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TL;DR: Don't eat carbs Am type 1 diabetic; can confirm that abstaining from raising blood sugar is even simpler than consuming carbs + insulin. The first option of abstinence is an empty equation, which is easy to reason about, where the second case involves addition between two (theoretically cancelling) variables, which is prone to variation and/or error. When you are diabetic, especially Type I (which is more severe), your food consumption on the momentary level is dictated by the push and pull of insulin vs. carbs. So, to be the devil's advocate, let's say you follow the general recommendation and eat essentially what you feel like and match it correctly with insulin. You would take your measurement/estimation of the result of summing the insulin's graph with the food's graph and you achieve a difference of +/-0 mmol/L glucose/blood over some period of time. That's not going to be a flat line because insulin has a generic shape, whereas foods have their own individual shapes (on the graph), but you're generally doing pretty well if there's no total variation at the end. That can be almost as good as just not eating carbs, but that's also assuming that there aren't negative effects of taking external insulin besides erratic blood sugar. There are just less moving parts if you eat real food (vegetables, meat, nuts, oils) and skip filler (bread, pasta, potato, sweets, pops). Then are you also consuming food with significant nutritional content per calorie. I would even go further and say that this kind of diet would likely benefit the health of non-diabetics as well. It's literally better food, and for me has gotten to the point where I think of carbs as basically garbage. I still eat them, and do insulin, but am just pointing out how much better it is to just factor it out where possible. And then if you're gonna eat carbs you can pick lesser evils, like brown things vs. white things. Or rice vs. wheat. Or diluted fruit juice (let's say with sparkly water) vs. Coke. This reduces both variables in the equation, the up (carbs) and down (insulin), which makes the entire equation less drastic to balance. So this is really basic math (0 vs. an equation with two vars) in terms of what the solution to diabetics' diets is. This opinion probably not backed by the FDA but I've heard that cinnamon and yams/sweet potatoes can passively help with blood sugar control in a gentle kind of sense. |