In the last article about diabetes monitoring, weight was included in the list as one of the items to track to help manage diabetes. While there are many ways to maintaining weight, food is typically the first one people with diabetes have the most questions about. When it comes to food, having a plan about what to eat helps. Planning meal and snack option helps to have healthy food options on hand to avoid eating foods which may get you off track. Planning what to eat sounds like a lot of work, taking too much time to go through your recipes, make a shopping list, etc. The Diabetes Food Hub™ is a great option to speed up and make planning your meals and snacks easy. Even better, it is free.

The Diabetes Food Hub™ is available at http://www.diabetesfoodhub.org.

The Diabetes Food Hub™ includes a huge database of recipes, each with nutrition facts, a recipe box to save your favorite recipes, a simple menu planner and an option to generate a grocery shopping list.

The recipe collection is searchable, and you can also customize by meal type, cuisine or diet type such as low carbohydrate or low sodium. You can also specify which ingredients you like or dislike and find recipes based on those selections. As you find recipes you like or dislike after trying them, you can mark them with a thumbs up or thumbs down and the ones you want to keep for future use, you can save those for quicker access.

To create a meal plan, from your saved recipes, you simply drag and drop the recipe to the day and meal of your choice. Then, you have the option to print or save the meal plan, and, indicate if you want to include your daily nutrition intake values, the individual recipes and/or sorted customizable grocery list that includes the total ingredients of all the meals. This meal planner is very thorough and, yet, so easy to use.

And, if you missed it at the beginning…this resource is FREE! And, you do not need to have diabetes to access this resource. It is useful for everyone.

Although this is an online resource, do not dismiss using it if you are not able to access this resource via the web. Contact the Big Sandy Library for access to online resources or I would be glad to assist in creating your personalized menu and printing it for you.

If you have questions or ideas you think our office can help with, please contact Janell at the Chouteau County Extension Office at 622-3036 or janellb@montana.edu.

Follow us on Facebook @ChouteauCountyExtension to keep up to date on what is happening in Chouteau County Extension and 4-H.

Montana State University, US Department of Agriculture and Montana Counties Cooperating. MSU Extension is an equal opportunity/affirmative action provider of educational outreach.