Can I eat cranberries for diabetes?

Diabetics have to strictly monitor their diet, studying the glycemic index of various foods, their fat content, and all kinds of vitamins that can improve health and help cope with the disease. Wild berries, and especially known for its healing effects of cranberries, often cause problems in patients with diabetes. Is it possible to use the berry in its pure form and prepare desserts from it, how it is useful and what are the contraindications - we will consider in more detail below.

What is cranberry good for?

Sweet and sour wild berry is simply a storehouse of vitamins and valuable substances that are useful not only for diabetics. Most often, the berry is used for the prevention and treatment of colds, viral diseases due to its antimicrobial and immunity-strengthening properties. In addition, berries are used to treat various types of inflammation, because cranberries are rich in antiseptic and antipyretic components, as well as accelerate body cleansing and trigger healthy tissue regeneration processes.

Useful cranberries and cores. Vitamins C and E contained in its composition help strengthen the heart muscle and increase the elasticity of blood vessels, help lower blood cholesterol and have an antioxidant effect. The beak helps bring pressure back to normal and protect the heart from overload.

The effect of cranberries on the digestive system affects several organs at once:

1. The berry helps cleanse the liver of toxins.
2. It has a choleretic effect.
3. Normalizes the pancreas.
4. It contains enzymes that promote the rapid breakdown of fats.
5. It removes stagnation of mucus and toxins from the body, normalizes the acid-base balance in the intestines, and is especially useful for people with low acidity of the gastrointestinal tract.

Cranberries also stimulate the kidneys and have a light diuretic effect, helping to relieve swelling. The berry will help and remove excess salts from the joints, thereby eliminating the pain syndrome. This will be useful for people who are overweight or prone to deposition of urea in the soft and connective tissues. Cranberries not only fight oxidative processes, but also help eliminate pigmentation, which creates an unhealthy appearance of the skin. In addition, its firming properties will help protect and restore the vessels of the legs from the symptoms of varicose veins.

What else will be useful for diabetics:

• cranberry significantly improves skin condition;
• heals wounds;
• helps strengthen the epithelium and increase its elasticity;
• improves vision;
• eliminates acne eruptions and heals acne marks.

How to use cranberries for diabetes

The most important thing that diabetics need to know when eating cranberries is that everything is good in moderation. An overdose of berries can lead to undesirable effects, so cranberries should be combined with other treatments, used only to maintain the body and not get carried away with a delicious potion.

To introduce cranberries into your daily diet, you need to consider that the berry contains enough fructose, and much less glucose. However, the berry retains an acidic taste with bitterness and not everyone may like it in its natural form. Therefore, cranberries and jam with the addition of sweetener or honey are best made from cranberries.

Dried berry
For convenience, the fruits can be dried. Dried cranberries preserves all its beneficial properties, is stored for a long time and is very tasty at the same time. If desired, cranberries can be dried on their own, allowing the berries to lie in an open oven at 60 degrees. Such a product is stored in glass or ceramic tightly closed jars.The less contact with air, the longer the berry will be usable.

You can still buy dried cranberries, the main thing is to make sure that it was prepared without the addition of sugar. These two types of processing allow the use of berries all year round. Add dried fruit to cereals, yogurts, salads, meat and vegetables, or just take it with you for a snack. Dried berries can completely replace sweets or store marmalade - you just need to get used to them.

Cranberry Drinks
Berry drink will be beneficial. Cranberries can be taken in pure form or mixed with lingonberries, blueberries, honeysuckle, cloudberries. You can save the berries until the summer by freezing them, and in the warm season make them fruit drinks with currants.

To make fresh fruit drink, you need to pour the washed berries with boiling water in a thermos or wrap the container for 3-4 hours. For flavor in the infusion, you can add useful spices, for example, mint, cinnamon, cardamom, ginger. After aging, the liquid is drained, the berries are ground, and mashed from skins, seeds and the remains of spices are filtered. Puree is combined with infusion, if desired, add honey or fructose to taste when served in fruit drink.

Another way to prepare fruit drinks is to immediately grind the berries in a puree, add all the desired ingredients and pour the mixture with boiled water, cooled to 80 °. After that, the fruit drink is allowed to infuse for 2-3 hours, and before serving it is filtered through a strainer.

Can be prepared and conservation. For this fruit juice you need to boil a little, like compote, and add fructose to the berry to taste. You can grind the berries with sweetness, boil and roll not filtered - then the drink will be more saturated, but you can boil the berries in boiling water, throw them on a sieve, grind in a puree, dissolve the sweetener in the drained liquid, and put the puree in syrup. The compote is kept on fire for 4-5 minutes, allowing it to boil, and then rolled up.

You need to understand that a heat-treated berry loses some of its healing properties, therefore it is better to freeze cranberries for storage, and then prepare fresh fruit drinks to the table.

Cranberry Desserts for Diabetics
Cranberries make jam, marmalade and jelly. The recipes are classic, only fructose and a synthetic substitute are used instead of sugar, observing the proportions indicated in the instructions. The berry is perfectly gelled and gives the desserts its unique aroma and taste with a light menthol note characteristic of wild berries. That is why delicacy lovers add quite a bit of sweetness to this berry so as not to spoil its unique taste.

Cranberry decoctions and teas
Dried, frozen and fresh berries can be brewed with herbs or in pure form to get tasty and healthy tea from colds, to strengthen joints and blood vessels, relieve heat and inflammation, and to control blood sugar.

2 tablespoons of the berries are poured with boiling water in a glass and let it brew, after which, for convenience, the drink can be (but not necessarily) filtered. Cranberries for taste and benefit are added to mint tea, to a decoction of hawthorn or wild rose, and tea with aronia. They drink such drinks at 2 glasses a day, and the course lasts 2-3 weeks, after which it is necessary to give the body a rest from the active components of cranberries and other means used.

Other healthy recipes
You can not combine sour cranberries with fresh milk, but you can add a handful of berries to kefir or yogurt and mix in a blender. This will help improve liver function, normalize appetite, restore normal intestinal microflora and improve the absorption of nutrients. In addition, it will relieve bad breath and will be an excellent prevention against colds.

Cranberries can be used for marinades and sauces for meat dishes. Such a berry will add piquancy even to dry lean meat and make a diabetic diet less boring.

Are there any contraindications

Those who suffer from gastritis and other diseases of the gastrointestinal tract, as well as people with increased acidity of the gastric sac, should refrain from using acidic berries, since I can damage the mucous membranes for a year.

Cranberries should be carefully consumed by people suffering from kidney diseases, especially when it comes to urolithiasis.

In addition, before introducing cranberries into the diet, patients with hypertension should consult a doctor. Berries perfectly strengthen the walls of blood vessels and fight cholesterol plaques, but also eating cranberries can provoke pressure surges.

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