If you are a nutritionist, you need to be able to make healthy and appropriate food recommendations for your clients. If you have diabetes, you need to know what nutrients and carbohydrates are in the foods you eat, and what the alternatives are. Food lists provide information about multiple foods so that you can compare them and choose the best ones for your situation.
Nutrient Lists
If you simply want to know what nutrients are in your food, you can use nutrient lists. The United States Department of Agriculture has determined the nutrient content for thousands of common foods, and it provides these lists free of charge to the public. There are lists for calories, carbohydrates, protein, fat, dietary fiber, sugar, water content or moisture, cholesterol, vitamins, minerals and different types of fats. Nutritionists can use these lists to figure out what nutrients a client is eating, or to make recommendations about what types of foods the client should focus on. Individuals with diabetes can use the sugar and carbohydrate lists to make better choices. If you want to look up the nutrients in a specific food, you can choose the list that has the foods listed in alphabetical order. However, you might want to find foods that are high in certain nutrients such as calcium, or low in other nutrients such as calories. In that case, you can look version of the list that lists the foods in order of their nutrient content.
Glycemic Index
The glycemic index of a food indicates how fast the carbohydrates in the food make your blood sugar levels rise compared to eating white bread or glucose with a reference value of 100. According to the Linus Pauling Institute Micronutrient Information Center, foods with a high glycemic index cause a faster and greater increase in your blood sugar levels and a larger insulin response. This is particularly risky for individuals with glucose intolerance or Type 2 diabetes who already have trouble maintaining a healthy level of blood sugar. Choosing foods with a low glycemic index can help because the carbohydrates in these foods digest more slowly and do not cause as big of a spike in your blood sugar. You can find glycemic index values on charts or tables. Low-glycemic foods include nuts, beans, apples and brown rice and some high-glycemic foods are dried fruit, jelly beans and potatoes.
Food Exchanges
The Food Exchange Lists are another set of lists that both nutritionists and individuals with diabetes can use. Each list contains foods with similar amounts of calories, carbohydrates, fat and protein, and the different lists are for fruits, vegetables, very lean, lean and medium-fat protein, starches, fats and fat-free and very low-fat milk. The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute provides some examples of foods and serving sizes for each of these groups. When you are planning your menu, you can interchange any food from a particular list. These lists can be useful for individuals with diabetes who need to eat a certain amount of fat, carbohydrates and protein at each meal. Even if you do not have diabetes, the food exchange lists may be useful for you. They can help you make variations to your diet while keeping similar calorie and nutrient content by substituting within a group, and they can help you manage your weight by using proper portion sizes.
