Healthy Food

By Chinyere Okwuduche

Having the diabetics in our family can give us lots of stress when trying to cook a healthy food for them, and the diabetics need to eat healthy food in order not to increase the sugar level in the urine.Its not good to leave home hungry when you are diabetic, as this will increase your chance of eating foods that are not healthy for you. Try cooking your own food or eat food cooked by a family member to reduce the risk of you eating the wrongly cooked food.

These are the 10 cooking healthy tips:

Overcooking: When cooking for the diabetic, make sure you do not over cook the food. When the food is over cooked it looses most of its nutritional value.

Roasting: Make sure to roast their food, it helps in promoting the reduction of the sugar content in the urine. Plantain can be roasted either with your grill or your local roaster, the local roaster is preferable as its close to be natural.

Starchy food: Do not!! I mean never you try cooking some starchy food for the diabetic as this is one source of food that the sugar content is very high. Always cook food that are low or have no sugar content in it. Like plantain, beans, eggs etc.

Steaming: Steaming is another way of cooking healthy for the diabetics, especially when cooking vegetables, try as much as possible to steam your vegetable so that it will still retain its value. You can allow to steam for about 3 minutes.

Deep frying: The diabetic food do not need too much of frying, so when cooking for the diabetics, do not deep fry the food. You can just stir fry it for about 3 minutes so that it do not fry deeply.

Salt: Salty foods are not good for the diabetics, you can try to avoid adding salt to taste, just a little salt will do. You can make it up by adding other spices to taste like, dried crayfish, garlic, onions, etc. But do not add so much salt.

Stocks: Most of the stocks in the market, groceries and supermarkets today contains starch, and as I have stated earlier, starchy foods are not good for the diabetic. Most of these stocks; like fish stock, chicken stock, beef stocks and the rest of them contains lots of starch.

Oil: Oil is not too good for the diabetics, especially the palm oil, groundnut oil, corn oil. If you must use oil for cooking, then use Vegetable oil only. As this will minimize the risk of developing heart problem.

Meat: Red meat in general is not too good for the diabetics, try using lean meat, white meat; like chicken. But don ot fry or over cook them. Meats can also be dried with little salt for preservatives. Its good to always have something handy to eat which is either prepared by you or from a very good source.

Low fat: The diabetics do not need the so called 'hidden fat' or fats that are invisible. Its best when cooking for the diabetic that you reduce fat diary foods among the items. Its best when we use unrefined dietary fat like avocado, seeds, fish, soy, olives etc. Many canned foods in the grocery stores are refined so always stick to your unrefined foods.

Cooking healthy food for the diabetic does not require much, just watch what you cook, when you eat and how you eat them.Its Important too that you avoid sodas, both the sweetened ones as most of these sodas contains lots of sugar.And you will be grateful you did.