The above diagram shows you what a healthy plate off food should look like if you have Type 2 Diabetes.
Fruit and vegetables
The largest half of the plate consists of fruits and vegetables. These foods are essential to our everyday living and should make up the largest portion of our diets. Because fruits do contain carbohydrate they should form and smaller part of your daily intake and vegetables should form the majority of your daily intake. Guidelines recommend that we should be eating at least 5 fruit and or vegetables every day but most of these should come from vegetables so that excessive fruit intake doesn’t compromise glycaemic control.
Lean protein
If we take a look at the plate we can see that ¼ of the plate is made of protein containing foods such as meat, chicken, fish, eggs and vegetable sources of protein such as tofu and legumes. These proteins should be lean and should be prepared with minimal added fats.
Healthy Carbohydrate
The last ¼ of the plate is made up of carbohydrate containing foods such as rice, pasta, sweet potatoes and couscous. These foods should ideally be healthy carbohydrates that are high in fibre.
The healthy food plate helps to give us a visual representation of what a healthy plate of food should look like as well as what sort of proportion those foods should be eaten in.
Need help?
If you feel like you would like to expand your nutrition knowledge and would like even more information relating to nutrition for people with diabetes then please email us at support@diabetes-advantage or sign up to our email list.
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