Many diabetic Latinas lack nutrition knowledge
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One-third of Latin American women with type 2 diabetes living in Connecticut have not seen a registered dietitian or diabetes educator for help with healthy eating, new research indicates.
Even among the women who had gotten professional help, nutrition knowledge was limited, Dr. Nargul Fitzgerald of Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, in New Brunswick and her colleagues found.
The research “highlights a really dire need,” Fitzgerald told Reuters Health, pointing out that poorly managed diabetes can have severe health consequences including heart attacks and strokes. “We don’t have enough services, we don’t have enough certified diabetes educators or nutritionists who can speak the language or who are culturally competent enough to work with Latinos.”
Latinos are at nearly double the risk of developing type 2 diabetes compared to non-Hispanic whites, Fitzgerald and her team note in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association. Poor eating habits—especially eating lots of red meat and processed meat, refined grains, sweets, and sugar-sweetened drinks—have been tied to a greater risk of the disease.
To investigate nutrition knowledge among Hispanic women, the researchers interviewed 201 Latinas, most of whom were Puerto Rican, living in Hartford. One hundred had been diagnosed with type 2 diabetes.
Sixty-four of the diabetic women had seen a diabetes educator or dietitian. These women scored higher on a test of nutrition knowledge than those who hadn’t seen a nutrition educator. Two-thirds of them used food labels to choose low-sugar foods, compared to a third of the diabetic women who had not seen a diabetes educator.
In the group as a whole, diabetic or not, the women with higher nutrition knowledge scores were more than twice as likely to use food labels to choose healthy foods. They also ate more fruit and vegetables and less meat, and consumed salty snacks less frequently.
However, the only major difference between the women with diabetes and those without was that the diabetics consumed fewer sweets and soft drinks and were more likely to consume drinks and sweets containing artificial sugar.
“The current findings suggest a need for nutrition education interventions in the study population,” Fitzgerald and her team write. “Moving beyond just preferring regular sugar vs. artificial sweeteners seems to be an obvious educational need. Saturated fat, fiber, and daily food group intake recommendations should be included in the educational interventions because these were among the topics that were least known to the participants.”
Teaching people how to read food labels is key for helping them to eat healthily on their own, Fitzgerald noted. Because Latinos overall are at such high risk for type 2 diabetes, she added, “why not provide nutrition education for everyone?”
But serious barriers exist, she pointed out. Many people don’t know such services are available, and even health professionals may be unaware of them. Cost may also be a concern, Fitzgerald noted, but some nutrition services may be covered by insurance, and free assistance may also be available.
SOURCE: Journal of the American Dietetic Association, June 2008.
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