Type 2 Diabetes - Are All Dietary Fats Bad for Diabetics?
By Beverleigh H Piepers
A lot of Type 2 diabetics are under the mistaken impression that all fats are bad. This could not be further from the truth. There are five kinds of fats, and only two of them are bad. And you could actually live longer without carbohydrates than you could if you tried to eliminate all fats from your diet. This is so much the case that if you wanted to make a general statement, you would be wiser to say that fats are good.
Other than trans fatty acids and saturated fats, fat is incredibly good for you in so many ways. However, since some kinds of fats are bad for you, especially if you live in the shadow of Type 2 diabetes, we should go over how fats can affect you.
What makes you fat? It is a common misconception that "fat makes you fat". In reality, excessive calories make you fat. But we're not talking about just weight gain here. We're talking about how taking in fat can affect a diabetic person's lifestyle. For the most part, it can actually improve your health, if you combine it with exercise. The nature of diabetes is that your body can't use sugar very effectively, either because you aren't producing enough insulin, or because the insulin you are producing just does not get used effectively. Fats and Type 2 diabetes do relate to each other, but only in a passing sort of way. It is true that fats get broken down into glucose, which is the basic unit of sugar that a diabetic's body has trouble with.
Is there anything good about fats? The good part about most fats (especially omega-3s and unsaturated fats), is that the breakdown process in your system is slow. This makes the glucose or sugar entering your blood stream a nice, gentle amount, instead of just slamming it in there, like if you decided to eat a dozen donuts. If you have diabetes, it's best to not do things like that. Since fats are chemically necessary for lots of processes in your body, like building muscle and running your internal organs... you need them. You might even want to eat more of them, since diabetes can put a lot of strain on those organs.
Fats to avoid: What you might want to avoid, however, is saturated fats and especially trans fats. These are what give butter its consistency, and they are any kind of fat that is solid at room temperature. Since your blood vessels are already being damaged by the sugar bumping around in there, putting these kinds of clog-building fats into your system can actually drive you to a heart attack, stroke or other kind of ailment which is caused by not letting your blood get where it needs to go in your system.
The key is to remember that most fats are good, but some fats are bad... especially when you have been diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes.