Back to the Diet

Yup, several months ago I promised to look into a diet that was both healthy and environmentally friendly. I even created a reading list, none of which I have had the time to read. Luckily, as you more likely to hear even from aging boomers like me, "there's an app for that." Several in fact.

I have a gazillion cookbooks around the house, but seldom have the time to cook anything other than old standards. Still if you are going to start a diet I thought having a cookbook or two on my IPad wouldn't hurt. i started with the app version of an old favorite cookbook "How to Cook Anything." In the app world this was an expensive purchase at  $9.99, but it is well worth it because of extensive entries on ingredients, techniques, and basic and advanced recipes. There is a vegetarian version of this book as well. You could just stop there, but I went on to add two more recipe apps. Big Oven claims 170,000 recipes with additions like menu planners, shopping lists and the ability to rate and post recipes. You can get the recipes without the inevitable "free membership," but the advanced features require you to give up your e-mail address. Access to the 170,000 recipes is free, and the site is highly rated. Punchfork, also free, searches popular food blogs for new recipes. Armed with all this, I should never be bored with a standard recipe again!

I'm going to get a little scientific in a moment so I added a unit converter app to change grams to ounces. The app I chose also converts currencies and just about everything else except Baptists to Unitarians. I also added a little free app called Sous Chef that has multiple kitchen timers, a place to enter recipes and then convert them to smaller or larger portions, a table of kitchen conversions like tablespoons to fluid ounces, and a reference section to notes. The free version of this program has ads, the "pro" version without ads costs a whopping 99 cents. Either version is worth it just for the multiple timers.

Ultimately, food is just protein, carbohydrates, and fat. When it comes to creating the framework of a diet, these are the things that give you the calories needed to fuel your body. The very important stuff like vitamins, minerals and antioxidants should be added into your diet after you build your framework. You've probably read about or tried a diet that emphasizes one or another of the major building blocks. For a type two diabetic like me, carbohydrates have to be the focus of any diet. Since there is an "epidemic" of type II diabetes going around you might be interested in understanding carbohydrates as well.

Basically, a carb based diet sets a limit for total carbs in a day, but carbs come in two varieties fast or slow. Fast carbs cause a spike in blood glucose and the up and down spikes of a diabetic who has trouble processing carbs probably causes most of the damage of the disease. Fast carbs are needed for bursts of energy. If your exercise level suddenly goes from couch potato to jogger you might need a shot of sugar, but for the most part maintaining a steady flow of fuel to the body is the goal. Since we're only eating three meals a day instead of constantly snacking (often suggested for diabetics and a good idea), you need to be able to measure the impact of the carbs in a meal on your blood sugar. This is where the Glycemic Index comes in.  This is an estimate (lots of things can change it) of how much of a certain carb will raise blood sugar. Cane sugar has an index of 100 and the index is created in relation to that so the carbs in a baked potato (without skin) have a GI of 98, beer has a GI of 36, and V-8 has a GI of 43. Anything under 55 is considered carb healthy because the sugar in the carbs is broken down slowly.

But wait there's more! There is a new concept called Glycemic Load which combines the Glycemic Index of a food with the amount of carbs in the food. Foods with a GL or below 10 are considered most healthy for general consumption. Mostly foods with a low GI also have a low GL, but, blessedly, some high GI foods like watermelon are low GL foods because watermelon is mostly water with relatively few carbs.

What you end up with is a giant math problem-find the number of total carbohydrates of the right type that will allow you to maintain a steady blood sugar no matter what your activity level. This is why diabetes is such a hard disease to manage. Its effects are insidious and the calculations needed to keep it at bay are complex and ever changing. Luckily, there is an app for that as well with better ones potentially on the way. More on that tomorrow.