Diabetes is about food, in the main, and how successfully or otherwise our bodies manage to deal with it in all its incarnations, whether encouraged by judicious choice and frequent activity, or with help from medications and insulin. As we have already seen, there are many misconceptions about what a person with diabetes can eat, or not, and these are often bolstered by sloppy reporting and poor scriptwriting in the media. The subject of diet, therefore, is pretty central to many of the threads on the forum.
When I was diagnosed, the chief principle I was taught was that I should simply follow a healthy, balanced diet, and this is what I have tried to do, with the occasional spectacular lapse! As your experience grows, you learn what foods are to be avoided, perhaps because they cause an unfathomable delayed spike, and what seemingly indulgent foods can be enjoyed regularly. In principle, this is the sort of diet everyone should be following, even if they are not diabetic, as it will help to keep them fit and healthy and less prone to a plethora of other potentially dangerous health issues.
Having diabetes and managing it successfully concentrates the mind on the subject of nutrition in a way that a non-diabetic person would probably find difficult to understand. As a result, people’s ideas about what is healthy and their attitudes to food can vary considerably, a fact clearly illustrated in Jamie Oliver’s series about school meals which won great critical acclaim for exposing the dreadful junk being given to many of our schoolchildren due to the twin evils of cost and convenience.
This thread concerns Jamie’s efforts to tackle the same issue, but this time in America, where, it seems, problems are an order of magnitude worse – children being fed pizza for breakfast with no alternative, ludicrous rules on the constituents of each meal without taking into account the true nutritional value etc. As always when poor diet and obesity are featured in the media, the word ‘diabetes’ crops up. But in Jamie’s series it is treated at a dangerous risk that may be avoided, and largely incidental to trying to get the public in general to embrace a truly healthy diet and lifestyle.
The series was well-received by forum members as an uplifting and entertaining programme, probably because it was offering a solution to the problem of diet in an educational and positive way, rather than the many documentaries that blame and condemn people and offer no practical way forward. More like this please!
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