That’s why vegetables are the base of the Beat Diabetes Pyramid. They’re the foundation of the Beat Diabetes eating plan—the bedrock on which the plan is based, the wellspring of all the advantages to be gained from eating the Pyramid way and following its guidelines. And just as the base of a pyramid occupies the greatest volume, so also should vegetables be the food group you eat the most of.
What do you think of when you think of vegetables? To many of you who may have tried weight-loss initiatives in the past, the very word may conjure up images of unadorned celery stalks or the overcooked spinach you loathed as a kid. Nothing could be further from the reality.
Gold, purple, deep orange, brilliant red, bright yellow and every shade of green.
Leaves, flowers, bulbs, stems, roots.
Growing underground, on vines, as the buds of plants, as their roots.
The world of vegetables is a universe of colors, textures, origins and tastes. Vegetables can be as ordinary as the much-maligned but delightfully crispy iceberg lettuce or as exotic as what the British call aubergine and we call eggplant. We read of favorite vegetables in ancient texts—like radishes, enjoyed by the Romans—and we associate certain vegetables with specific places—okra from the American South, leeks from the Celtic countries. And some vegetables have traveled farther than we’re likely to in a lifetime: the tomato, native to the Americas, has become almost the national vegetable of Italy, to which it was introduced only in the sixteenth century. Marinara sauce, anyone?
In their sumptuous variety, vegetables form a rainbow of health that can arc across our lives. Where weight loss and managing diabetes are concerned, they’re a good thing. And you remember what the legendary Hollywood vixen Mae West said on that score: “Too much of a good thing is wonderful!”
So why do some people, especially those who are diabetic or trying to lose weight, still shrink from certain vegetables that they suppose are fattening or bad for sugar control? You know the ones we mean: peas, beets, carrots—all the vegetables that seem sweet to the taste or that are starchy in texture.
GLYCEMIC INDEX, GLYCEMIC LOAD, GLYCEMIC IMPACT: THE REAL SKINNY
One reason may be all the talk about glycemic index—promoted by some researchers as measures of the effects of carbohydrates on blood sugar levels. The glycemic index number reflects how quickly sugars are absorbed into the bloodstream and raise the blood sugar level. The higher the glycemic index number, the more quickly the carbohydrates are absorbed and the faster the blood sugar level rises. Obviously, this is a very important concept for people suffering from diabetes or trying to lose weight, many of whom will aim to avoid vegetables with a fairly high glycemic index—for all practical purposes, anything over 50. That would include beets, with a glycemic index of 64, winter squash at 75, even carrots at 47—the sweet and starchy kinds of vegetables.
But there’s an additional factor that needs to be taken into consideration: glycemic load. Glycemic load refines the glycemic index calculus by taking into account the amount of carbohydrates in an average serving of the particular food. In fact, when you factor in that refinement, you get a more accurate—and quite different—measure: beets have a glycemic load measurement of 5, carrots come in at 3 and winter squash’s glycemic load is 3 as well.
Unfortunately, the idea of carrying around a chart of glycemic index and/or glycemic load numbers and basing your food choices on these measures can be burdensome for a lot of people, who may well decide that vegetables simply aren’t worth the trouble.
Moreover, the fact is that a lot of different factors affect the speed with which a food’s carbohydrate content will be absorbed into the bloodstream. Even such factors as how ripe the food is, how and when it was processed, how and for how long it’s been stored, how it was cooked, even the particular variety of the food—green cabbage or red cabbage, for example—may affect the absorption rate.
It therefore makes much more sense to talk about glycemic impact rather than about the narrowly defined glycemic index and the only slightly more precise glycemic load. While glycemic index and glycemic load focus on one food in isolation, glycemic impact takes into consideration all the factors in your diet in general that affect how quickly sugars are absorbed in your bloodstream.
After all, you rarely eat a single food in isolation; rather, your meal consists of protein, fat, fiber, even acid—from the lemon juice or vinegar in your salad dressing, for example—and all these can affect how fast sugar enters into the blood. The balsamic vinegar on your salad of raw carrots and sweet peppers, to take just one delicious instance, helps to slow the rate at which your stomach empties, thereby slowing the rate at which glucose enters your bloodstream. So it simply doesn’t work to take into account just the glycemic index number of the carrots or peppers onto which the balsamic vinegar is tossed. You’ve got to look at the total picture and assess the overall impact instead.
The beauty of the Beat Diabetes Pyramid is that it looks at the total picture; it assesses the overall impact of all the factors in your diet—the total glycemic impact as well as all the health impacts. In doing so, there’s just no question that vegetables as a group remain the single most powerful weapon there is for achieving and maintaining weight loss and for beating diabetes. Yes, we’ll have some important things to say about such starchy vegetables as potatoes and corn when we get to Chapter 6, but that these foods should be avoided is simply not true.
It’s worth repeating: for weight loss and beating diabetes, where vegetables are concerned, more is good, and even more is even better.
GETTING TO MORE: PRACTICAL STEPS
Okay, how can you increase your intake of vegetables without feeling like you’re swallowing something because your mother said there will be no dessert if you don’t? Eat two salads instead of one? Force yourself to eat yet one more stalk of broccoli?
Well, that’s one way to do it. But we have a couple of better suggestions.
Suggestion 1: Extend the Variety of Vegetables in Your Diet
Stop thinking of vegetables as just greens and as just raw, and start thinking out of the box. Roasted eggplant, marinated artichoke hearts, minestrone soup, grilled acorn squash, cauliflower casserole, pickled beets, sautéed spinach with garlic, Chinese stir-fry—all vegetable dishes.
Keep in mind also that you can get your vegetables in snacks, condiments, sauces, dips and toppings as well as entrées and at any time of day. While roasted eggplant or a Chinese stir-fry can be a meal unto itself, sautéed spinach is a great side dish, and artichoke hearts make an elegant hors d’oeuvre for the cocktail hour.
Remember, too, to get your vegetables in any form you can. Yes, in the summer, it’s lovely to head for the nearest farmstand or local market for just-picked radishes, peppers, lettuces, beets and the like. But don’t neglect the advanced technologies that have made it possible for us to have vegetables all year round by pulling a package out of the freezer or a can down from the pantry shelf. These days, the variety of vegetables on supermarket shelves and in supermarket freezers is pretty mind-boggling. Check it out.
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EXTENDING YOUR VEGETABLE VARIETY
Try grilled vegetables this summer. Marinate asparagus, eggplant, zucchini or other vegetables, or brush them with light barbecue sauce, and put ’em on the grill.
You’ve heard of iceberg lettuce. What about romaine, Boston or butter lettuce, arugula (also called rocket), oak-leaf, Bibb, mâche or mesclun? Be adventurous.
Vegetables are the cornerstone of good soups: carrot-ginger, curried pumpkin, squash, gazpacho, borscht, cucumber, tomato, minestrone.
Stir-fry any combination of vegetables in hoisin sauce: cauliflower, peppers, onions, broccoli, green beans. You’ll have a gorgeous, healthful, diabetes-beating, weight-losing meal in less than ten minutes.
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Suggestion 2: Make It Tasty!
If you think that cooking vegetables means putting them in a pot of water and boiling them till all the flavor and nutrient
s are completely gone, you’ve got another think coming. In culinary academies, students rise or fall on the succulence of their vegetable preparations: presentation, texture and above all taste.
The possibilities are endless. Take it from Chef Franklin: you can live a lifetime and not run out of different ways to prepare utterly scrumptious vegetable dishes. Given the extraordinary variety of entries in this group plus the many different ways to prepare, flavor and cook foods, you are sure to run out of time before you run out of ideas for yet another vegetable dish. So for the adventurous cooks among you—or for the would-be cooks out there—go for it! Let your imagination run wild, and make vegetables the primary arena for your culinary inventiveness.
But even if you have neither the talent nor the inclination to make vegetables your cooking laboratory, there are still some very simple things you can do to make eating more vegetables something you’ll look forward to. And since the more appetizing you find a food, the more you want to eat it, taste is extremely important.
You’ll read more about sauces and condiments in Chapter 7, but here’s the basic point: any sauce, dressing or seasoning that is not sugary in taste (except if it’s sweetened with a low-calorie sweetener) and that is low in saturated fats or trans fats is particularly appropriate for enhancing the taste of vegetables. In other words, a honey-based dressing or butter-, cream- or cheese-based sauces are not going to work. Such additions are off the mark in terms of both diabetes management and weight loss—and not just where vegetables are concerned.
What works? Something as simple as lemon juice or as complex as balsamic vinegar brings out the flavor of the vegetable even as it adds its own piquant taste. And don’t forget the other plus of these seasonings where fighting diabetes is concerned—the acid they contain slows the rate at which glucose enters the bloodstream.
Serving the same dual purpose of highlighting the underlying taste while adding enriching flavor are all the sauces and relishes of the great Asian cuisines: soy sauce, teriyaki sauce, hoisin sauce, curry paste, black bean sauce, Thai peanut sauce, sesame sauce and more. Hot sauces from the world’s cultures—salsa, Tabasco, Worcestershire, wasabi—also work wonderfully well, and don’t forget plain old mustard and ketchup. Best of all, many condiments, sauces, dips, toppings and dressings are themselves vegetable sources—chutneys, mole, salsa, caponata, ratatouille, marinara, pesto, pickled vegetable relishes and more.
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SALT CAN BE YOUR FRIEND!
Soups, pickled vegetables, soy sauce: all recommended as ways to get you to eat more vegetables. But you may be wondering, what about the salt in these foods? After all, doesn’t salt cause you to retain water and increase blood pressure?
Not really.
Yes, sodium intake—that is, salt—is one of many factors that influence fluid balance in the body. Other factors include hormone levels, temperature, humidity and the other foods you may eat. As those factors combine, you might find you weigh 2 pounds more tomorrow than you did today—and 3 pounds less the following day, just based on normal fluid balance.
But neither your fluid balance nor your salt intake has anything to do with diabetes control or losing fat—which is what you want to lose if you’re overweight or obese.
Yes, salt can be a major factor in blood pressure control, but other factors are even more important, and most important of all is a way of eating that includes plenty of fruit, vegetables, plant-based proteins and ample amounts of “good” fat. In other words: the Beat Diabetes Pyramid.
So when you have an eating plan that is great for lowering blood pressure, for diabetes control and for weight loss, it makes sense to enjoy its health-promoting foods as much as possible. To that end, some salt, either on its own or in sauces and condiments, may well be essential for you—and that makes salt your friend.
For example, if the idea of plain steamed vegetables leaves you cold, you’re unlikely to eat this crucial food group frequently enough or in sufficient quantity to derive its substantial health or weight-loss benefits. But if you flavor the steamed vegetables with black bean sauce, Thai peanut sauce or whatever else strikes your fancy, you’ll eat them with pleasure.
The bottom line on salt? Take in however much you need to enjoy eating the Pyramid way. Whatever the amount, it makes salt your very good friend.
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BOTTOM LINE
In short, that’s exactly what vegetables are: the bottom line of weight loss and beating diabetes, the bedrock of a lifelong program for getting and staying healthy and of course the bottom rung of the Beat Diabetes Pyramid. You cannot do better for yourself—for your health and for your future—than to make vegetables the foundation of your eating.
As we said at the top of this chapter, vegetables are good. More vegetables are better. And even more vegetables are even better than that.
PIZZA AND
More food for fewer calories—that’s the promise of the Beat Diabetes Pyramid, and it’s a promise fulfilled in this pizza demonstration:
On the left, two slices of pizza—an average portion to most folks. And what do these two slices deliver besides taste? A whopping 900 calories to burden your waistline and your heart! Nothing else.
Check out the meal on the right. Pizza may be the jewel in the crown of this lavish meal, but it is set between two equally delicious dishes—a substantial bowl of thick minestrone soup filled with vegetables and an antipasto as only the Italians can make it, with greens, tomatoes, olives and marinated artichoke hearts. This is a full meal that will leave you feeling as satisfied as you are sated. And it’s just 600 calories—far less than the two pizza slices to the left. Plus the 12 grams of fiber this meal provides will keep you feeling full, and that can keep you away from the table—or the fridge or the pantry—for hours and hours to come. It means fewer calories now—and fewer calories over the next twenty-four hours as well.
2 slices pizza
900 calories, 0 grams fiber
vs.
1 slice pizza
450 calories
0 grams fiber
1 bowl minestrone soup (1½ c.)
110 calories
8 grams fiber
Antipasto
(greens, tomatoes, olives, marinated artichoke hearts)
40 calories
4 grams fiber
TOTAL
600 calories
12 grams fiber
SAILOR’S DELIGHT
Pasta with marinara sauce was the first thing sailors wanted to eat when they returned home to Naples after a tour on the high seas; that’s where the name marinara—as in marine—comes from. But chances are that no sailor would be satisfied with that lonely-looking bowl of pasta on the left of the picture. Yet pasta and sauce together add a hefty 605 calories to the diet, while providing a mere 4 grams of fiber.
Appealing much more to the seafarer—or to anyone, for that matter—is the mouthwatering collection of foods to the right. The pasta with marinara sauce is there for the land-bound sailor. But in addition, there are broccoli rabe in garlic and olive oil, succulent herb-grilled tomato halves and sliced portobello mushrooms. All these dishes combined are a mere 355 calories, while the meal as a whole adds 11 grams of stomach-filling fiber to keep you feeling unhungry for a long time to come.
5 ounces pasta
525 calories
0 grams fiber
1 cup marinara sauce
80 calories
4 grams fiber
TOTAL
605 calories
4 grams fiber
vs.
2 ounces pasta
210 calories
0 grams fiber
½ cup marinara sauce
40 calories
2 grams fiber
1 cup broccoli rabe
with garlic and olive oil
70 calories
4 grams fiber
2 herb-grilled tomato halves
20 calories
3 grams fiber
Sliced
portobello mushrooms
15 calories
2 grams fiber
TOTAL
355 calories
11 grams fiber
CURRIED PUMPKIN SOUP
½ cup chopped onion
½ cup chopped red or yellow bell pepper
½ cup chopped celery (including leaves)
1 tablespoon olive or canola oil
4 teaspoons curry powder
1 15-ounce can pumpkin
1 cup soy milk
1 cup water
1 tablespoon lemon juice
2–3 packets Splenda
1 ½ teaspoons salt
2 tablespoons chopped cilantro
1. Combine the onion, peppers, celery and oil in a medium saucepan. Sauté over medium heat for 5 minutes, or until the vegetables are slightly tender.
2. Stir in curry powder and cook another minute.
3. Add pumpkin, soy milk, water, lemon juice, Splenda and salt.
4. Stir until well blended; cover pot and simmer over low heat for 15 minutes.
5. Pour into bowls, sprinkle with cilantro and serve.
Yield: 5 servings
Each cup contains 85 calories, about 2 ½ grams of fat, 6 grams of fiber.
NOTE: Fresh or frozen pumpkin or winter squash may be substituted for canned pumpkin.
2-ounce chunk white cheddar cheese
230 calories, 19 grams of fat
vs.
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Mutt and Jeff
Eat & Beat Diabetes with Picture Perfect Weight Loss Page 7