If you want to lower your blood sugar, then changing your diet is important. Adding in foods that help to lower blood sugar and avoiding foods that cause blood sugar to rise can help you take control over your blood sugar levels and overall health.

Foods And Nutrients That Lower Blood Sugar

The good news is that there are many foods that help to lower blood sugar, and they can be easily added into your diet.

For instance, garlic is known to help stabilize blood sugar, and it can be added to almost any dish you cook to enhance flavor. If you are not a fan of eating garlic in any form, you can buy garlic tablets and easily get the benefits of garlic that way.

Maitake mushrooms are also known to help normalize blood sugar levels, and they can be added into almost any dish to enhance texture and flavor. They also come in supplemental form.

Nutrients that help lower blood sugar include:

• Chromium picolinate: This nutrient improves the efficiency of insulin, which helps to lower blood sugar. Brewer’s yeast, broccoli, orange juice, and green beans all contain this nutrient.
• Biotin: Helps to improve the metabolism of glucose. Swiss chard, carrots, nuts, goat’s milk, cauliflower, and cucumbers all contain this nutrient.
• Zinc: Helps improve insulin sensitivity and, therefore, clear sugar from the blood faster. Seeds, oysters, liver, and cheese all contain this nutrient.
• Coenzyme Q10: This nutrient improves circulation and stabilizes blood sugar. You can find this nutrient in dark leafy greens, nuts, fish, chicken, and beef. However, supplementation may be needed to get an adequate amount to promote health benefits.
• Manganese: This nutrient is an important factor for the metabolism of blood sugar. People with diabetes often have a deficiency of manganese. Whole grains, leafy vegetables, nuts, and teas have this nutrient.

Herbs that can help lower blood sugar include dandelion root, goldenseal, bilberry, huckleberry, cedar berry, and ginseng.

Foods To Avoid In Your Diet

While adding the above foods and nutrients to your diet can help lower blood sugar, there are also foods that should be eliminated from the diet. This is an important step to maintaining a healthy blood sugar level.

Avoid unhealthy foods that are high in saturated fat. There are many drawbacks to consuming a diet high in saturated fat; however, when it comes to blood sugar levels, this type of fat increases the amount of free fatty acids in the blood and promotes insulin resistance – a common factor of high blood sugar. You can find saturated fats in foods that contain animal or animal products, including cheese, fatty beef, lard, and pork.

“Both repeatedly elevated levels of FFAs as found in chronic intake of high fat (especially high saturated fat) meals and obesity are associated with both skeletal muscle and liver insulin resistance.” – Joslin Diabetes Center

It is also important to eliminate sugar. This can be easier said than done. Cutting back on pop, as well as cakes and other baked goods is an obvious way to reduce the amount of sugar you take in; however, sugar can be hidden in many prepackaged foods that may not appear to be full of sugar at first glance. Always check the labels of foods you buy to determine whether or not sugar is present in high values.

Two other things that should be taken into consideration are:

1. Foods that are high on the glycemic index scale, such as russet potatoes, white break, and white rice.
2. Drinks high in caffeine, as studies have shown that caffeine can increase insulin resistance.

You have a lot of control over your blood sugar when it comes to diet. Ensuring that you are getting essential nutrients and avoiding foods that affect blood sugar negatively is the easiest thing you can do to lower your blood sugar and maintain it.