A healthy diet is critical for your diabetes. The food that you eat each day can have a considerable impact on how you feel and how well you control your diabetes.
In general, you should eat food to control diabetes and blood sugar levels, with other health benefits such as lowering blood pressure and cholesterol. Eating such foods are the best ways to keep your diabetes under control and lead the healthiest life possible.
In my opinion, avocados are an excellent choice for you because they offer all these benefits and help you manage your diabetes and improve your overall well-being.
How do avocados affect your blood sugar levels?
Blood sugar control is a serious issue. Your doctor or your dietitian may advise you to choose foods that are lower in carbohydrates and sugar. They may also recommend foods that help control blood sugar spikes. An avocado meets both of these requirements.
An average medium avocado has around 17 grams of carbohydrates. For comparison, an apple has 25 grams of carbs, and a banana has 27.
A 1-ounce serving or about one-fifth of an avocado contains only 3 grams of carbohydrates and less than 1 gram of sugar. With so few carbs, you won’t need to worry about an avocado raising your blood sugar levels.
Pairing an avocado with other foods may also help in reducing blood sugar spikes. It’s fat, and fiber content takes much longer time to digest and also slows the absorption of other carbohydrates in the process.
How many avocados can you eat in a day?
Before making any significant changes to your diet, you must first talk to your doctor or your dietitian. One of the most important things to discuss with them is your total calorie intake.
A whole medium sized avocado contains 250-300 calories, but a 1-ounce serving has only 50 calories. If you are monitoring your calories, you can add avocado to your diet as well. This addition can be done by switching a serving of avocado for something else with a similar amount of calories like cheese or mayonnaise.
According to the American Diabetes Association, you should pay attention to the type of fat you are eating rather than its amount. They also recommend avocado as a healthy source of monounsaturated fats. Monounsaturated fats are a healthy alternative to the trans fats and refined polyunsaturated fats that you often find in most processed foods.
Do you know potassium, magnesium, and fiber are in avocados?
Avocados are also an excellent source of mineral potassium, without the relatively high carbohydrates of some other potassium-rich foods like bananas and hence makes them an especially good addition to your diabetic diet.
Potassium is essential for maintaining a healthy cardiovascular system and normalizing blood pressure, both highly significant for diabetes. Your pancreas needs potassium-rich foods to operate at its best, and the mineral is also heavily involved in your body’s insulin function.
Along with potassium, magnesium is another important mineral for you to get in sufficient amount. A lack of magnesium is also recognized as a risk factor for heart disease and high blood pressure.
Avocados are also an excellent source of dietary fiber that helps to stabilize your blood sugar levels.
I eat daily half of a fresh avocado with lunch to maintain my blood sugar levels. I eat it with salad in which I also add olive oil and little amount of spice for taste. If you are trying it for the first time, you will find its taste a bit different, but later you would love it.
For me, the best part of eating avocado is it increases my satiety and reduces my needs to snack for up to 4 hours after my meal.
I hope this post has provided some good reasons to eat avocados to control your diabetes.
3 Comments
Hi Mohammad, thank you for such a great post.
I love avocados and have long known about their health benefits and never worry about things like the fat in them because I know it is good fat.
I got into them some time ago when I was first diagnosed with T2 diabetes and was reading and learning about GI diets and took to them instantly, though of course they were not listed in the GI tables.
Anyway thanks again and best wishes.
H,
Actually my question won’t be about diabetics. During sleep, I really would love to control my blood sugar spikes for my bodybuilding routine. Do you think I should eat cinnamon or avocados?
You can take either cinnamon or avocado because both of them are helpful in lowering blood sugar levels, reducing heart disease risk factors and have awesome health benefits but you should not eat them together in high quantity as it will drastically reduce your blood sugar levels. You can eat an avocado with a small pinch of cinnamon powder. Use Ceylon Cinnamon as it is more refined and has a slightly sweeter flavor. Hope I gave you a satisfied reply. Best Regards.