Beans and acha diabetic diet and their effect on diabetic control amongst T2DM patients in a tertiary centre, Jos North Central Nigeria

Abstract

Background: clinicians' nutritional-therapy knowledge is still poor. Patients are restricted to a diet of beans and acha as nutritional treatment. Consequently, complications resulting from poor glycaemic control despite adherence nutritional and antidiabetic drugs. Forty - two patients on Beans and Acha; and antidiabetic drug prescriptions did not have good glycaemic control.

Methods: we investigated the effect of nutritional prescription that recognised appropriate food portion sizes from the various food groups; while the patients were still on the previous oral hypoglycaemic drug regimen, amongst the 42 patients over a period of three months. The level of glycaemic control was determined after 3 months on the new nutritional therapy based on standardized dietary plan guide. A free copy of the dietary manual guide was given to each of the patients after educating them on how to use the guide.

Results: all the 42 subjects recruited for this study had the pre and post intervention laboratory investigations. All responded to the questionnaires. Of the 42 subjects 40 (95.2%) had their fasting plasma glucose (FPG) while for the HbA1C 32 (81.0%) of the subjects had their HbA1C outside the normal range. Further analysis revealed other complications ranging from overweight and obesity associated with the poor glycaemic control found amongst the study subjects as detailed in the body of the study.

Conclusion: we conclude that both the HbA1c and the FPG of the 42 subjects were poorly controlled despite combination of nutritional and oral hypoglycaemic drug prescriptions and that a combination of appropriate dietary prescription that recognises the different food groups in appropriate portion sizes with oral hypoglycaemics gave better glycaemic control as shown by the FPG and HbA1c results 3 months after intervention.