I would love to know if your ethnicity has affected your diabetes treatment or has it drawn you to certain comfort foods.
Being hispanic I have rice and beans and lovely yummy non-diabetic friendly food at my disposal. I’m also very drawn to these foods. Is anyone else drawn to their ethnic foods?
Being Korean I am always exposed to white rice, brown rice, rice cakes, noodles, starchy and root vegetables all around me. Oh it is so hard, I haven’t had Korean food in over a month, I can see myself completely losing it one day. I hope I don’t break down and eat a bowl of rice with a stew and cry over elevated/dangerous BG’s. I am now on a low carb diet, eating mostly lean protein and non-starchy vegetables with occasional low-carb bread. I’m kinda thankful I don’t live in Korea. A lot of them such as my own family actually think that grains and fruits are wonderfully healthy for all people whether you’re diabetic or not.
I DONT THINK MY ETHNICITY EFFECTS WHAT I EAT BUT HOLY COW DO I LOVE MY CARBS, BREAD, POTATOS THE WHOLE NINE YARDS, I THINK MY PUMP HAS REALLY MADE IT EASIER FOR ME…
Well, that is that is the downside of having diabetes in the Philippines. We have a lot of delicious food that you simply can’t indulge in, as they either are just too sweet, or way to rich for our bodies to handle…Talk about Christmas even where almost everyone is compelled to eat at parties and all of that…
I find beans are relatively benign as long as they’re cooked without salt and fats. I have cut way back on potatoes and rice, and I only make whole-grain pasta.
I think I’ve had potato latkes only once or twice since diagnosis. I do OK with low-fat, reduced-sugar lokhshen kugel (noodle pudding). For me, most Jewish ethnic cooking is associated with holidays, so I don’t miss it on an everyday basis. That said, I could still easily binge (and spike) on a good white-flour, whole-egg challah, and matzoh-heavy Pesach requires some ingenuity.
Soul Food…yummie!!! I stay away from it most of the time and give in when I go home. I am glad I am not in MO all the time…lol there would be a serious issue:) Candy yam’s…yummy.
I completely understand where youre comming from. im a puertorrican mama. i love to cook and make good eating meals for my family. but, i’m diabetic., and i find now that i have to deprive myself from soo much good food. like pernl asado., arroz con gandules and soooo many pastries and goodies. just once in a while i kinda cheat and have some any way pero girl., i pay the price at some point. i enjoy cooking and i like to eat., especially comida crolla., u know., im drawn to it like you., and it makes it very hard being diabetic and having to watch every thing that goes into your mouth.
im with you mija., lol …thanks for the chat… mama Haydee
As a Latina I struggle with that also… for me it means corn tortilla instead of flour, and bean soup rather than refried, yet it can be very difficult because these food are so much apart of the culture. I am on the pump so that does make it a bit easier to manage.
I’m curious, based on the title of this topic. When you compare the diabetes treatment you get from your doctors and CDEs with that received by patients who are of different age group, gender, race or ethnicity, do you believe you may be shortchanged on treatment (for example, T2s not being told to test or test sufficiently; nonwhites not being offered recipe-rework assistance)? Do you believe they may be shortchanged?
no based on the diet you should follow.
by the comments, the others understood 
I’m puerto rican too!
Oh the foods we really want to eat! I miss the arroz con gandules y pollo
Italian here! Can we say pasta and pizza?
Not to mention my best friend (really sisters for many moons) is Puerto Rican and Dominican so, I’m loosing it at all angles - LOL.
I am now a low carber trying to make the best of it. There is still bistec encebollado and low carb tortilla pizzas.
Have you tried shirataki noodles? I get them from my local Korean shop. They are made of a kind of fibre and are virtually zero carb. The label might say 'elephant yam' but me and my meter will testify that there is no starch in them! They are convincingly noodley and I love them in a spicy soup made with Korean spicy bean paste, various types of tofu, mushrooms, seaweed and bulgogi beef. These are all ingredients I pick up at the Korean store and by leaving out the last ingredient, are not just super lo-cal but also vegan, in addition to being really tasty and satisfying - all of which are a winning combination for palate AND meter!
Oh, do you make my mouth water. I remember my grandmother's matza-ball soup, and her Pesach-dicke cake, and macaroons, and we used to have blintzes from time to time. And of course, there's kasha, which the Poles and Russians like, too. And don't forget the Haroset for Pesach!
But actually, I think pretty much all peoples like carb-heavy food -- rice, potatoes, wheat, pasta, corn -- everywhere you go there are carbs. The Pacific Islanders had taro root.
The only people who have subsisted without carbs, as far as I know, are the Inuit (Eskimos), and they seem to be perfectly healthy when consuming a traditional diet. So somehow, it seems to me that carbs PLUS fat/protein are the problem!
How horribly unenlightened! There is a long list of things that taste great to me, and which don't spike my BG. For a start: tomatoes eaten off the vine, perfectly ripe avocadoes (and homemade guacamole from said avocadoes), small amounts of raspberries and blueberries, fluffy omelettes with Jarlsberg or Swiss cheese, flavoured seaweed, rare beef with a sharp mustardy/horseradishy sauce, weisswurst, bratwurst, olives stuffed with feta cheese..... Of course I wish I had the sort of functioning metabolism that I could eat a plate of nachos but hey, at least I can still manage everything *but* the tortilla chips.
This is a very good question that alot of people try to ignore. I do know ethnicity is uncomfortable for some people to talk about especially on forums like this. The fact still remains that minorities do not recieve the same health care and benefits that others get and that is somewhat based on ethnicity the availability to get information to those groups.
Being African American and being raised in the southern part of the US, food is apart of everyday life. Food is used as an offering to people when they come into your home. As southern folk are we want people to feel like they are apart of the family and using food is a wonderful way of doing this. Because it is so much apart of tradition now it is almost an insult to not accept food. Now and days this has been distorted in may different communities. I would dare say that food is the nation's drug of choice and not crack or heroin.
African Americans have such a unhealthy relationship with food. Food is apart of the emotional psyche. We use it to numb the pain in our lives. Some foods will cause endorphins.. Couple this with lack of nutrition knowledge and health care you have a pan epidemic. I would also say that Latinos have the same unhealthy relationship in their culture. I had a Latino co worker whose wife was diabetic. I would ask about her condition. I would explain to him some of the foods weren't good for her. He would explain to me that this is what they ate and it was apart of the culture. I would have to remind him that I had a culture too of people cooking carb heavy food and I had to turn away from it. From my last conversation with him about his wife, she is still struggling with her diabetes worse than myself.
In Southern California, there are very few grocery stores but multiple fast food joints on any given street corner. There are hoards of taco trucks, quickie fast food wagons and local dirty convenience stores. Normally these are in areas where minorities live. So if you have a chronic condition such as diabetes you may not have access to proper nutrition and food to help your situation. Several articles have been written on how parents my have to take a 2 hour bus ride to the nearest grocery store. If you are a working mother is a nightmare and will opt to feed her children whatever is available despite its nutrition.
A bill has just been passed by the council to ban any more fast food restaurants to be built in certain areas which would that are populated by African Americans and Hispanics.
http://www.scpr.org/news/2010/12/09/Fast-food/
http://articles.latimes.com/2007/sep/10/local/me-fastfood10
JohnG, I am glad that neither of you was serious :)
I do think that most foods are ok in very small quantities. I could not, even before dx, eat a big Belgian waffle, as I don't have a sweet tooth. But even now after dx, and with a *seriously* impaired metabolism, I can manage a small part of a small waffle. I only eat the best parts, the crispy bits around the edges. My kind and understanding other half (who is lucky enough to have a normal metabolism) is left with the non-crispy bits.
After I was diabetic I went back to what we used to eat in mexico. We did not have flour tortillas in mexico or at least we were not fed those when we were kids. I think for the most part Mexican food is one of my favorite foods. I tend to eat very little rice but all tortillas have been switched either to corn or wheat. I eat breakfast tacos on corn tortillas if I do have them. So I guess those around us are the ones that bring the high carb food that we cant limit ourselves to.
Christalyn - let's not also forget that people of colour seem to be genetically more prone to getting diabetes, especially Type 2. And it has little to do with weight. See for example David Mendosa's post on healthcentral, on diabetes in Korea, where virtually everyone is Type 2 and lots of them are thin. India has one of the highest rates of diabetes in the world, despite the lack of a 'western' lifestyle and also despite the fact that lots of people there are vegetarian. Anecdotally I have noticed that people of colour tend to store fat in their bellies, and I often even see otherwise slim people of colour who nevertheless have noticeable abdominal fat.
Well, in the beginning... I did struggle a bit with rice and beans. Now, I later realized that I just don't really care for the rice, and I just have a big bowl of beans instead. lol It doesn't seem to challenge me as much as the rice would. I can't have it with anything else, though... with meat of any kind... as I will spike. But my big struggle is that I'm a Type 2 on no medications and no insulin... so I don't have as much freedoms as others. I worry of whenever I get to go back home and visit my family in Puerto Rico, and all the food... god, all the food. lol I hope I survive. :)
As for treatment... right now, my state of poverty is the thing that gets most in the way of me receiving proper care and treatment, as I do not have a job or proper insurance. I am so fair skinned, most people can't tell I'm Latina... Which unfortunately exposes me to people who somehow think it's okay to say racist things about others, to me, because they think I'm White. I've had so many people just casually say denigrating things to me about Puerto Ricans, and other Latinos... it's not even funny. I usually let them go on and on... until they ask me where I'm from... So I can throughly shame them. Such sad fools they are.