One of the most-repeated diabetes myths is this: People with diabetes must eat special foods. Truth is, whether you have diabetes or not, you should be eating more whole grains, vegetables, and fruits and fewer packaged items, fried foods, and refined carbohydrates. But that doesn’t mean you have to stick to a diet of salad and yogurt. By employing some clever kitchen tricks, you can cut out excess calories, fat, carbohydrates, and sodium without sacrificing taste. 

1 | Adjust Portion Sizes. Before you alter your recipe, consider whether you can simply eat a little less of it. “The first thing I always look at is the serving size,” says Diabetes Forecast Food Editor Robyn Webb, MS, LN, who created the recipes in this special section. “Traditional serving sizes are so huge.” To take just one example: If your apple pie recipe yields six servings, cut it into eight portions instead. Doing so would save 92 calories per slice for a 2,200-calorie pie. (Just make sure you don’t eat two slices!

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Crab cakes, pie crust, and other sinful foods get a diabetes-friendly makeover from Food Editor Robyn Webb, MS, LN. Submit your recipe now!

Baking is a little trickier since any changes you make will affect the final product’s texture, density, and volume. An easy-to-adopt swap: Replace cooking oil with an equal amount of unsweetened applesauce or baby-food pureed prunes. “If you’re making cornbread, you’re going to use applesauce,” says Tina Ruggiero, MS, RD, a dietitian based in New York and Florida. “If you’re making brownies, you’ll use prunes. You’re looking for something that has the same density.”

Finally, you can dump at least some of the salt. Experts agree that this one change won’t cost you flavor since many recipes are already too high in sodium. A simple fix is to use herbs and spices instead. Or, says Webb, get your sodium from a more flavorful source. “With salt, I have to use so much to get flavor out of it,” she says. “So if I’m making something Asian, I use hoisin sauce.”

3 | Get More of the Good Stuff. Give yourself a double dose of vegetables or beans, and you’ll eat less of the high-carb, high-fat, or high-calorie portion of the meal. “Throw some broccoli and cauliflower into mac and cheese, and you’re bulking up on vegetables,” says Marissa Lippert, MS, RD, a New York City dietitian. Cheryl Forberg, RD, a nutritionist with TV’s The Biggest Loser and author of the book Simple Swaps, likes to accent vegetables with pasta—not the other way around. “It’s kind of like a big bowl of vegetables with pasta,” she says.

4 | Become Meat Savvy. Certain meats (think ground beef, bacon, and sausage) are high in saturated fat, a major dietary cause of high cholesterol. But eating healthfully shouldn’t force you to scrap your favorite recipes. Instead, pick lower-fat proteins: Ground turkey can sub for ground beef, turkey bacon for pork bacon, and turkey sausage or meat-free sausage for the fattier variety. Many people find that extra-firm tofu, seasoned or marinated and sautéed, tastes surprisingly like chicken.