Times they are a changing!

in feb i was
hba1c 106
hdl 0.9
ldl 3.6
tri 2.6

Gosh your hba1c reading is great....well done....

Cheers andy.

Those figures are an amazing change.

My figures are similar to your Feb readings for HDL and LDL, I've always had high cholesterol, but only recently tried to target them, after I've got the bs where I want it.
So you're where I'm aiming to be.

I take statins Douglas.....trying to get numbers down, have a full year review in December.....
It's my blood sugars that I have been working on....
Amazing what the body does, I never thought I would have high cholestrol......

thankyou hehe, a great opportunity to show off lol

Show off lots Andy, you deserve the feel good factor

Kat100 said:

I take statins Douglas.....trying to get numbers down, have a full year review in December.....
It's my blood sugars that I have been working on....
Amazing what the body does, I never thought I would have high cholestrol......

Click to expand...

My cholesterol has always been high, it's actually the lowest it's ever been now, I'm on statins too, but I'm going to go for the magic 60/60/60 next, so above 1.6 HDL, below 1.6 LDL, below 0.7 triglycerides.

Go for it Douglas....good luck....none of this is easy

I like your diet, but I hope you eat PLENTY of vegetables. With this kind of diet you need a lot vitamins. I would change sunflower oil for rice or grape seed oil. These two are the best oils for cooking. Olive oil is very good for salads.
I would also add some diary, maybe not every day for example 3x/week low lat cottage cheese or low fat yogurt.

This diet is good to lose weight and improve your lipid profile. However, as you know, you cannot be on this diet for a long time. You will need to add wholegrain bread. The best one is rye bread. For dinner quinoa is very good and healthy carb. To be honest, it tastes like carb, but it has plenty of protein and some polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Good luck!

Hania, the whole point of diabetics going on these diets is to avoid eating things that raise their glucose levels. Bread, no matter what the GI of it is, raises people's glucose levels. Therefore, many diabetics are intolerant to it. No-one "needs" to eat bread, or indeed any carbohydrate at all as you know full well that the body is prefectly capable of createing it by itself. Quinoa is higher in carbs than bread, per 100g.

Dietitians advising people to eat carbs, when they don't need to, is the very reason why many diabetics find it difficult to control their levels.

Regarding vegetables, yes, you are correct and many of us on here adopt a low carb, high veg diet, where we replace the carbohydrate portion with extra vegetables.

People can happily live on low carb diets long term. There was a recent study that showed around half of people sticking to a low carb diet for over 4 years, with excellent results for their HbA1c. I've completed around a year and a half on a low carb diet, my levels have never been better and I intend to stay on it until there's a cure for Type 1. There are many people on here that have stuck to a low carb diets for many years.

Hania_dietitian said:

I like your diet, but I hope you eat PLENTY of vegetables. With this kind of diet you need a lot vitamins. I would change sunflower oil for rice or grape seed oil. These two are the best oils for cooking. Olive oil is very good for salads.
I would also add some diary, maybe not every day for example 3x/week low lat cottage cheese or low fat yogurt.

This diet is good to lose weight and improve your lipid profile. However, as you know, you cannot be on this diet for a long time. You will need to add wholegrain bread. The best one is rye bread. For dinner quinoa is very good and healthy carb. To be honest, it tastes like carb, but it has plenty of protein and some polyunsaturated fatty acids.

Good luck!

Click to expand...

I eat a lot of veg at the moment, and try for a good mix, kale, cabbage, beans, sugar snap, onions, peppers, to name a few. I tend to avoid ones that grow underground though.
"A good mix of colour"

I do eat cottage cheese, and muller lite yoghurt occasionally.
Ryvita or rye bread, usually homemade feature as well.

I'll give the rice oil a go, and try the quinoa, thanks for you advice.

hmmm it frightens me that your name suggests you are a dietician it gives weight to your opinion, which when telling people to eat bread is counter productive, im more than happy to hear everyones opinion (to eat bread or not) but with your name it maybe casts doubt in peoples minds that are on the brink of trying low carb, its hard for many including me to get past the dread of ignoring medical advice which your name makes your advice, this is just my opinion sorry to sound so negative

sorry if this makes no sense im on my mobile and my posts are harder to review


Sent from the Diabetes Forum App

SamJB said:

Hania, the whole point of diabetics going on these diets is to avoid eating things that raise their glucose levels. Bread, no matter what the GI of it is, raises people's glucose levels. Therefore, many diabetics are intolerant to it. No-one "needs" to eat bread, or indeed any carbohydrate at all as you know full well that the body is prefectly capable of createing it by itself. Quinoa is higher in carbs than bread, per 100g.

Dietitians advising people to eat carbs, when they don't need to, is the very reason why many diabetics find it difficult to control their levels.

Regarding vegetables, yes, you are correct and many of us on here adopt a low carb, high veg diet, where we replace the carbohydrate portion with extra vegetables.

People can happily live on low carb diets long term. There was a recent study that showed around half of people sticking to a low carb diet for over 4 years, with excellent results for their HbA1c. I've completed around a year and a half on a low carb diet, my levels have never been better and I intend to stay on it until there's a cure for Type 1. There are many people on here that have stuck to a low carb diets for many years.

Click to expand...

I'm on a diet for several reasons, only one of which is to control my bs.

I want to lose weight.
I want to maintain my weight when I have lost it
I want to correct my cholesterol levels to where I would prefer them to be, then keep them there.
I want to maintain my blood pressure, as it's good now, and I want to keep it there.

To aid that, I know which foods I can tolerate.
I know which carbs I can eat, and will not increase my bs beyond an acceptable range.
Even non diabetics experience some increase when eating carbs.
Vegeatables are carbs, and even with them I choose ones I digest well.
At the end of the day, bread is a processed vegetable, it's the amount of processing I have found I can tolerate that lets me have a small amount of rye bread, or burgen, to create a low GL meal.

So I'm good with knowing about carbs and eating them, my HbA1c is 5.4, and is still creeping down.

My other difficulty is low carb diets are not all the same, you mentions low carb, but replace carbs with vegetables, what about low carb high protein, low carb high fat, low carb healthy fat, low carb, saturated fat?
Are they all equally as good for you?
I think that is my dilemma, and no study has a specific diet itemised on it, so many studies are mis quoted, or quoted for entirely different diets to the ones they may have been the subject of.

There's plenty of evidence that the cholesterol level a person has doesn't relate directly to incidence of coronary artery disease. People with low cholesterol have heart attacks too.
In addition, what a lot of writers seem to forget is that we digest our food. we break it down to its components. Thus It's not like pouring fats down a drain and blocking it.
Hana

Andy12345 said:

hmmm it frightens me that your name suggests you are a dietician it gives weight to your opinion, which when telling people to eat bread is counter productive, im more than happy to hear everyones opinion (to eat bread or not) but with your name it maybe casts doubt in peoples minds that are on the brink of trying low carb, its hard for many including me to get past the dread of ignoring medical advice which your name makes your advice, this is just my opinion sorry to sound so negative

sorry if this makes no sense im on my mobile and my posts are harder to review


Sent from the Diabetes Forum App

Click to expand...

I tolerate some bread, and to be fair, rye and wholegrain are probably the two best options as well.
There are quite a few threads running on the results of eating these, some success, some failures.
I normally start the day off with a couple of ryvita, I get on ok with them, and it's got to be healthier than the 4 slices of white toast I used to have.

Douglas, I wasn't responding to the diet that you are on, you can eat what ever you want and you are clearly controlling your diabetes very well. I was responding to the assertion by Hania that you "need" to eat carbs and that low carb diets are unsustainable.

Regarding the different types of low carb diets, yes there are many different ones. I follow the one that is most convenient and gives me the best results in terms of, principally, my HbA1c and secondary, my lipid and other safety metrics. I go for low fat where I can, only go for "good" fats and avoid any starchy carbs, replacing them with veg. Yes there are carbs in veg, but much less than a bowl of pasta, a few spuds, a portion of rice etc.

There has been a lack of direction from dietitians on this matter, which is probably why there is no professionally-accepted low carb diet for diabetics. One would hope that they would be able to come up a safe low carb diet (I think mine is pretty safe - salad or soup for lunch and extra veg with dinner), but unfortunately they don't see the obvious; than diabetics are sensitive to carbs and that reduced carbohydrate diets are effective at controlling diabetes.

Hania_dietitian said:

You will need to add wholegrain bread. The best one is rye bread.

Click to expand...

Rye bread in Poland is different from rye bread in the UK Hania. You can't just go to a bakers and get a real wholegrain loaf. I investigated a 'Bavarian Rye Loaf' baked by a local baker as it looked nothing like anything I had ever seen in Baviaria. It looked just like an elongated english brown loaf. It transpired that it had lots of white flour, corn flour and soya flour in it with the baker explaining that it wouldn't rise otherwise. I know of maybe 6 bakers I would trust in the north of England and the supermarket loaves are a joke. Waitrose for example sell a wholemeal loaf which only has 6% wholegrain flour in it. Adding sugar to get a quick rise is common. Everything is about speed whereas real bread takes time. Our flours are pulverised to a fine dust by high speed steel rollers which run hot and kill off the germ and our loaves are injected with steam which is why they grow mold rather than go stale. Yes, your advice is sound but it is not easy in the UK. The advice is still, if you want authentic wholegrain bread, bake your own. Even then, you have to source the flour correctly.

I didn't think it was ethical for a dietitian to give advice on a one to one on the internet?
How can you tell someone what they have to do if you are not privy to their medical history? Do you know of any allergies, other medical conditions etc...?

SamJB said:

Quinoa is higher in carbs than bread, per 100g.

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It's the composition of those carbs that is important. Quinoa has high amounts of oligosaccharides which we break down by bacteria rather than enzymes and trisaccharides like Raffinose. Comparing the starch elements, quinoa contains less amylose than most grains. Amylose is quickly digested by humans as production of the required enzyme, amylase is stimulated by chewing and is present in saliva. Absorbtion starts in the mouth and is more or less completed by the time it is in the stomach. You can always tell if a food has a lot of amylose as it appears to get sweeter the longer you chew it. The amylase in your mouth is converting it to sugar right away.

There is a very full account of the carbohydrate profile of qunioa here:

http://tinyurl.com/q77owjh

and it provides some details of how the various factors are influenced by industrial processes. It serves as a good template for understanding the differences between foods with otherwise apparantly similar amounts of carbohydrate.

Andy12345 said:

im more than happy to hear everyones opinion (to eat bread or not)

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It is important not to omit details. When Christ fed the multitude, the five loaves of bread and two fish, it is often forgotten that it was Barley Bread, nothing like your supermarket, superwhite, thick cut toastie.