You've asked and we've answered your questions about managing diabetes in the following categories:

Diet and nutrition

Weight management and physical activity

Cardiovascular disease risk and children

Lori Wolf, R.D./L.D., patient education advisor for the American Heart Association in Dallas, Texas, explains:

Diabetes increases the risk for cardiovascular disease (CVD), and dietary intervention has been proven to help lower that risk. Following recommendations from the American Heart Association is heart healthy. Since diabetes is a major risk factor for CVD, you should protect your heart with diet and physical activity (as your healthcare provider allows).

To manage your diabetes, it's important to monitor calories, fat and carbohydrates. On a diabetic meal plan, your caloric intake should remain about the same from day to day. That's because the meal plan is designed around a total caloric level. Your healthcare provider set your level to support optimal blood sugar control and to allow gradual weight loss or weight maintenance, depending on your need. That's why it's imperative that you comply with the recommended calorie levels.

Fat is an important nutrient in the diet, so don't exclude it. To manage your diabetes to protect your heart, it helps to know about saturated, unsaturated and trans fats.

Saturated fats are usually solid at room temperature and come from animal products such as meats, cheese, eggs, milk products and butter. They are also found in tropical oils such as coconut and palm oils. Saturated fats increase CVD risk by increasing the bad cholesterol (LDL) and lowering the good cholesterol (HDL). To protect against CVD, you should limit these fats to no more than 10 percent of calories in your diet.

Unsaturated fats are liquid at room temperature and come from vegetable sources such as canola oil and olive oil. They also can be found in soft tub margarine. These fats protect your heart's health by increasing the good cholesterol and lowering the bad cholesterol, so most of your daily fat should come from unsaturated fats. And you should use these oils to substitute for saturated fat choices, not in addition to them.

Trans fats are created in an industrial process that adds hydrogen to liquid vegetable oils to make them more solid. Another name for trans fats is "partially hydrogenated oils." Look for them on the ingredient list on food packages. Trans fats raise your bad (LDL) cholesterol levels and lower your good (HDL) cholesterol levels. You should limit your diet to less than 1 percent of your total daily calories. To manage diabetes and decrease CVD risk, it's best to increase unsaturated fats and decrease saturated fat.

Carbohydrates should be the main focus of your daily efforts to control your blood sugar and thus your diabetes. Carbohydrates are completely digested and put into your bloodstream in the form of sugar within two hours of eating them. (This is one of the reasons it's important to test your blood sugar two hours after a meal to monitor how your body handled the amount of carbohydrates you just ate and to design the perfect plan for your body.) To successfully manage diabetes, consistency is the key with carbohydrates. Typically, eating the same amount of carbohydrates at each meal at the same time every day is a great formula for stabilizing blood sugar levels according to the caloric level of your meal plan. Some people are more sensitive because of medications and/or activity levels. They will need more specific monitoring of their meals and carbohydrate intake with a dietitian's help.

John Crouse, M.D. explains:

First, I do not like the word "diet" as it is commonly used. Instead, think "lifestyle change," because when you stop using a diet, you go back to where you were before you began the diet.

There's nothing magical about any of these fad diets. They're quick fixes. All of them will help you lose weight as long as you eat fewer calories than you expend. A lot of these diets replace something you eat with something else. So, going on these diets is the wrong approach to take.

If, as a person with diabetes, you want to get your weight under control, make major behavior changes. I recommend you join Weight Watchers because it will put you into a lifestyle change mode. Think of diet in the context of "eat less, move more." You must work on both sides of the equation: how many calories you consume (diet) and how many calories you expend (exercise).

There's a difference between diets that help you lose weight and diets that can help you lower both blood cholesterol and body weight. For example, the diet that lowers blood cholesterol is low in saturated fat and cholesterol and has the right amount of calories for you. A diet that fosters weight loss only, such as some of the fad diets, can cause weight loss temporarily but may not help with glucose control or maintaining weight loss. In fact, a good diet — that is, a healthy lifestyle — causes weight loss and will improve blood sugar control, lower blood pressure and lower blood cholesterol.

So remember, it's not about diet — it's about behavior change.

Prakash Deedwania, chief of the cardiology division and professor of medicine at the University of California School of Medicine in San Francisco, Calif., explains:

Drinking a glass of wine is good for the heart in the sense that the main mechanism by which alcohol protects the heart is increasing good cholesterol (HDL). The grape skin provides flavonoids and other antioxidant substances that protect the heart and vessels from the damaging effects of free oxygen radicals produced by our body. This is particularly true for diabetics because they have been shown to have a high production of free oxygen radicals. But we don't have any evidence specifically related to diabetes patients.

A glass of wine can also help individuals relax. The strongest evidence is in favor of wine, but some evidence recently showed beer and other types of alcohol may provide the same benefits related to increasing good cholesterol (HDL).

In general, alcohol does not seem to have an adverse effect, unless excessive amount is used — and it increases calories, among other things. For example, excessive amounts of alcohol consumption could be harmful by increasing the risk of high blood pressure, for which diabetic patients are already at high risk.