Smart Grocery Shopping for Diabetes

Grocery shopping decides most of what you will eat for the next week, which makes it a better place to manage diabetes than the dinner table.

India's dietary guidelines are close to a shopping list already: 400 g of vegetables and 100 g of fruit a day, 85 g of pulses, and 250 g of cereals and millets. Multiply by seven and you have the week.

What that looks like in a trolley

• Vegetables in bulk, first. Buy them before anything else, so the budget and the bag space both go there.
• Two or three whole pulses — chana, rajma, whole moong — rather than only washed dals.
• Curd, eggs, paneer or fish, depending on what you eat.
• Peanuts and roasted chana for the evening, bought instead of namkeen rather than alongside it.
• Fruit for the week, not the fortnight — it gets eaten when it is fresh.

In the packaged aisles

Since 2024, FSSAI has required packaged foods to show added sugar, salt and saturated fat in bold, larger type. Use it — it is the fastest comparison you can make between two similar packets. And check total carbohydrate rather than only the sugar line, since flour and rice flour do not appear as sugar.

The simplest rule still holds: if it is not in the house, it does not get eaten at 10 pm.