Can a Diabetic Eat Beans Every Day?

Beans is one of the best foods you can eat when you have diabetes.

It is slow on your sugar, it fills you up, and it is loved from one end of Nigeria to the other.

So it feels safe to reach for it every single day. The truth is no, not quite every day. About four times a week is the right count, even for beans.

And there is a twist most people are never told. The beans is hardly ever the problem. What you eat beside it usually is.

Does beans raise blood sugar?

Barely, and this is the good news. Beans is one of the slowest foods on your table. The brown honey beans that so many of us grew up on comes in at 29, and the African yam bean is slower still, at 17.

To make sense of those, foods are given a score from 0 to 100 for how fast they turn into sugar once you have eaten them.

Anything from 1 to 55 is slow, and at 29 the beans sits well down in that safe end. Very few of the foods you cook come in this low.

That is why beans has earned its good name. It carries body-building food, the same thing that fills you and steadies you, and it carries the rough part of the food that your body cannot rush through.

Both of those slow the sugar on their own. You are not wrong to love beans, and you are not wrong to lean on it.

So why not every day?

Here is the part that catches good people out. Slow is not the same as free. Beans still carries starch inside it, and anything that carries starch or sugar, even a food as slow as this one, is not a food for every single day.

That is a line your body draws, and beans sits on the safe side of it about four times in a week, not seven.

So keep beans as a friend you see often, not one you see daily. Four times a week leaves room for the other slow foods your body needs, and it stops even a good thing from becoming too much of one thing.

The trouble is not the beans, it is what sits beside it

This is where a good meal is usually lost. Beans on its own is slow.

But the moment a fast food joins it, the fast one decides the whole thing, and the beans cannot rescue it.

The best example is beans porridge with soaked garri. On its own the beans is down at 29. Set soaked garri beside it and the whole thing climbs to 96, right at the top.

Soaked garri behaves like a sugary drink the moment the water touches it, and a fast food like that pulls the whole meal up with it. The beans did not fail you. The garri did.

The same story runs through the other pairings people ask about.

Beans and rice is heavier than beans alone, because the rice is the fast part of it. Beans and plantain is fine when the plantain is boiled or roasted and kept small, but not when it is fried. So the beans is not the thing to watch. The company it keeps is.

Moi moi and akara: the same beans, two different meals

Take that same beans and steam it into moi moi, and it stays slow. It is one of the best things you can eat in the morning, and it stands well on its own or with a little salad.

Fry the same beans into akara and the story changes, though not because of the sugar. The oil is the cost. And akara has a famous partner that undoes it, which is pap.

The pap is the fast one, not the akara. Eat your akara with vegetables instead, keep the oil light, and it treats you far better than the morning bowl you may have grown up on.

Is beans good for diabetes and high blood pressure?

Plenty of people are managing more than diabetes, and almost nobody answers this part for them. Beans itself does not trouble the rest of your body.

Cooked from scratch, it carries no salt and little fat, so your heart, your pressure and your kidneys have nothing to complain about.

The trouble comes in a tin. Canned baked beans is often heavy with salt and sugar, and salt lifts your blood pressure and gives your kidneys extra work even on a day your sugar is behaving well.

Diabetes UK say the same about tinned beans, and their advice is to pick the ones packed in water, with less salt and less sugar.

The palm oil in a rich beans porridge is the other thing to keep light, because heavy oil is hard on your heart and your cholesterol whatever your sugar is doing. So cook your own where you can, and go easy on the salt and the oil.

How much beans, and how often

A serving about the size of your closed fist, which is roughly half a cup of the cooked beans, about four times a week.

Put fish or an egg beside it, or two slices of boiled plantain, and load the rest of the food with vegetables. That is a full, steady meal, and it is smaller than most people serve.

Beans is one food, and you have already seen how the answer moves away from the beans itself and onto the garri, the rice, the plantain and the oil around it.

Every food you cook has a count like this and a size like this, and nobody can hold hundreds of them in their head.

Worse, the answer shifts again the moment two foods meet, the way slow beans and fast garri end up high together. That is the gap GluFloat was built to close.

You type in a food and it tells you where you stand, the size to keep to, and what to eat it with.

Then you build a whole meal and watch the answer move as you change it.

You can try it free, so you can test it on tonight's dinner before you decide anything.

Thank you for reading.