Carbs and starches: nutrition tips for diabetes

For people who suffer from diabetes, altering your diet can play a huge role in your everyday health. Here's a guide to carbs and starches and how they affect people with diabetes:

Not on their own. However, for many people with diabetes, a diet heavy with simple carbs is a big part of the cause.

• Put simply, a steady diet of "bad" carbs boosts insulin levels.
• When you consume too many dangerous carbs for days, weeks, months and years, insulin may stop doing its job as well as it once did, and the pancreas must generate more and more of the hormone to handle even small amounts of blood sugar.
• This phenomenon is what's known as insulin resistance, and it's an early sign of type 2 diabetes.

Good carbs are any grain product made from unrefined ingredients.

• Whole-wheat breads, whole-grain cereals, brown rice, whole-grain pasta and grains like quinoa and barley are all good examples.
• Vegetables and fruits are mostly made up of carbs that are healthy for you. Plus, fresh produce is packed with micronutrients that are particularly important to heart health. Depending on how many calories you eat a day, you should try to get as many as nine servings daily, with more vegetables than fruit.
• Don't let that scare you — serving sizes for this purpose are pretty small. A large salad could be three or four servings.

A few years ago, nutrition scientists identified another component in carbohydrates. They dubbed it resistant starch because it "resists" being digested. That's a good thing.

• Fast-digesting starches (think corn syrup, potato or white rice) spike your blood-sugar levels.
• Slow-digesting starches (think complex carbs like whole grains or brown rice) have less effect on blood-sugar levels.
• If a starch is indigestible, it has no effect at all on blood sugar. In fact, research suggests that resistant starches might improve your body's ability to process blood sugar.
• Resistant starches are best found in beans and whole, intact grains. For example, the starch in pearl barley is about 12 percent resistant and 43 percent slow digesting.
• Researchers were excited when they identified this starch form, because it is so good for you in several ways.
• Truth be told, however, there's really nothing new here. Resistant starch is found in foods that nutritionists have long advocated; if you eat a healthy diet that focusses on lean proteins, fresh produce and lots of whole grains, you're already getting lots of resistant starch.
• While diet plans linked to resistant starch sound sexy and new, they're often based mostly on established, diabetes-appropriate eating guidelines.
• If it works for your friend, terrific. That means she's eating healthfully and enjoying the benefits. Is it a "breakthrough" dietary approach? Not really.

Coping with diabetes is a tough job in itself. However, by changing your diet to avoid bad starches and carbs, you can definitely improve your everyday health and quality of life. Try these tips and see how great you feel!