Holiday Guests With Diabetes

When my aunt, who always spends the holidays with us, was first diagnosed with diabetes, we all just flipped out. We thought that she needed sugar free everything and so did she. We thought she would feel left out if we had desserts and she didn’t have a special one of her own. We were wrong: she felt left out because she had to have a special dessert of her own. We stuffed her stocking with sugar free candies—that she ate all of and then got sick after—and low glycemic snack bars. She would read the sugar grams content of the bars, declare it too high and say “Can’t have it,” as she tossed it aside. She declared the chocolate cake that I sweetened with Stevia to be bitter and later helped herself to some of the cake everyone else was having. We were annoyed and hurt. She was annoyed and reeling. We’ve all learned a lot.

First of all, don’t panic. Don’t run out to the store and buy a bunch of ingredients you don’t already have. And don’t get a crummy ‘sugar-free’ pie from the bakery section of the store. According to the website diabetes.org, a generally healthy meal for anyone, is a healthy meal for your diabetic guest. Create your desserts aiming for something low fat, moderate on sugar and salt and including lean protein sources and complex carbs. Don’t go out and buy artificial sweeteners or a special diabetic dessert. You can do better!  Many artificial sweeteners still raise blood sugar levels just like true sugar does, and along with their odd after taste, they can give your guests some odd digestive results.  If you have a guest with diabetes coming to celebrate the holidays with you, your dessert offerings may have come up as a source of concern. Here is the basic information that you need for shaping a dessert offering that everyone can eat.

Accentuate seasonal fruit! What could be more perfect than baked apples on a cold, wet evening? After a hearty meal of lean proteins and complex carbs with good vegetables, a dessert of warm fruit will do the body good. Cut the cores out of a flavorful apple and mix together chopped nuts, your favorite spices, dried fruit and a tiny sprinkle of brown sugar. Bake it until your kitchen smells delicious. Sorry, this is the way I cook. Want a real recipe? Go to a real recipe site.

So here are some MENU suggestions and remember… these are just suggestions. Use your favorite recipe for any of these and keep it simple. All of these ideas require little to no recipe and besides, there are such a wealth of recipes on the internet; I am assuming that you have no need for mine.

Protein: Decrease the fat by baking or roasting– Chicken, Turkey, Fish & Low-fat Cuts of Red Meat

Bring on Some Vegetables! Easy vegetables to prepare are Steamed Broccoli (you can even microwave the stuff), Stir-fried Mushrooms in butter, and anything raw and chopped. I like to chop up carrots, zucchini and onion, and let them bake in the same dish with the chicken. They’re delicious and I put forth almost no effort.

Nope, corn is not a vegetable; it’s a starch. But it came from a plant! Right, but so does chocolate. Sorry. If that’s the only vegetable you were able to come up with, (virtual hug) you need to try again. If you cook those green beans, with the bacon and spices, for the full 8 hours, they will lose their vegetable souls. Sad, isn’t it? Just when you got vegetables to taste like meat, they stopped being a respectable vegetable. If you really need your vegetables to taste like… not vegetables… try chopping them up, tossing them in vegetable oil, sprinkle them with your favorite meat seasoning and then roast them for 35 minutes. Toss in a squirt of honey if you’re really desperate. You’ll like that.

Listen, I’m not commanding healthy holidays for all man-kind. I just know that when the doctor looked your loved one in the eye and said that life would be much shorter and harder unless they made some changes to the way they eat, it was a punch to the gut. So, be the helping hand. Don’t panic. Go ahead and finish grieving for what gets left behind, but make a conscious decision to celebrate what’s ahead. Food is good! But food is for living; we don’t live for food.