Overview
You’re in for a treat — but not the sweet kind. The punchline is simple: natural, minimally processed food + a reliable meal structure makes diabetes easier to manage and health easier to protect. If you only remember one idea from this page, let it be Michael Pollan’s: Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.
This page is not about perfection. It’s about building a default food environment that reduces glucose chaos, reduces decision fatigue, and makes “good enough” repeatable.
The detail
Escaping nutritionism
Most people get stuck in nutritionism: zooming in on single nutrients (omega-3s, ketosis, glycaemic load, fat subtypes…) until they can’t see the food anymore. Useful details, yes — but not a useful way to live.
Reality tends to fix this. When life gets busy (kids, work, stress, fatigue), the winning strategy stops being “optimal nutrients” and becomes reliable, repeatable food.
Babies don’t eat nutrients. They eat real food. They don’t follow diets. They eat what’s natural and available — and they tend to stay healthy, energetic, and blissfully uninterested in calorie counting or body-image nonsense.
So yes — ditch nutritionism and swallow some food realism.
Pollan’s rule that outlives every diet trend
If you read just one food book, make it this one:
Michael Pollan’s Food Rules.
It’s not written by a nutritionist. It’s written by someone with a strong grip on common sense. One conversation with your grandma probably covers 80% of it: meat and two veg is boring, reliable, and weirdly hard to beat.
You only need one line from Pollan:
If you want the longer version, these ten rules are enough to retire every “diet book” you’ll ever see:
Simple messages, not easy to follow in a modern food environment.
Normal eating vs natural eating
Let’s define terms, because this is where people get quietly derailed.
Normal eating is consuming food based on marketing, trends, and whatever everyone else happens to be doing.
And:
Natural eating is eating food that hasn’t been heavily processed, hasn’t had artificial ingredients added, and usually grows from the earth or runs on it.
If children follow “normal eating” without a protective home environment, they drift towards the average modern outcome:
- overweight (or swinging between extremes),
- undernourished despite high calorie intake,
- always hungry for sweet food (hello, overeating switch from the hypo section),
- tired,
- constipated,
- low energy and low resilience,
- and increasingly entitled around food.
But if we build a home environment that supports natural eating, children are far more likely to be:
- a healthy weight for height,
- well nourished and vibrant,
- rarely craving more sweet food,
- digesting normally, every day,
- grateful for food and connected to where it comes from.
This isn’t easy. The pressure to eat “normally” is relentless — TV, parties, school meals, takeaways, friends’ houses… you can’t escape it. So you need a counter-environment at home.
Practical tips for eating naturally
- Eat what’s in the cupboards — so buy natural food and don’t store the normal ultra-processed stuff.
- Cook with kids. Connection to food beats lectures about food.
- Grow something. Even a small planter changes perspective.
- Get grandparents and carers on the same page: hugs > Haribo.
- Take natural food with you. Don’t outsource meals to the environment.
- Use herbs, spices, and seasonings as your only “additives”.
Can you ever eat processed food? Of course. But kids learn via monkey see, monkey do. The food environment you model becomes their default.
A good rule of thumb is 80:20: at least 80% natural food, 20% wiggle room for life. The other diabetes-specific benefit is consistency: the more repeatable the meal structure, the less frustration you feel.
Back to diabetes: the base meal structures that reduce chaos
This page is about real food and eating structure, not Coco Pops and Pop-Tarts.
In the Mealtime Insulin Guide, you’ll learn how to manage any style of meal (high-carb, high-fat, low-carb) using elements of Dynamic Glucose Management.
But if you choose either of these two meal structures as a base, you’ll protect health, stabilise glucose, and reduce diabetes distress:
Adults: three balanced meals
Children: three balanced meals + a snack
What’s a balanced meal?
A plate of natural food: half vegetables, the other half split evenly between carbs and protein.
Balanced-meal options (including higher-fat meals) are covered in the Mealtime Insulin Guide.
Still thinking “as long as I count carbs and match insulin, I can eat what I want”? Have a proper look at these two graphics and decide:
What’s next
Next step: Hypoglycaemia
Foundations / related content
The order shown below is recommended, but navigate as you see fit.
- What is Diabetes?
- Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM)
- Basal insulin
- Bolus insulin
- Correction insulin
- Carbohydrate counting
- Three balanced meals
- Hypoglycaemia
- Measuring success
