Home-cooked meals are one good strategy to use for managing your blood-sugar level. If you aren’t already Diabetic, they can at least delay — and perhaps even prevent — you from becoming Diabetic. If you are already diabetic, they can mitigate some of the bad effects of your Diabetes.
Large-scale American Heart Association (AHA) studies, recently presented at the AHA’s annual meeting in Orlando, Florida, United States, cited results suggesting that folks who eat eleven to fourteen home-cooked lunch and dinner meals every week have a thirteen percent smaller risk of developing Type II Diabetes than do similar folks who eat six or fewer such meals each week. These studies did not consider breakfast meals. But they included results from tracking 58,000 women in a study of nurse health, and results for 41,000 men in some cases over a period of as long as 36 years.
As of the beginning of the studies, none of the participants were known to have Diabetes, any form of cancer, or any cardiovascular ailments. Older health professionals, tracked for eight years, were found to have less weight gain because they ate predominantly home-cooked meals. Other studies have concluded that there has been a big increase in eating chain-restaurant fast-food meals in recent years among North Americans.
According to the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the percentage of meals eaten away from home by Americans rose from 26% in 1970 to 43% in 2012. The USDA apparently attributes this increase to more women working outside their homes, more family disposable income, and more fast-food restaurants opening up and advertising their food offerings effectively.
Alas, eating more fast-food-restaurant food not only costs people more money, but it also leads to more obesity, to higher blood-cholesterol levels, and to increased insulin resistance which in turn can lead to Type II Diabetes. A study performed at Queens College, City University of New York (CUNY), covering about 8300 American adults between 2005 and 2010, found that folks who ate out more than six times per week on the average had higher Body0Mass Index (BMI) values, lower levels of ‘good’ (HDL) blood cholesterol, and lower bloodstream levels of Vitamin C and Vitamin E, among other things. Other studies have found that eating out leads to taking in more calories, more fat, more sugar, and more sodium than does eating at home.
Some review: BMI is a rough-and-ready measure of bodily fitness, or alternatively of obesity. A person’s BMI is computed by dividing their weight in kilograms by the square of their height in meters. The same formula also works in English units, pounds and inches, except that the result needs to be multiplied by the conversion factor of 705 to get it into standard metric form. Conventional wisdom holds that a BMI of at most 25 is the healthiest, that a BMI of between 25 and 30 implies that the person is a bit overweight, and that a BMI greater than 30 implies obesity, with various increasingly unpleasant gradations onwards above 30.
A study by the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, based on data from the 2007–2010 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey of more than 9000 American adults, found that
- 8% of adults ate at home once a week or less, and averaged 2301 calories, 84 grams of fat, and 135 grams of sugar daily.
- 48% of adults ate at home six or seven times a week, and averaged 2164 calories, 81 grams of fat, and 119 grams of sugar daily.
It’s harder to manage your blood glucose level when you’re eating out, because restaurant portions are often larger, and because you usually have no handy way to accurately estimate their calorie, fat. and sugar content.
If you haven’t already been cooking at home very much, start small and work up. Try for healthful, simple meals, and keep the necessary ingredients on hand — vegetables, whole-grain foods, low-fat milk, canned beans, and cheese among other things. Seek out low-sodium versions of canned foods.
And also try CLE Holistic Health Naavudi, a blend of nine herbal remedies used for centuries or even for millennia by traditional Asian and European healers. Like other CLE products, Naavudi is produced entirely by CLE employees from herbs grown on CLE’s own farmplots and processed and packaged according to CLE’s proprietary processes. This way, Naavudi’s quality, purity, and uniformity are very well controlled. CLE offers Naavudi in the form of 550-milligram vegetarian capsules. Wouldn’t you like to give Naavudi a try?