Dietary advice and structured lifestyle interventions remain central to the effective management of Type 2 diabetes, with clinical guidelines emphasising the need for individualised, culturally sensitive, and evidence-based nutritional counselling. Experts underline that adults with Type 2 diabetes should receive ongoing dietary guidance from healthcare professionals with specific expertise in nutrition, integrated within a personalised diabetes care plan.
In line with current recommendations, patients are encouraged to adopt healthy eating patterns similar to those advised for the general population — including high-fibre, low-glycaemic-index carbohydrates, reduced saturated fat intake, and balanced meal planning — while ensuring that decisions around care are made through shared decision-making and informed patient participation.
People have the right to be involved in discussions and make informed decisions about their care, as described in NICE’s information on making decisions about your care.
Making decisions using NICE guidelines explains how we use words to show the strength (or certainty) of our recommendations, and has information about prescribing medicines (including off-label use), professional guidelines, standards and laws (including on consent and mental capacity), and safeguarding. Healthcare professionals should follow our general guidelines for people delivering care:
• Patient experience in adult NHS services
• Shared decision making
• Medicines adherence
• Medicines optimisation
• Multimorbidity
• Decision making and mental capacity.
Dietary advice
• Provide individualised and ongoing nutritional advice from a healthcare professional with specific expertise and competencies in nutrition.
• Provide dietary advice in a form sensitive to the person’s needs, culture and beliefs, being sensitive to their willingness to change and the effects on their quality of life.
• Encourage adults with type 2 diabetes to follow the same healthy eating advice as the general population, which includes:
• eating high-fibre, low-glycaemic-index sources of carbohydrate, such as fruit, vegetables, wholegrains and pulses
• choosing low-fat dairy products
• eating oily fish
• controlling their intake of saturated and trans fatty acids.
• For recommendations on low-energy and very-low-energy diets for the management of type 2 diabetes, follow the:
• NHS Type 2 diabetes Path to Remission Programme
• NICE guideline on overweight and obesity management.
• Integrate dietary advice with a personalised diabetes management plan, including other aspects of healthy living such as increasing physical activity and losing weight.
• Individualise recommendations for carbohydrate and alcohol intake, and meal patterns. Make reducing the risk of hypoglycaemia a particular aim for people using insulin or an insulin secretagogue.
• Advise adults with type 2 diabetes that they can substitute a limited amount of sucrose-containing foods for other carbohydrates in the meal plan but should take care to avoid excess energy intake.
• Discourage adults with type 2 diabetes from using foods marketed specifically for people with diabetes.
• When adults with type 2 diabetes are admitted as inpatients to hospital or any other care setting, implement a meal planning system that provides consistency in the carbohydrate content of meals and snacks.
• For recommendations on wellbeing advice, see NICE’s guidelines on overweight and obesity management, physical activity: brief advice for adults in primary care, and tobacco.
Dietary Advice Key to Effective Type 2 Diabetes Management: NICE guidance
