Three major dietary taboos for patients with high blood sugar: replacing staple foods with meat and ignoring calories.

Dietary Recommendations for People with High Blood Sugar

Avoid Replacing Staple Foods with Meat: Some diabetic patients, fearing a spike in blood sugar, avoid staple foods or high-sugar foods, replacing them with meat. This is not advisable because:
If daily carbohydrate intake is less than 125 grams, it can lead to starvation ketosis.
Eating too much meat often results in weight gain and decreased insulin sensitivity, requiring increased insulin dosage.

Avoid Ignoring Calorie Intake:
As the saying goes, "It's hard to buy leanness in old age." The body's ability to metabolize glucose decreases with age, as does the ability of peripheral tissues to utilize glucose. Secondly, older adults tend to be less active, reducing their food needs. Thirdly, many older adults gain weight due to various reasons, contributing to the increase in elderly diabetic patients. Therefore, for elderly diabetic patients, appropriately limiting total calorie intake and reducing weight to reach or maintain a healthy weight is recommended. Calorie intake is a crucial factor for elderly diabetic patients.

Avoid excessive consumption of peanuts and sunflower seeds: Peanuts and sunflower seeds are among the most nutritious snacks. They can not only whiten skin and remove age spots, but also affect blood sugar levels.

However, peanuts and sunflower seeds are plant seeds rich in fatty acids, making them high-calorie, high-fat foods. Their calorie content is several times higher than the same weight of pork. Excessive consumption will definitely affect weight maintenance and blood lipid control, and will also indirectly affect blood sugar and blood pressure control.

Therefore, diabetic patients should not consume more than 10 peanuts (8 grams) or more than 50 sunflower seeds (20 grams) per day; otherwise, it will be detrimental to diabetes treatment. At the same time, because diabetic patients need to control their total daily calorie intake, the daily use of cooking oil should not exceed 3 tablespoons (30 grams). Furthermore, 18 peanuts are equivalent to 1 tablespoon of oil (about 10 grams), which can produce more than 90 kilocalories. Therefore, patients must control their consumption.