaks down the sugar in our bloodstream, making it available for energy. When insulin isn't being produced in sufficient quantities, blood sugar becomes high and if uncontrolled can damage body organs, leading to kidney failure, blindness, neuropathy, loss of limbs, and eventually death. In addition to the proper medications, an important factor in diabetic health is proper food choices. Patient education is a vital part of the disease management in diabetes.

  1. American Diabetes Association

    • The American Diabetes Association has a website that offers advice on food choices and meal planning, the opportunity to ask questions of a registered dietician, a pharmacist and a dentist, and chatting online or by phone during business hours. Hundreds of recipes are available for diabetic cooking. There is a special feature called My Food Advisor, which explores 5,000 different foods, allows searching by personally set nutritional parameters and will track carbohydrates, fats and other nutrients for you. There are a number of books available for purchase that are good tools in meal planning.

    National Institutes of Health Medline Plus

    • Tools on this website include an interactive tutorial on meal planning, recipes, and worksheets and advice to help make daily food choices. Spanish versions of many documents and tools are available. There are links to other sites that can help with meal choices.

    United States Department of Agriculture

    • At MyPyramid.gov, there are a number of interactive tools to help meal choices. You can look up foods in MyFood-A-Pedia, use MyPyramid Plan to work out a personalized food plan, plan a healthy menu with Menu Planner, use MyPyramid Tracker to analyze your diet, and listen to podcasts or watch videocasts on various food choices. Questions can be asked by email or phone.

    FreeVree for Diabetes

    • FreeVree is a free application for downloading to iPhones from iTunes that helps track glucose levels, activities, nutrition, weight, exercise, blood pressure and history. The program calculates nutritional information for foods you select from their database and reminds you to eat meals on time. It will record what you eat and when. The program can be used without entering any personally identifying information, and information is stored on your iPhone.

    Mayo Clinic

    • The Mayo Clinic offers 85 different educational pages online on diabetes, many of which have to do with meal planning and food choices, with helpful advice on such topics as eating out, caffeine, diabetes diets, late-night eating, pizza as a food choice, exchange lists for free foods, nonstarchy vegetables, starches, meat and meat substitutes and fruits and other meal choice subjects.

Diabetes - Related Articles