11 Simple Ways to Lower Your Blood Sugar (2025)

7. Fill half your plate with veggies

Kristan, recommends a plate loaded up with vegetables. You can’t go wrong withdark leafy greenslike spinach as well as pulses, such as chickpeas and beans, which have all been linked to lower blood sugar levels.

Short of going vegan or vegetarian, you may still reduce your risk of developing diabetes by following a healthy, plant-based diet, according torecent researchpublished inDiabetes Care. The study followed 11,965 adults aged 45 to 64 over two decades. It found that those who ate a healthy diet emphasizing fruits, vegetables, legumes, whole grains, nuts, tea and coffee, while minimizing less healthy plant foods like refined grains and fruit juices along with animal-based proteins, had a lower risk of developing diabetes. However, eating an unhealthy plant-based diet with more refined and sweetened foods wasn’t linked to a lower risk of developing diabetes.

8. Fill a fourth of your plate with healthy carbs

This macronutrient, like the others — protein and fat — has a place in a healthy diet. But carbs shouldn’t cover half your plate — which is typical with the Western diet, Kristan emphasizes.

Experts add that it’s important to swap in healthy carbs.

Try to have more foods like quinoa or farro, lentils and chickpeas, and brown rice and fewer processed carbs.

Instead of villainizing foods, understand where they fit on your plate. Starchy favorites like corn or potatoes will raise your blood sugar and go in the carbs category, rather than that half of your plate that’s devoted to veggies, Kristan says

9. Pump up the fiber

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) recommends that people with diabetes and those at risk for it eat at least 14 grams of fiber per 1,000 calories (or 28 grams for a 2,000-calorie diet), following the Dietary Guidelines for Americans for everyone. AARP’sWhole Body Reset, based on the latest research in people age 50 and over, recommends 20 to 25 grams a day for women and 30 grams for men.

Vegetables like lentils, nuts and fruits, especially those with edible skin, such as apples and pears, and edible seeds including berries are good sources of fiber, according to the ADA.

10. Sleep on it

Tired of the daily grind? Take it lying down.

“Adequate sleep is critical not only for diabetes management but in terms of all metabolic diseases including weight management,” Kristan says. Conversely, not getting at least seven hours of shut-eye nightly is associated with insulin resistance, according to areview of research. When that happens, the cells don’t respond to that hormone like they should — to efficiently take in sugar from the blood and convert it to energy — and blood glucose rises.

Plus, being sleep-deprived can make it harder to handle stress, which also contributes to the stew of toxic hormones like cortisol linked to insulin resistance. Think about being overtired and overstressed. “Those two are so interrelated,” Kristan says. She adds that when more insulin is produced, in response, that increases hunger and you eat more calories.

Here are some tips toput the spiral to bed.

11.Lifestyle changes alone not enough? Consider medication

For certain patients, medication like metformin may also be helpful to lower blood sugar.

“Some people are going to have a really difficult time making lifestyle changes, and some people will tell you I’m more likely to take my medicines every single day to control the prediabetes,” Huang says.

While lifestyle changes are part of a comprehensive approach, experts say what’s most important is doing whatever it takes — and not waiting — to lower blood sugar so you can live a longer, healthier life.

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Can eating ice cream prevent diabetes?

In a delicious odyssey, an Atlantic article recently dealt with a swirling controversy around an “inconvenient” finding replicated in various nutrition studies: Consuming not only dairy, but ice cream in particular, has been linked with a lower risk of diabetes.

As detailed in "Nutrition Science’s Most Preposterous Result,” not only individual studies but analysis of decades of research has failed to dispense with this clearly consumer-approved but scientifically improbable association. A 2016 paper published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutritionsummarizing data from about a dozen studies found that tucking into at least half a cup of the dairy dessert per week was associated with a 19 percent decrease in diabetes risk (even higher than the 14 percent risk reduction seen with yogurt).

But, as noted in the story, the authors of that paper, like other experts, wrote off the findings to what’s called “reverse causation” — in essence that the link between ice cream and diabetes wasn’t going in the direction you’d think. That is to say, for instance, people who are healthy and already at lower risk for developing diabetes might have felt more at ease having rocky road, while those who were already at higher risk for developing the chronic disease might have had less.

The key takeaway in all of this, buried about 3,300 words into the sweetly self-indulgent exposé, is sadly vanilla: “To be clear, none of the experts interviewed for this article is inclined to believe that the ice-cream effect is real.”

Mark Pereira, an epidemiologist at the University of Minnesota, has long wrestled with the ice cream–diabetes risk reduction correlation in his own research. “I don’t think I’ve ever experienced anything like this finding in my career because it’s completely unexpected,” he told AARP. “The Atlantic article was really good journalism,” added Pereira, who was interviewed for that story.

But even lacking an explanation for the link, Pereira isn’t about to advise people to make soft serve a feature of their daily diet in the name of diabetes prevention.

“There could be something there that’s causal,” Pereira acknowledges, giving at least a glimmer of hope to gelato apologists the world over. “But that’s a far cry from saying, ‘Oh, I would recommend that people with prediabetes increase their ice cream intake.’ I mean there’s so many other ways that you could change your diet and improve your physical activity to reduce your A1C [a measure of blood sugar] and prevent diabetes.”

Scooped another way: There’s still no proven reason to expect ice cream will protect you from diabetes. So, for now at least, experts still suggest savoring ice cream in moderation — and not for prevention.