Type 2 diabetes is a serious health condition that, if not managed properly, can lead to severe complications. A well managed diet for diabetes is essential to controlling this disease. Your physician may prescribe medications to help regulate your blood sugar levels, as well as medications that help protect your heart and kidneys. Understanding how to manage your diet can be complex. Here we try to put it all in plain language, to help you make sense of all the charts in the standard booklet of counting your carbs.
At first glance, it seems that carbs are your enemy. The usual proscription from the medical people is that you limit your intake of carbs to no more than 195 per day. The trouble starts when you see that two pieces of sandwich bread runs around 30-40 carbs, while one plain bagel is almost 50 carbs! If you’ve been a sandwich eater all your life, this is dismal news indeed.
What you want to do, to set up a healthy diet for diabetes, is to start reading those food labels carefully. When buying bread, look for whole grain breads. You’ll notice two things. Whole grain breads have fewer carbs and more fiber. Some newer brands on the market have added fiber, in addition to that contained in the whole grain flour. Whole grains are complex carbohydrates, which is a good thing in a diet for diabetes patients. Complex carbohydrates break down slowly, so you never get a sugar spike, whereas refined flours contain little fiber and often, more simple sugars.
To arrive at the total number of carbs per serving, subtract the fiber grams from the total carbs. Your physician or nutritionist has doubtless emphasized the importance of getting a sufficient amount of fiber in your diet. Why? Fiber helps keep your digestive tract clean and free of toxins, which in turn, helps protect your kidneys from damage. This makes the picture a lot better, in terms of what you can eat and how much, while having a perfectly healthy diet for diabetes management.
Don’t shy away from eating plenty of fruits and vegetables. When you see that a half cup of chopped onions has about 15 carbs, you may feel that you’d rather use up your carb allotment on that sandwich! However, when you picture putting a half cup of onions on a salad, you realize that a sprinkling appropriate for a salad probably adds up to just a few carbs. Not a big deal.
Most produce are heavy on the antioxidants too, leading to better overall health and packing a preventative punch for all of your organs, a definite plus in a healthy diet for diabetics.
Foods that are encouraged in a diet for diabetes patients include meat, poultry,  fish and dairy products. This means that you can make a meal of a big juicy burger on a whole grain roll, loading it up with lettuce, tomatoes, a couple of sauteed mushrooms and a fat chunk of Swiss to top it all off, all for less than 40 or 50 carbs. Not a bad deal.
In a nutshell, it’s simple sugars you want to avoid. A single soda or candy bar can wreak havoc with your blood sugar levels. In fact, a healthy diet for diabetes can be a healthy diet for non-diabetics as well.

Do You need a blood sugar level test?
There’s a lot of talk about blood sugar and about the blood sugar level tests. What is a blood sugar level test? Who needs a blood sugar level test? What does a blood sugar level test tell you? There’s a lot of information about blood sugar, but there’s only a few things that you really need to know.
A blood sugar level test measures the amount of sugar in your blood, commonly and medically referred to as glucose. Specifically, a blood sugar level test tells you how your body is handling glucose. Glucose, like virtually everything naturally produced in your body, is necessary to a healthy and functioning person. Glucose is the “fuel” that your body’s cells need to continue to function. What a blood sugar test will do is discover how well glucose is being delivered to your cells.Most people use a blood sugar level test for two reasons: either to help manage diabetes or to discover if they have diabetes. Using a blood sugar level test can help give a comprehensive look at your overall health. Furthermore, you can check if you’re pre-disposed to high blood sugar levels or low blood sugar levels.
That said, most people don’t need a blood sugar level test. However, if you do suspect you might have type 1 or type 2 diabetes, you might experience these symptoms. Increased urination, increased appetite, extreme weight loss (particularly when coupled with an increased appetite, as these are wildly disproportionate), achiness, fatigue and dizziness. If you find yourself experiencing most of these symptoms, consider a blood sugar level test.
When diagnosing diabetes, a doctor will prescribe a blood sugar level test such as a fasting blood sugar test. As the name implies, this is a blood sugar level test carried out after the patient has fasted or gone without food for at least eight hours beforehand (the easiest way to do this, of course, is to take the blood sugar level test first thing in the morning – most people don’t eat while they sleep). A normal range would be between 75 to 100 milligrams of glucose per deciliter of blood. If the number is over 125, a physician will likely schedule more tests.A random blood sugar level test is administered without the fasting. This blood sugar level test is less reliable, as it doesn’t take into account whether you’ve eaten recently, and what you might have eaten. In fact, there is no “normal” blood sugar level in your day-to-day life. It’s a function of diet, exercise and body type. It’s much better to get a fasting blood sugar level test.
Finally, those with diabetes regularly engage in a different type of blood sugar level test called a glycated hemoglobin or A1C test. This blood sugar level test is used to help diabetics manage and monitor their glucose levels and insulin dosages. This type of blood sugar level test should NOT be used to diagnose diabetes.