Vegetables—Your Best Friends (Mostly)
In the battle against high blood sugar your greatest allies are the vegetables. Granted, you could live on meat and eggs and keep everything under control, but you would get precious few vitamins. If you are serious about maintaining reasonable blood-sugar levels and getting the necessary nutrition to maintain excellent health, you will need to become good friends with the vegetable family.
There are a few veggies that are high in carbs, but most are not. It is not that they have no carbs. All vegetables have carbs—they’re not like that can of tuna that lists a big fat zero for the carbohydrate amount. But many vegetables have so few carbs and so many vitamins and nutrients they are nearly perfect as food for diabetics. In many cases you would have to eat so much of the veggie to accumulate a significant amount of carbs that you can forget the need to count their carbs. And the carbs they do have are locked into the fiber of the food, so that they hit your bloodstream slowly and gently.
Here is a list of most of the vegetables you will see in your local grocery store, with their net carb content (total carbs minus fiber carbs) based on a cupful of each vegetable. Keep in mind that carb counts are tricky things and there are gobs of carb charts available. The numbers can vary pretty widely based on whether the foods are boiled, cooked, or raw, and the portion size listed. And, people being people, some charts simply differ from others. So while I won’t guarantee that others may not come up with somewhat different numbers, the categories are what you need to focus on.( The actual figures are from the website www.fatsecret.com.)
As you can see, not all vegetables are created equal. Sadly, two of the tastiest and most popular vegetables (potatoes and corn) are the absolute worst ones you can eat, sugarwise. The key to successful blood-sugar control is being willing to load up on the low-carb foods and go easy on the high-carb ones. Many Americans fill up on potatoes, breads, chips, and pastas, drink sugar-saturated drinks, and enjoy prodigious desserts and candy way too often. Not good! Those of us who battle high blood sugar have to reverse this and make vegetables, meats, eggs, and cheese foundational in our diet, supplemented by low-carb, high-fiber breads and lesser portions of some of the other foods.
You really do have a say in what your blood-sugar monitor reads when you prick your finger and wait for the results. Choose wisely and make low-carb vegetables an important part of your diet.
