I ran across a group of online diabetics who insist that their doctors tell them to eat a high-carb diet. People have a tendency to hear exactly what they want, so I don’t believe their protestations of how their doctors tell them to stuff their faces with bananas and cereal. Even small children know that diabetics can’t eat carbs, so pretending that this is a huge revelation is strange.
My diabetic breakfast is pictured below:
Certain complex carbs can be beneficial, though still limited. I wonder if they’re conflating simple carbs with complex carbs.
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I am not surprised that this exists.
My spouse works in healthcare. At a previous clinic they dealt with lots of people with histories of limited or inconsistent access to healthcare (mostly people who had not had steady jobs with insurance benefits) and they regularly had patients who had been diagnosed with diabetes elsewhere who didn’t believe their previous doctors. Things like “Doctors keep telling me I have diabetes, but …” followed by some crazy explanation for why they couldn’t really be diabetic. They also couldn’t get lots of patients to show up for fasting blood labs because they didn’t believe that eating before the blood draw really made a difference. It is wild what people will believe about healthcare.
We have a culture where every personal quality that is actively encouraged makes it impossible to manage a chronic disease like diabetes. Self-indulgence, excessive emotionality, self-pity, short-term thinking, a lifelong immaturity- all of this is preventing people from doing what they need to keep it in check. All these qualities make us great shoppers but terrible at monitoring our health.
I agree, a lot of Americans seem to think that if a professional tells them to stop doing something it’s because they’re killjoys who want to stop your fun, not because it’s a serious health concern. Many Americans will not give up junk food, being sedentary, and refuse to exercise or lose weight since doctors are supposedly liberals and hate being told what to do, Covid didn’t help things either.
I don’t eat junk food and I get my exercise running to catch the bus to and from work, my cardio, but I do drink a lot of alcohol. I fess up to my drinking, I’m not going to get mad if a doctor told me to stop drinking because they’re a healthcare professional and they saw something abnormal. I grew up with a mother who’s a teetotaler who thinks alcohol is evil and can’t tell the difference between Two-Buck Chuck and good whiskey, it’s a sort of covert rebellion since she thinks all alcohol is evil
American Diabetes Association is currently recommending about a quarter of your plate be carbohydrates, using their “plate” method. 1/4 protein, 1/2 non-starchy vegetables.
I think this may be a reduction from previous recommendations. They are notorious for recommending comparatively high-carb diets in the past. I want to say it was something like 60% of calories from carbohydrates.
Current advice:
https://diabetes.org/food-nutrition/understanding-carbs
Seriously, though, my mom had type 2 diabetes in the 1990s. The official nutrition advice was deadly. It’s backed off a little bit, but I did a quick look around just now, and there are definitely still recommendations out there that emphasis carbs are a central part of a healthy diet w/ diabetes. Alas.
This. Exactly.
I have a whole family full of diabetics. The ones who are getting all the diabetic complications are the ones scrupulously following their doctors’ orders.
The ones who are doing OK, staying healthy, not getting complications: are the ones who don’t trust doctors and “do their own research” (which the doc hates), and universally follow some version of keto, or eat-to-your-meter, and try to minimize dependence on insulin.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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