Eating with Dignity is aimed at people when they are unwell and need to replace essential nutrients and calories. Below are some important principles to follow for the general population to try and remain healthy.
The best way to check if you need to reduce weight is by measuring your abdominal circumference. You should aim for <80cm for a woman and <94cm for a man. This is more accurate than using weight or BMI alone, although these can give you a rough guide. Abdominal circumference is important as an increased abdominal circumference gives a marker of how much unhealthy organ fat a person might have deposited. In general, a ‘pear’ shaped body is a more healthy profile than an ‘apple’ shape.
What is a healthy diet?
It should have balance and most public health bodies still choose a plate diagram to illustrate this. The best example I could find comes from the Harvard School of Public Health in America - please visit their website for more useful information.
In comparison, I feel that the NHS Eat Well plate is currently inadequate and does not provide enough emphasis on the most up to date information regarding the importance of vegetables, whole grains and nuts.
Back to basics: cooking from scratch is actually cheaper and far more healthy for you than processed foods which sometimes contain horrible ingredients like partially hydrogenated oils (trans fats) – (very bad for you) and palm oil (very bad for the environment – especially primates).
Keeping health and help to prevent Type II Diabetes (Adapted from the Harvard School of Public Health)
1. Choose whole grains and whole grain products over highly processed carbohydrates.
There is convincing evidence that diets rich in whole grains protect against diabetes, whereas diets rich in refined carbohydrates lead to increased risk. In the Nurses’ Health Studies I and II, for example, researchers looked at the whole grain consumption of more than 160,000 women whose health and dietary habits were followed for up to 18 years. Women who averaged two to three servings of whole grains a day were 30% less likely to have developed type 2 diabetes than those who rarely ate whole grains. When the researchers combined these results with those of several other large studies, they found that eating an extra 2 servings of whole grains a day decreased the risk of type 2 diabetes by 21%.
Whole grains don’t contain a magical nutrient that fights diabetes and improves health. It’s the entire package—elements intact and working together—that’s important. The bran and fibre in whole grains make it more difficult for digestive enzymes to break down the starches into glucose. This leads to lower, slower increases in blood sugar and insulin and a lower glycaemic index. As a result, they stress the body’s insulin-making machinery less, and so may help prevent type 2 diabetes. Whole grains are also rich in essential vitamins, minerals, and photochemicals that may help reduce the risk of diabetes.
In contrast, white bread, white rice, mashed potatoes, doughnuts, bagels, and many breakfast xa have what’s called a high glycaemic index and glycaemic load. That means they cause sustained spikes in blood sugar and insulin levels, which in turn may lead to increased diabetes risk. In China, for example, where white rice is a staple, the Shanghai Women’s Health Study found that women whose diets had the highest glycaemic index had a 21% higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes, compared to women whose diets had the lowest glycaemic index. Similar findings were reported in the Black Women’s Health Study.
More recent findings from the Nurses Health Studies I and II and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study suggest that swapping whole grains for white rice could help lower diabetes risk: Researchers found that women and men who ate the most white rice—five or more servings a week—had a 17% higher risk of diabetes than those who ate white rice less than one time a month. People who ate the most brown rice—two or more servings a week—had an 11% lower risk of diabetes than those who rarely ate brown rice. Researchers estimate that swapping whole grains in place of even some white rice could lower diabetes risk by 36%.
2. Skip the sugary drinks, and choose water, coffee, or tea instead.
Like refined grains, sugary beverages have a high glycaemic load, and drinking more of this sugary stuff is associated with increased risk of diabetes. In the Nurses’ Health Study II, women who drank one or more sugar-sweetened beverages per day had an 83% higher risk of type 2 diabetes, compared to women who drank less than one sugar-sweetened beverage per month.
Combining the Nurses’ Health Study results with those from seven other studies found a similar link between sugary beverage consumption and type 2 diabetes: For every additional 12-ounce serving of a sugary beverage that people drank each day, their risk of type 2 diabetes rose 25%. Studies also suggest that fruit drinks— Kool-Aid, fortified fruit drinks, or juices—are not the healthy choice that food advertisements often portray them to be: Women in the Black Women’s Health study who drank two or more servings of fruit drinks a day had a 31% higher risk of type 2 diabetes, compared to women who drank less than one serving a month.
How do sugary drinks lead to this increased risk? Weight gain may explain the link: In both the Nurses’ Health Study II and the Black Women’s Health Study, women who increased their consumption of sugary drinks gained more weight than women who cut back on sugary drinks. Several studies show that children and adults who drink soda or other sugar-sweetened beverages are more likely to gain weight than those who don’t and that switching from these to water or unsweetened beverages can reduce weight. Even so, however, weight gain caused by sugary drinks may not completely explain the increased diabetes risk. There is mounting evidence that sugary drinks contribute to chronic inflammation, high triglyceride, decreased “good” (HDL) cholesterol, and increased insulin resistance, all of which are risk factors for diabetes.
What to drink in place of the sugary stuff? Water is an excellent choice. Coffee and tea are also good calorie-free substitutes for sugared beverages (as long as you don’t load them up with sugar and cream and drink them in moderation!). And there’s convincing evidence that coffee may help protect against diabetes; emerging research suggests that tea may hold diabetes-prevention benefits as well, but more research is needed.
There’s been some controversy over whether artificially sweetened beverages are beneficial for weight control and, by extension, diabetes prevention. Some studies have found that people who regularly drink diet beverages have a higher risk of diabetes than people who rarely drink such beverages, but there could be another explanation for those findings: People often start drinking diet beverages because they have a weight problem or have a family history of diabetes; studies that don’t adequately account for these other factors may make it wrongly appear as though the diet soda led to the increased diabetes risk. A recent long-term analysis on data from 40,000 men in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study finds that drinking one 12-ounce serving of diet soda a day does not appear to increase diabetes risk. So in moderation, diet beverages can be a good sugary-drink alternative.
3. Choose good fats instead of bad fats.
The types of fats in your diet can also affect the development of diabetes. Good fats, such as the polyunsaturated fats found in liquid vegetable oils, nuts, and seeds can help ward off type 2 diabetes. Trans fats do just the opposite. These bad fats are found in much margarine, packaged baked goods, fried foods in most fast-food restaurants, and any product that lists “partially hydrogenated vegetable oil” on the label. Eating polyunsaturated fats from fish—also known as “long chain omega 3” or “marine omega 3” fats—does not protect against diabetes, even though there is much evidence that these marine omega 3 fats help prevent heart disease. If you already have diabetes, eating fish can help protect you against a heart attack or dying from heart disease.
4. Limit red meat and avoid processed meat; choose nuts, whole grains, poultry, or fish instead.
The evidence is growing stronger that eating red meat (beef, pork, lamb) and processed red meat (bacon, hot dogs, deli meats) increases the risk of diabetes, even among people who consume only small amounts. The latest support comes from a meta analysis, or statistical summary, that combined findings from the long-running Nurses’ Health Study I and II and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study with those of six other long-term studies. The researchers looked at data from roughly 440,000 people, about 28,000 of whom developed diabetes during the course of the study. They found that eating just one daily 3-ounce serving of red meat—say, a steak that’s about the size of a deck of cards—increased the risk of type 2 diabetes by 20%. Eating even smaller amounts of processed red meat each day—just two slices of bacon, one hot dog, or the like -increased diabetes risk by 51%.
The good news from this study: Swapping out red meat or processed red meat for a healthier protein source, such as nuts, low-fat dairy, poultry, or fish, or for whole grains lowered diabetes risk by up to 35%. Not surprisingly, the greatest reductions in risk came from ditching processed red meat.
Why do red meat and processed red meat appear to boost diabetes risk? It may be that the high iron content of red meat diminishes insulin’s effectiveness or damages the cells that produce insulin; the high levels of sodium and nitrites (preservatives) in processed red meats may also be to blame. Red and processed meats are a hallmark of the unhealthy “Western” dietary pattern, which seems to trigger diabetes in people who are already at genetic risk.