Healthy- Diabetes and Carbohydrates

Diabetes is often thought to be linked with eating too much sugar, which is a myth. This article will explain the link between carbohydrates and diabetes, and why being aware of your carbohydrate intake can be beneficial to your blood glucose level.

Diabetes is a condition where your insulin production or the way that your body uses insulin is impaired. In Type 1 diabetes, which commonly starts in childhood but can occur at any age, your body destroys its insulin-producing cells, so that you are left without any insulin and have to inject insulin at least daily (more commonly 4 times or more), or wear a continuous insulin infusion pump 24 hours a day, for the rest of your life.

In Type 2 diabetes, you develop what is known as insulin resistance, where you still produce insulin but it doesnt work effectively, so in order to have enough working insulin you need to produce much more than other people. It is difficult to sustain this high level of insulin production, so over time this declines as the cells start to get worn out, and that is when diabetes appears. If you are overweight, you are likely to have a higher degree of insulin resistance than someone who is slimmer, which is why you have a higher risk of developing Type 2 diabetes.

Insulin is a hormone, and is essential to help glucose (sugar) move out of your bloodstream and into all the cells in your body to provide energy. If you dont have enough insulin doing this job, the glucose stays in your bloodstream and your cells dont have enough energy.

Carbohydrate is the main food that you get energy from, and all types of carbohydrate are digested down into glucose to be able to make that energy available. This is why carbohydrate is linked to diabetes.

So what should you do in relation to the carbohydrate you eat? Well, it is different for Type 1 and Type 2 diabetes.

In Type 1 diabetes, the treatment aim is to replace insulin to copy what your body would naturally produce. So you need some long-acting insulin to use over 24 hours (or an insulin pump to provide a constant supply), plus additional quicker-acting insulin to match your meals. The most successful way of managing Type 1 diabetes is to be able to work out how much carbohydrate your food contains, and to be able to match the amount of quicker-acting insulin to that. So with Type 1 diabetes, you can eat any food you like as long as you match your insulin to it.

With Type 2 diabetes, you will probably still be producing some insulin of your own, at least in the early years of having the condition. But your insulin production will be a bit slow and sluggish, and you wont be able to suddenly produce large amounts of insulin to match your food. You may well have tablets to combat the insulin resistance and provide your body with support in using its available insulin effectively, or even be injecting insulin, but your insulin resistance will mean that you can still get high blood glucose levels after meals which take a long time to go back to normal.

So you can still eat what you want if you have Type 2 diabetes, but if you want to try and avoid too high a blood glucose level after meals, it is better to eat foods that contain carbohydrates that digest more slowly, so your body is more likely to be able to cope with the demand for insulin. So foods like potatoes, rice and cereals will release their sugar more slowly than sweets or sweet desserts.

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