HealthLink: New Beyond the Basics - Meal Planning Guide for Diabetes Prevention and Management
On March 30th, the Canadian Diabetes Association (CDA) released its new Beyond the Basics meal planning guide. This new consumer friendly poster is a more flexible meal planning tool to assist health professionals in educating clients on how to improve their eating habits and better manage metabolic parameters. This tool replaces the CDA’s Good Health Eating Guide, in response to new methods of management and feedback from the public, health professionals and food manufacturers. The CDA plans to make a complete Beyond the Basics manual available to diabetes educators within a year.
The Beyond the Basics poster is more compatible with Canada’s Food Guide to Healthy Eating. To simplify planning, portions of all carbohydrate-rich foods contain 15 grams of available carbohydrate. All vegetables are ‘free’ foods to encourage their consumption. Many more multicultural choices reflect the Canadian population.
Another key feature is a colour coding system to identify foods to choose more often and foods to choose less often in each food group. The CDA recommends choosing the foods in green boxes more often because they are lower in fat, higher in fibre and/or have a lower Glycemic Index (GI) value. Foods to choose less often are found in amber boxes. Examples of foods to choose more often include:
- In the Grains and Starches group: whole grain breads, hot cereal, barley, bulgur, rice, millet, pasta, couscous, corn kernels and sweet potatoes.
- In the Meat and Alternatives group: lean cuts of meat, lean ground meat and poultry, skinless poultry, fresh fish and canned fish packed in water.
CONSUMER TIPS:
A review of the Beyond the Basics meal planning guide and its new features will be very helpful to those affected by diabetes. The Canadian Diabetes Association encourages people to obtain the new poster through their diabetes educator.
HealthLink is an e-mail newsletter from the team of registered dietitians at the Beef Information Centre: a non-profit organization committed to provide credible and timely information. Please share it with colleagues.
Download the Canadian Diabetes Association's
consumer “tip sheet”.
“tip sheet” for educators.
Literature order form
food label factsheet.
Canadian Diabetes Association.
Subscribe to HealthLink.