Can You Eat Crackers While Having Diabetes?

Today’s topic came from one of our viewers and it's a great question! As people with diabetes, can we eat crackers? What are the best crackers to eat if we’re trying to manage our diabetes? She heard that Triscuits were okay - and by the way I do have a video about Triscuits. Read on as I reveal something about myself that I have a sneaky feeling you might relate to. It has to do with our eating choices, too.

Have you checked out the cracker aisle at the grocery store?! I mean WOW there are a lot of choices, and there are even some smaller companies that only sell crackers online. Like I've mentioned in many of my other food based videos, reading food labels is an important step that will help guide you on your best choices. Let's review a couple key points that we're looking for when we are looking and how to fit crackers into our eating plan:

As I mentioned in the video about Triscuits, for people with diabetes the key areas of a food label are serving size total grams of carb, grams of dietary fiber, total grams of fat, saturated fat, and milligrams of sodium. It also can be beneficial to look at the grams of protein, but generally we wouldn't expect crackers to be a high protein food.

When you're looking at the nutrition facts label, scroll down to the ingredient list. You will want to see the first ingredient listed as whole grain or whole wheat. Now that you know what we are looking for in a label, I've pulled a couple different crackers off the shelf to give you a quick review.

Many crackers are similar but we also need to consider the question, what else are we looking for in the cracker? This will help us narrow down our best choices.

Is it portion size? A portion of whole grain Goldfish crackers for 19 grams of carb is 55 crackers and the rest of the nutrition fits into a good choice for a cracker category.

If we are looking for a high in fiber cracker, Thin Wheat crackers contain 3 grams of fiber, a good choice cracker. Buyer beware of crackers that may advertise whole grain on the front of the label - this doesn't always mean that it's higher in fiber.

Or is it a low sodium cracker that you're looking for? The Wheat Thins with a hint of salt has 55 milligrams of sodium in comparison to the regular Wheat Thins with 200 milligrams sodium per serving. So the hint of salt version is a better choice for lowering sodium in your diet.

While you're at the grocery store take some time to do these best choice comparisons. Now I don't know if you ever have gotten this feeling but I started getting into a rut with my eating it felt a little bit boring. I was tired of eating the same old crackers! I received some samples for a new cracker that uses seeds as a main ingredient - they are lower in carb, 50% or lower compared to the typical crackers on the grocery store shelves because they use mostly seeds. A serving is 6-7 crackers for 10 to 13 grams of carb, 2-3 grams of fiber, 3-4 grams of protein, and 90 - 115 milligrams of sodium. So if you're looking for a cracker that is crunchy and nutty like a combo of cracker and chip, this kind of cracker can fit in that bucket.

It’s okay to change things up and try new foods - eating should be pleasurable, not boring! Until next time, cheers to your health.