How to Customize a Diabetic Menu

Cooking for yourself or someone else with diabetes requires great care and attention. Everything must be accounted for in any recipe, including sugar, carbohydrates, fat and serving sizes. The diabetic diet emphasizes low carbohydrates and sugar along with lean meats, fruits and vegetables. You can reduce the carbohydrate, sugar and fat content in many recipes to make them more diabetic-friendly. In fact, if you read food labels and keep track of your ingredients, it is possible to modify nearly any recipe for a diabetic.

Things You'll Need

• Sugar substitutes
• No-sugar-added applesauce
• Soy, almond, whole-wheat or oat flour
• Fruit juices
• Low-carbohydrate pasta

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Instructions

• 1

  Review the ingredients for the recipe you want to modify. Look for any added sugars, flour and fat.

• 2

  Replace any sugar with a calorie-free sugar substitute. Review the package for the substitute you have selected to determine the conversion for sugar. Some are equal conversions, meaning 1 cup of sugar is equal to 1 cup of the substitute. Other substitutes are much more concentrated and require only 2 to 3 tsp. to replace 1 cup of sugar. When baking, reduce the amount of regular sugar and replace half of it with a substitute.

• 3

  Eliminate any unnecessary added fats, including extra butter or oils. Substitute half of any vegetable oil with no-sugar-added applesauce. Use lean cuts of meat or trim visible fat, and prepare fish and white meats whenever possible.

• 4

  Use soy, almond, whole-wheat or oat flour to replace all-purpose white flour. Experiment with various combinations of these alternative flours to find the best results for your taste.

• 5

  Use fruit juices in place of sugar whenever possible to add sweetness and important vitamins to a recipe. If the sugar is used only to add sweetness, and not to aid in browning, you can use some fruit juice or fruit puree in place of the sugar to add sweetness with less carbohydrate impact.

• 6

  When cooking pasta, select a low-carbohydrate pasta. There are brands commercially available that contain only 5g of net carbohydrates per serving, as compared to 35g of net carbohydrates in most standard pastas. You can also replace pasta with zucchini, squash or other such vegetables with excellent results.