Vegetarian diabetics?

[Spiral]

Sorry to start off by being really pedantic here, but I know that other vegetarians will understand. By vegetarian I mean people who don't eat any animal flesh (fish and shellfish are animal products)or slaughterhouse products like gelatine secreted away in so many products. If you eat those things you are not a vegetarian. I mean lacto-ovo vegetarians (like me) or vegans, or anybody who reads all of the labels and asks questions I the supermarket and restraunts to make sure there are no slaughterhouse or unacceptable other animal based products in what you eat.

Are there others out there? I went veggie in 1985, 24 years ago, and I have not knowingly eaten animal products since August 1985. On the occasions I have, it has usually been when I have been charged a large sum of money for a meal by people who think a fish is a vegetable :evil: (and apparently it's only vegans who don't eat fish... really :shock: ) or who didn't see that bit of bacon hiding under the cheese :?

I have heard wildly varying opinions of a veggie diet in managing diabetes. Some say that a veggie diet helps to manage diabetes - the Diabetes UK information sounds very positive about veggie diets. But some have said that there may be too many carbs in it, although I don't know if they are speaking from personal experience and understanding.

The most negative things were from a born-again evangelical meat eater (on another health related site I posted on), who told me that my diabetes (and all my other ills) are because I don't eat meat, as opposed to my bum genes, high levels of stress, poor diet (even vegetarians can eat badly :roll, lack of exercise and other very poor lifestlye choices.

I'm cleaning up my dietary act - more fresh and raw, less cerial based carbs, low GI - and some supplements and getting regular exercise - I have just bought an exercise bike as I don't have time for the gym and I am using it most days. I have lost weight and my fasting blood glucose is down from 8.7 at the end of January to 6.9 in mid-April.

I'm trying to make these changes within what I already eat, to see how far I can go and then review it if that isn't working. To be honest, the thought of ever eating meat again turns my stomach.

How does being vegetarian (please refer to my definition above) work for you? Can you get what you need nutritionally while managing to avoid those awful spikes in blood sugars?

 

[fergus]

Hi Spiral,

I'm full of admiration for your efforts to maintain your veggie principles and make them work while cutting down on the carbs. I think it's certainly do-able, although you'll always need to work harder at it than the omnivores.
I followed exactly the same principles for 16 years, but I'm afraid I jacked it in a few years ago as I tried to cut back on the carbs and found the list of banned foods just getting longer and longer.
I think I know a bit more about it now than I did then and I'm sure it could be done, as long as you take care of the B vitamins of course.
How do you make sure of good quality proteins, by the way?
Sorry, I haven't helped at all, but I just wanted to say I admire your moral stance.

All the best,

fergus

 

[Spiral]

Protien - seeds, nuts, pulses, tofu, eggs, cheese

Thanks for the encouragement, Fergus. I know this is going to be hard work and I'm trying to look on my diagnosis as an opportunity (and if I say that often enough it will become true).

I am the ultimate last minute queen and need deadlines and targets to work really well. I'm hoping the BG targets (and all the other jargon I'm learning very quickly) will give me the motivation I need to stay on track, after all, I will be doing this for the rest of my life. I am 46 and from a very long lived family - even the side with the diabetes genes.

I see from your profile that you are T1. I am T2 and I think I am in the earlier stages of the illness, as I was merely insulin resistant 2-3 years ago :roll: and the numbers given to me by my GP at the time of diagnosis are nowehere near as high as some of the others I have read on here. I want to believe this will make a difference to how my body will react to what I'm doing to get my BG down and avoid spikes, hopefully making it a bit easier. But I guess the real proof will be what happens to my post meal tests when I get my meter.

I'm wondering how long I need to give myself to establish whether or not this is working. Initially my GP agreed to give me 3 months to try and loose weight and bring my numbers under control, he is pleased with the progress i have made so far and I will be reviewing this with him at the beginning of June, when I will be having more bloodwork done. But if it isn't working well enough, I have no idea what I will do, but medication will probably figure. I am currently diet and exercise.

I have looked long and hard at low carb, low GI and GL and Mediterranean diets. I think the principles of glycaemic index and glyceamic load are very helpful (the science makes sense to me) and the vegetables I eat fit in with this approach, but I do take on board what the patient experts say about diabetics not being normal, so don't have the normal post meal response to glucose. Although the patient experts are very positive about what happens by examining the evidence of regular blood tests and bringing BG under tight control. I have a science background, so need to make sense of the biology and chemistry and physics of all of this and then apply it to my own particular diabetic body. I

tend to be pragmatic, if it works for me I will use it. I need to significanly reduce carbs, aim for lower GL, reduce fats etc etc and still be able to sit dow and eat the same food as my rapidly growing 12-year-old who has completely different dietary needs. I have looked a number of changes and I have bought different grains - I have quinoa and barley and rye in the cupboard now and given away my white flour. But there is so much conflicting advice about how to do this and downright prejudice towards vegetarians.

 

[Thirsty]

Spiral, good luck with your plan and keep us posted. Whilst I do eat meat and fish, I've found myself preparing more vegetarian meals lately, simply because they're inexpensive. The main problem I've found is that so many veggie recipes contain fairly high carb ingredients such as rice, pasta and potatoes.

Like Fergus, I can't help feeling that adding more restrictions to an already restricted diet would soon become extremely monotonous but, perhaps you can prove us wrong!

 

[Spiral]

Thirsty, in my experience the people who say they tried being vegetarian and failed or went back to meat because they couldn't find enough variety (both after relatively short periods of time) because didn't have a particularly imaginitive or creative approach to food. You have to think beyond my mum's approach (she likes to be able to see the different piles of vegetables and meat on her plate, covered by gravy) which i think of this as the traditional English approach (basically meat and 2 veg) or loads of pasta or rice. I don't think that this approach to food works for vegetraians.

In my experience succesful vegetarians have a much more cosmopolitan approach and have a whole world of cuisine to choose from. I have cooked for people who didn't know I was a veggie and only after the meal reailsed there was no meat in it. I am fortunate in having a very good local market where I can get the more "exotic" things easily. I like to mix things up and use lots of spices and herbs, fresh and raw is something I have returned to over the last couple of months.

I have loads of veggie cookbooks after 25 years and have recently added a couple of veggie low GI and low carb books to my collection and have considered what I can do to make my current staple recipies diabetic friendly and adpat other things to be lower carb. So far these are very simple changes eg more broccoli, dolcalette and pine nuts and considerably less of the pasta penne for me. I have adapted some of the things I cook to be a lot to be lower carb and also catered for my rapidly growing (non-veggie) son's needs by putting more of the carb rich stuff on his plate. But the thing with diabetes is that you have to change the way you eat anyway - rather like succesful vegetarinanism.

I also use things like buckwheat, quinoa and higher protien grains - this isn't new for me, I have been using them for years.

 

[Dennis]

Hi Spiral,

Also not a vegetarian but have you seen these recipes? Quite a few are suitable for diabetes and all look very tasty.

http://www.bbcgoodfood.com/content/reci ... ian/vegan/

 

[Spiral]

I have been thinking about the replies to this thread all day. I feel the need to clarify a couple of things.

While I went veggie in 1985 (aged 23) for moral reasons, I actually found I'd been eating less and less meat since I left home aged 19. One day I realised I'd had no meat at all for about 2-3 weeks, so I immediatly went out and bought the ingredients of a bolognaise sauce and eventually realised how much better I'd felt before eating it.

I don't feel deprived or restricted by being vegetarian. I'm interested in why Fergus and Thirsty think that my diet would be increasingly restricted.

Looking at some of the lists of food in good nutritional guidelines, I have a very good diet. Obviously not that good for me to be overweight (or, as BMI chart told me a couple of days ago clinically obese :? ) but I have eaten lots of high carb junk over the last few years due to stress and general lack of time to cook properly. My diet is probably better now than it has been for years and my BG is falling, as are the lbs/kilos

I have realised that I bought in to all those toxic myths about slow burning carbohydrates being good for me especially as they were recommended for diabetics :shock:

Reducing the carb count of my food is no big deal, except on the days I when I comfort eat :? :cry:

Fergus - why will I need to work harder at it than a meat eater?

Thirsty - How often are you cooking veggie and how have the veggie meals you have made affected your blood sugar readings?

Are there any diabetic vegetarians (please refer to definition in the first post) or vegans out there and do you feel restricted?

 

[hermit104]

Are there any diabetic vegetarians (please refer to definition in the first post) or vegans out there and do you feel restricted?

Yes, me! A proper vegetarian for many years with diabetes since 2000. Glucose levels got higher and higher on recommended high carb diet and all tablets prescribed had awful side effects. In despair stopped all tablets and started to lowcarb in March 2008 - results very dramatic including HBA1c down from 12.7% to 7.2% in In two months.
I don't find my diet restricted at all and a personal trainer at my gym has just analysed a food diary for me and given it the thumbs up nutritionally. I do miss stuffing my face on bread & rice but hey-ho.
I normally lurk on sites like this to help me reinforce my diet choices since there is a huge amount of pressure from the medical profession and in the media to follow a "healthy" high carb diet.

Rona

 

[fergus]

Hi Spiral,

I'm sorry if I came across as sceptical about a low-carb veggie diet, I didn't intend to give that impression.
My own experience was similar to yours in some ways, my decision to become vegetarian was primarily a moral one, not a health driven one. As a very poor student it was almost inevitable that my diet veered towards cheap bulky starches and that ultimately became habit forming. It was also very restrictive if I'm being honest, particularly when eating out and the dreaded 'veggie dish of the day' reared its tired head. Had I tried to reduce my starch intake at that time I really don't know what I would have eaten! My concern before I began eating meat and fish again was that the restrictions I had grown accustomed to would be compounded by others which might make the diet very difficult to adhere to.
This isn't to say that it's not very do-able if you approach it armed with the time, money and imagination I lacked! That's why I said you might need to work a little harder at it than an omnivore, for whom high quality amino acids and B vitamins are a little easier to come by. But in the end, we all live with dietary restrictions in some form and the goal for many of us is to find a way of eating that can best accommodate all our physical and moral needs.

Best wishes,

fergus

 

[Thirsty]

Thirsty - How often are you cooking veggie and how have the veggie meals you have made affected your blood sugar readings?

Difficult question to answer. I have to survive on a limited budget and tend to buy whatever happens to be particularly cheap when I'm shopping, so much of the food I prepare tends to be an improvised version of one recipe or another; it could contain fish, meat or poultry or pass your criteria for vegetarian dishes and contain none at all. It's all tasty, though!

As I said, I've found that starchy foods like potatoes, rice and pasta send my BG levels skywards, as do most fruits and some dairy products. You'll have to find out for yourself which foods you can tolerate, as my diet wouldn't suit all diabetics.

Again, best of luck to you and do keep us up to date.

 

[Trinkwasser]

This may help

http://www.dsolve.com/news-aamp-info-ot ... th-recipes

I went veggie long ago, partly for moral and partly for financial reasons. This led me to explore the wide range of vegetables on offer, but in retrospect my big mistake was basing my diet around all those Healthy Whole Grains.

Over the years I started adding back meat and especially fish, and I'm afraid my current diet simply wouldn't work without them. I still eat scads of different veggies and salads though.

 

[hanadr]

Hi
I'm just browsing and am not a veggie, but I am a keen cook and I wondered if Hindu cooking might have some useful things to add. Many hindus are vegetarian, but by no-means all.

 

[Spiral]

Thanks for the responses, while I'm always keen to experiment with recipies, and I have followed the links given here, I'm not actually looking for recipies. I want to talk about how being vegetarian affects managing diabetes, especially Type 2.

Hello hermit104/Rona how lovely to meet another proper vegetarian What impressive results you got. I'm a bit vague at the moment about my A1c, I think it was 7.7% when it was done a couple of months ago, it will be repeated in early June, but I was being bombarded with so many results and so much information I kind of got a bit bewildered by it all :roll:

I am reassured to see that you don't feel at all restricted, I'm missing toast (nice thick farmhouse sliced white, evenly toasted to a golden brown, served hot with butter and Marmite, even though I didn't eat white bread all that often) but I am sure I will learn to live without it and perhaps indulge once in a while once I'm under proper control.

I have loads of questions for you, I hope that you can answer them here, but happy to chat with private messages too . You said that it was low carb that achieved these results. Did this involve major diet changes for you or was it simply reducing and removing the bread and rice? Have you been able to maintain this progress? What is the difference in your diet now and before your diagnosis? Have you met with scepticism by trying to control things on this diet? Do you do blood tetsts and if so how often and do you/did you keep a food diary?

Fergus, I can understand why you took the steps you did (I'm assuming that is your story on the other linked site). What kind of food did you eat when you were veggie? My brother tried veggie for a while and went back to meat, not helped by him not being a fan of vegetables :shock: or cheese. You say you veered towards the cheap bulky starches I have been there too, when I simply haven't had time to cook or even think about it... and all that publicity for healthy slow buring compex carbs.

I know what you mean when you talk about lack of imagination. I have always been "adventurous" with food so I guess I inherited something other than the diabetic genes from my dad I like to feel different textures and see different colours and smells and tastes. I have some family staple meals that have been very easy to adapt to considerably lower carb. But don't get me started on the veggie dish of the day :| :shock: :evil:

As far as finding the protein goes, I have found the words of The Food Doctor very helpful - where is the protien? - as well as some of his advice on portion size and the time of day you eat things.

Thirsty's comments about so many veggie options being so high carb are true :? But I find that is often because the chef hasn't got a clue about vegetarian cooking :roll: and so many people have actually forgotten how to cook or never actually learned in the first place. Somewhere I worked several years ago had a great chef in the staff canteen who was married to a vegetarian... the food was always interesting ie it was not cheese and tomato or quorn based. You could see a huge difference in the veggie food when he left.

There are a couple of comments about cost on this thread. Why do people think veggie food is more expensive?

 

[Thirsty]

Hi
I'm just browsing and am not a veggie, but I am a keen cook and I wondered if Hindu cooking might have some useful things to add. Many hindus are vegetarian, but by no-means all.

hanadr, I used to live with an Indian girl from the Gujarat area where the cuisine is mostly vegetarian. While it's delicious, much of it contains high carb ingredients and probably wouldn't suit you. They're also particularly fond of sugar, (jaggery is commonly used in many dishes), so a good deal of adaptation would be required for most recipes.

 

[increasingly cynical]

Hi,

Macro-biotic cooking also has a lot of healthy veggie options. I'm about to post another query 'tho, because as a very long term strict vegetarian, I am finding that the difficulty is findign healthy 'snacks' which don't get boring very quickly - any ideas?

 

[Spiral]

Hi,

Macro-biotic cooking also has a lot of healthy veggie options. I'm about to post another query 'tho, because as a very long term strict vegetarian, I am finding that the difficulty is findign healthy 'snacks' which don't get boring very quickly - any ideas?

Do you have any veggie recipe books? There are a couple of low carb and low GI books by Rose Elliot that I have just acquired quite cheaply at eBay and Amazon. Lots of ideas in there.

I'm very pleased to see that the veggie cooked breakfast with sausages etc is low carb

 

[fergus]

I've just shifted this thread across to the Discussions forum for Spiral to see if we can catch the eye of any veggies out there who might have missed it in the Food area.
I'll shift it back later on.

fergus

 

[Spiral]

Thanks, Fergus.

Any more "proper" vegetarians out there? How do you manage your diabetes?

 

[RichardS]

Yes, I have been a vegetarian for 20 odd years and diagnosed with T2 for 6. I manage on what I call a "sensible balanced" diet and metformin. I'd never heard of low carbing until I found this place 2 weeks ago.
My last A1c was 6.1 - current 14 day average BG 5.9
Regards

Richard

 

[theziggy]

I'm a vegetarian of almost 30 years. Diagnosed with type 2 just over a year ago. Was given the usual 'eat plenty of carbs etc', was going to try low carb but thought it might be too difficult, found out a bit about Low GI/GL and thought that might be more do-able. Have been tweaking my diet to make it more GI and have been walking between 3 to 6 miles roughly 5 days a week. My last HbA1C was 5.7 so I must be doing something right.

I find a lot of recipes for vegetarians a) contain a lot of hard to get ingredients or ingredients that it's not worth buying as you'll never use the rest of them b) things I don't like c) recipes which, because the other people in my family aren't vegetarians are impossible to make in tandem with their foods.

I have quite a few recipe books and hardly ever use them (for reasons stated above). I became vegetarian for moral reasons and just to see if I could do it.

I don't know how much the tweaked low GI diet and the exercise contribute, I guess I could stop exercising and see how that effects my blood sugars. I know that in the book Type Two Diabetes - the first year, the author does not put any emphasis on exercise.

I found that a lot of people, the practice nurse, the pharmacist etc. were surprised when my diabetes was diagnosed, partly because of the vegetarian thing but also because I was quite slim.

So good to meet other vegetarians here. I got a lot of info on GI from David Mendosa who is regarded as one of the world's foremost experts on GI (though he has gone low carb!) at www.mendosa.com

Cheers

Ziggy