Getting diabetes diet right is one of the most difficult parts of having the disease. In recent years, expert consensus about the best food for diabetics to eat has shifted. Nowadays, the experts say, we can eat anything (or nearly anything), but a good diet makes all the difference to blood glucose control.
Diet remains a complex and vital part of diabetes management, and comprehensive guides are hard to come by, making the Diabetes Cook book for Dummies all the more useful as a diabetes diet aid.
The Diabetes Cook book for Dummies, featuring ‘110 delicious and diabetic-friendly recipes,’ is much more than simply a recipe book. Authored by a combined force of experienced professionals (a diabetes specialist, a GP, a registered dietitian and a chef), the book is divided into five parts. These include: Thriving with Diabetes, Healthy Recipes that Taste Great, Eating Away from Home and a series of ten-step guides entitled The Part of Tens, finalised with an information packed series of appendices.
The book is then sub-divided to encapsulate every aspect of a diabetic person’s daily diet. In great detail, the Diabetes Cook book for Dummies explains what diabetes is, how your diet and lifestyle affects diabetes, how to plan meals and eat what you like (within reason) and how to shop. The detail is what separates this book from others out there, and includes specifics such as eating Indian food, how to decipher a food label and how to safely drink alcohol.
From the second section onwards, the informative text is packed with mouth-watering, healthy recipes. However, rather than simply download the information, the Diabetes Cook book for Dummies explains and expands each type of meal and ingredient, including sections on breakfast, appetisers, soups, salad, vegetables, fish, snacks and much more. The recipes, usefully indexed at the start of the book , include favourites like chickpea salad and summer pudding, and some more unusual dishes such as mussels with pastis and barley pilaf.
Research indicates that more and more eating is done away from homen, at restaurants and hotels Fittingly, the third section of the book details how to understand and order from a variety of menus, as well as explaining barbeques and pack lunches. The part of tens includes further simple guides to keeping a food diary, lowering fat, knowing blood glucose, helping children with diabetic diet and much more. The final section of the book, the appendices, are packed with information about diabetes complications, vitamins, exchange lists, conversion tables and other recipe sources.
The Diabetes Cook book for Dummies is typical of the Wiley series, in that it includes an enormous amount of carefully chosen and well-presented information. The authors, as a combined team, have done an extremely good job in covering everything a diabetic (whether newly diagnosed or experienced) needs to know about their diet, as well as providing enough recipes to keep any diabetic cook busy in the kitchen.
