Nutrisystem Diabetes: Are You Being Fooled By Program Claims?

Nutrisystem Diabetes, America’s ^#1 diabetes home delivery weight loss program that claims to lower A1c by 1.02%, delivering your favorite foods without fads or gimmicks. But is this entirely true?

After we heard the negative experience of one of our members who used this product/service, we decided to investigate further.

Here we break down the true facts behind the product and claims and our opinion about it’s likely effectiveness.

How Does Nutrisystem Work?

Nutrisystem is a meal service that ships “healthy,” portion-controlled meals to your door. They claim that following their meal plans will help you lose pounds and get better control of your diabetes.

Although Nutrisystem provides slightly different options based on your gender and dietary preferences (such as vegetarianism), following their meal plan would limit your daily calories to between 1,200 and 1,500 calories.

Another main focus of the program is to portion control and keep you eating every 2 to 3 hours in order to “stabilize your blood sugar.”

Following the diabetes plan, you eat six times a day starting with breakfast at 7AM and ending with an evening snack at 9PM.

On Nutrisystem you are provided breakfast, lunch, dinner, and one snack per day. Outside of that, you are responsible for adding in your own mix of fresh produce and lean dairy products to round out your daily nutrition.

Nutrisystem claims that their meal plans are simply “your favorite foods made healthier!”

However, are these Nutrisystem meals really that healthy?

The Nutrisystem Diet: How Does It Really Stack Up In Terms of Nutrition?

At first glance, a program like Nutrisystem sounds like a dream come true!

You get nutritious, diabetes-friendly food sent to your doorstep, you get to snack on yummy pizza and cookies all day, and you hardly have to do any cooking.

The only problems is, programs that sound too good to be true, typically are. And, boy, in our opinion, the promises made by Nutrisystem diet program are too good to be true.

The core plan claims to provide you with “simple meal plans with the right balance of lean protein, smart carbs like fiber, and healthy fats,” but when you look a little closer the meals themselves don’t reflect this at all.

The Nutrisystem sample menu is filled with the usual “diet foods” like sugary energy bars and an assortment of processed meals that are high in carbohydrates!

They boast that their meals focus on “low glycemic carbs,” which is fine, but relying on glycemic index alone may set you up for failure because what really matters is the total amount of carbs you’re eating in a day.

Let’s take a moment to examine a few of Nutritsystem’s so-called “nutritious” food options.

First up is the Nutrisystem Dark Chocolate and Sea Salt Nut Bar.

They claim that this “guilt-free” snack contains 7 grams of fiber and 6 grams of protein, which is true, but it also contains 16 grams of carbohydrates.

And while you might think 16 grams isn’t all too bad, the major downfall of this snack bar is that it is highly processed.

The ingredients list for the snack bar looks like this:

• Almonds, peanuts, chicory root fiber, dark chocolate coating (sugar, fractionated palm kernel oil, cocoa processed with alkali, lactose, palm oil, soy lecithin, vanilla), walnuts, rice crisp (rice flour, rice bran, raisin juice concentrate, honey, salt) honey, organic gum acacia, glycerin, peanut oil, sea salt, soy lecithin (as emulsifier), mixed tocopherols.

There are a number of ingredients on that list that in our opinion, just don’t fit into a healthy diabetic diet.

Their Stuffed Apple Pie, another “guilt-free” snack or dessert, also contains more than 35 ingredients including modified food starch, resistant maltodextrin, and plenty of empty carbohydrates like brown sugar. And will deliver 25 grams of carbs and just 4 grams of fiber.

So in short, these “guilt-free snacks” are nothing more than junk!

There’s a reason we encourage fresh, whole foods. Because they provide way more nutrients than processed foods do. These nutrients are the fuel for your body, and when your body is given the right fuel, guess what happens?

Your metabolism resets itself, blood sugar lowers, so does cholesterol and blood pressure, and your diabetes improves immensely – we’ve seen our members reversing their diabetes, so we know that eating the right foods works!

It is pretty clear that programs like Nutrisystem are more focused on cutting calories than they are on providing actual nutrition from whole food sources, or providing actual nutritional guidance that really works for people with type 2 diabetes and prediabetes.

Nutrisystem Dinners Overview

Sadly, Nutrisystem doesn’t get much better when it comes to dinner options.

Just like everything else they offer, the majority of their dinner meal plans are pretty high in carbs.

We encourage people to eat around 50 to 80 grams of total carbohydrates per day. Why? Because there is ample research to show a lower carb diet can help you treat your diabetes effectively!

Eating just a few Nutrisystem meals every day would put you way over your daily carb limit.

For example, the Nutrisystem Parmasian Chicken dinner consists of a breaded chicken breast on a bed of spaghetti noodles topped with sauce and cheese. This meal contains 38 grams carbs, 6 grams fiber, and 14 grams protein.

Now let’s compare that to a DMP dinner that gives you a great tasting meal with almost half the carbs.

Our Creamy Mustard Chicken Noodle dinner contains only 22 grams of carbs, ups the fiber to 10 grams, and gives you an amazing 69 grams of quality protein!

Another Nutrisystem dinner option is an Italian Sausage and Turkey Pepperoni Pizza.

This dinner is advertised as “high in fiber” but the pizza is only a 4 grams of fiber. But… a whopping 33 grams of carbs and 30+ ingredients – yet another processed food to add to your menu.

Compare that option to a homemade pizza with nutritious toppings on a low carb crust recipe from DMP. This almond-flour crust only contains 12 grams of carbs and it has 6 grams of fiber, plus you can top your pizza with whatever you’d like.

Or why not try our Zucchini Boat Pizza’s. These are always a hit, and again, you can load them up with whatever fresh ingredients you like, for a fraction of the carbs (18g) and more fiber (6g).

Feel free to bulk up the fiber count even further by adding mushrooms, olives, colorful peppers, and a few fresh spinach leaves to your pizza. Sprinkle on a handful of mozzarella and top it all off with a clean meat protein if you’d like.

That sounds a lot better for your blood sugar levels than a lifeless, frozen, processed pizza from Nutrisystem, right?

How Much Does Nutrisystem Cost?

These Nutrisystm meals are not cheap – costing between $10-13 per day, depending on the plan.

In addition to the frozen meals you receive, you are still responsible for preparing (and paying for) four meals per week on your own, along with supplyng your own vegetables and yogurt to snack on throughout the day.

So, even though most of your meals are provided you still have to hit the grocery store and cook a substantial amount of your own food.

And sure, at the end of the day Nutrisystem might not seem too expensive…until you realize what you’re actually getting for your money.

For just under a hundred dollars a week, Nutrisystm will supply you with plenty of high-carb, highly processed frozen meals that aren’t very nutritious and probably won’t help you reach your health goals!

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Nutrisystem D: Does It Work?

Nutritsystem advertise that you will “Lose weight and lower your A1C by 1.02%*” by using their Nutrisystem D program. But unfortunately, these claims are largely unfounded. 

You see, after reading the fine print, you’ll discover that the “studies” this statistic is based upon were:

1. Funded by Nutrisystem itself
2. The study was never published in a peer reviewed journal

So as far as we know, it could all be heresy – who knows!

And, on another note, many have complained about their poor customer service (you can find evidence of this on social media).

One DMP subscriber also supports the fact that the Nutrisystem may be nothing more than another fad diet selling promises, she said:

“I bought Nutrisystem D a couple of months ago and I have had trouble sticking with it. It seems like there are way too many carbs. I am not succeeding. My doctor now has me starting insulin.”

Thankfully, this person has since joined our 30 Day Turnaround Program™ and is already seeing better results. That’s because our programs and meal plans are founded upon hundreds of published studies that show the best foods to eat!

We don’t sell fads or dreams, we help you learn to eat the way your body was designed to eat – natural, whole foods full of nutrition! And, we make it easy for you with weekly meal plans and cooking classes.

Low Fat, High Carb Diets Are Outdated!

Nutrisystem founds their diabetic diet on the same principles as most other unsuccessful diabetes diets – low fat, high carb!

Even though many websites and programs still offer this way of eating, there really is no debate – low fat, high carb diets are outdated – especially in regards to treatment for type 2 diabetes and prediabetes.

We have been encouraging people to eat a low carb diet for years – because it works! 

And we are now seeing growing amounts of evidence emerging to support this fact, not to mention the real life results of members and subscribers.

So, despite what you may have heard elsewhere, when it comes to dietary treatment for type 2 diabetes and prediabetes, low carb diets produce the best results. In fact, all the information we share at DMP is based on scientific evidence!

We invest substantial time and efforts scouring through research papers because we want you to know the truth about what works to improve your health, so just browse about out resources and you’ll be setting yourself up for success.

Conclusion

Without a doubt, healthy eating and healthy lifestyle are critical to diabetes management.

But after looking at the nutritional value offered by the Nutrisystem D plan, in our opinion, Nutritsystem D may help you with losing weight in the short term, but their claims for lowering A1c are unfounded, therefore, with the high levels of carbs provided by the diet, the program is unlikely to work for better blood sugar management.

And you know what? You don’t need to buy into an expensive fad diet plan like Nutrisystem Diabetes in order to lose weight and improve your health. Just reduce the amount of carbs in your diet and make better food choices – choose to eat lower carb, nutritious, whole foods at every meal (here’s a food list to help). In most cases, it’s as simple as that!

If you need help to do that, check out our weekly low carb meal plans.