Diet and diabetes: carbohydrate portions

June 23, 7:47 AMDiabetes ExaminerRobert Scheinman

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Eat in moderation

Taking control of your diabetes is the order of the day and the best way to begin is to start working on what you eat. Modifying your diet is exceptionally hard. How many of your social encounters involve food? Probably a lot – especially family gatherings. In addition, there is the training we all received as children to clean our plate. Finally, after a stressful day, nothing soothes like comfort food. So how should you start?

Since carbohydrates are the big problem we’ll start by focusing just on these foods. When we say carbohydrates we mean things like cereals, breads, pastas, rice, dairy, and fruit. Rule number 1: You get approximately 12 portions per day (that doesn’t sound so bad). Rule number 2: You have to spread out the intake of those portions throughout the day. Dr. Wesley Nuffer at the University of Colorado Denver School of Pharmacy puts it this way. “Consider a grocery checkout clerk. Imagine if they had 20 people lined up to get their groceries checked and bagged all at once. It would be a mess. If those people showed up over the course of an hour, the clerk would have no trouble processing everyone. In the same way, if you eat a huge portion of carbohydrates all at once, your body can’t handle it. Your blood sugar spikes and all you want to do is take a nap.”

So what constitutes one portion of carbohydrates? Since few of us want to deal with a food scale, let’s use some imagery. Dr. Nuffer explains: “For cereal use your fist as the size of one portion. For pasta and rice, use a computer mouse. For fruit it is the size of a baseball. For bread it is one slice. For juice, fill a glass with 6 ounces of water using a measuring cup. That is your volume for 1 portion.”

“In addition to carbohydrates, you get to eat protein,” he continued. “For each meal consider a deck of playing cards. Think about the size of that deck. That is the volume of your meat (or protein) portion. The good news is that the vegetable amount can be unlimited.”

Now that you know what you can eat, the next question is how to succeed in limiting yourself to that amount as well as limiting the amount of fat in your diet. That will be covered in a subsequent article. Bon appetite.

This article was written in close collaboration with Dr. Wesley Nuffer, Pharm.D, CDE. Wes is the Assistant Director for Experiential Programs at the University of Colorado Denver School of Pharmacy.  His primary responsibility is setting up diabetes clinics in pharmacies throughout Colorado for 4th year PharmD students.