My 65 year old grandfather, who is a strict vegetarian and has NIDDM, needs a general diet chart. Please give some tips.

In type�2 diabetes (NIDDM), blood sugar control requires keeping the insulin demand created by food in balance with the amount of insulin the body can still make available. This is true whether your father takes no medicine for his diabetes, oral hypoglycemic agents, or oral tablets in combination with injected insulin.

The foods that have the most impact on this balance are the carbohydrate-containing foods: rice and other grains, puri, chapati and other forms of bread, fruits, and so on. The simplest advice to assist your grandfather, without knowing his weight, medicines, blood sugar values, activity level and so on, would be to divide the carbohydrate-containing foods which he eats as evenly through the day as possible. With fruit for example, to have several smaller portions throughout the day, instead of one or two bigger ones. To keep the amount of chapati eaten at a single meal modest, and so on.

Your grandfather can judge how this is working by testing blood sugar about one to two hours after eating, if he has access to blood glucose monitoring supplies. Keeping the after meal blood sugar below about 180 mg/dl [10 mmol/L] or even a bit lower is what most authorities recommend as a protection against the complications of diabetes.

In short, his normal preferred vegetarian food choices are fine, but should be divided up evenly through the day to prevent large rises in blood sugar after big meals.

BB