What are macronutrients, and what do they mean for diabetes?
It's an excellent question, and one that is the subject of almost infinite debate on topics ranging from body composition, weight loss, general health, and, you guessed: diabetes.
Lets start with the basics: what are macronutrients?
You can think of macronutrients as the building blocks of your diet. They come in three varieties: protein, fat, and carbs.
If you look on the back of any nutrition label you'll always see the total grams of each of these three macronutrients listed out.
Each play their own role in your body.
Protein is known to most people as the macronutrient responsible for muscle growth, but protein also does a lot more than that. It contains essential amino acids and helps your skin, hair, nails, bones, and organs function properly.
Fat often gets a bad reputation, but is another integral macronutrient that helps your body absorb fat-soluble vitamins and is a source of essential fatty acids that your body can't otherwise produce on it's own.
Carbs are the body's main source of energy. Your body does this by converting the carbs into glucose (sugar), which can be used by your cells as fuel for their daily functions. Carbs tend to be the most abundant of the three macronutrients, typically making up 60-70% of a person's daily caloric intake.
Because they are turned directly into glucose when digested, it's carbs that are most responsible for elevating blood sugar levels.
In normal situations this is no big deal. In fact, it's perfectly healthy. When our body needs more energy our brain sends a signal to our stomach and we feel hungry. We eat, our body digests the food, and violà, we have the energy we need.
The problem is that if that sugar isn't burned (typically via exercise) it can build up in your body, causing high blood sugar.
Most medications such as metformin or insulin work by helping your body to deal with this sugar.
But what if you can reduce the amount of sugar coming into your body in the first place?
Turns out, you can!
By eating less carbs you can naturally reduce the amount of sugar entering your body.
Dozens and dozens of clinical studies have shown low carb diet to be highly effective at naturally managing blood sugar levels in patients with diabetes.
There's just one problem: low carb diets can be super tough to follow!
As we mentioned before, a typical diet consists of roughly 60-70% carbohydrates. That means that if you're eating a 2000 calorie diet, about 1400 calories are from carbs. That's a lot, and replacing all of those calories with protein and fat is not easy.
What makes things even more difficult is that carbs are sneaky - they're found in all sorts of foods, even healthy stuff like fruits and vegetables, and rice and beans.
So while many people know that low-carb diets can be effective ways to naturally lower blood sugar, actually sticking to a low-carb diet can be a whole other story.
We made Type2Diet for this very reason.
Rather than trying to figure out what foods to eat and what foods to avoid, wouldn't it be easier to just pick up a shake?
What if this shake had 20% of your daily values of all the vitamins and minerals you needed each day? What if we packed it with 27g of protein and 21g of healthy fats? What if it included other supplements like gymnema extract, alpha lipoic acid, reishi mushroom, and a ton of other ingredients that have been studied to support healthy blood sugar levels? What if it tasted amazing and kept you full for hours?
We created Type2Diet meal replacement shakes specifically for folks with diabetes or pre-diabetes, because we know how challenging it can be to stick with a low carb diet. We wanted to make it easy.
By replacing just 1-2 meals every day with our low-carb shakes you can massively cut down on the amount of carbs in your diet and take all the guesswork out of eating low-carb.