Читать книгу Diabetes Cookbook For Canadians For Dummies - Cynthia Payne - Страница 4

In This Chapter

▶ Getting to know the types of diabetes

▶ Diagnosing diabetes

▶ Seeing the highs and lows of blood glucose levels

▶ Managing diabetes through nutrition

▶ Staying healthy with exercise

▶ Investigating the important role of medication in diabetes management

This is a cookbook with a twist.

This book begins not with recipes or a discussion on food handling or food shopping or the like, but rather starts right here, in Chapter 1, with a discussion on diabetes.

Beginning this book by talking about the basics of diabetes – Diabetes 101, if you will – is in keeping with the very special nature of diabetes. Diabetes is special in many ways, but none more so than this: If you’re living with diabetes, the more you know about your diabetes and the more actively you are involved in your own health care, the more you can do to ensure you stay healthy.

Your diabetes therapy begins anew every day when you first get up and decide what you’re going to eat. And your therapy continues all day with every morsel you put in your mouth. If you have diabetes it’s not your doctor or nurse or dietitian or any other person who ultimately makes your nutrition choices; it is you.

Healthy eating affects diabetes in many different and crucial ways: The food choices you make will influence your blood glucose (“blood sugar”), your weight, your blood pressure, your cholesterol, your bowel habits, your sense of well-being, and much more. Indeed, we are routinely, absolutely, blown away by the dramatic improvement in the health of our patients with diabetes who carefully practise healthy eating.

In this chapter, we look at the different types of diabetes and we explore how to manage them. Because diabetes is (as we look at in a moment) a condition characterized by high blood glucose, we look in detail at blood glucose, how high (and low) levels can make you feel, and how you can control your blood glucose through nutrition, exercise, and medication. For most people with diabetes, a combination of these therapies works best in achieving and maintaining both good blood glucose control and good health in general.

This chapter is an overview of key elements of diabetes. For detailed information on the material we cover here, we unabashedly refer you to another book that Ian co-wrote: Diabetes For Canadians For Dummies (Wiley).