Catering For Different Tastes When Cooking

I see variations on this question asked many times on the various forums I am on:

Being head cook and bottle washer, I have a question. Having D, I need certain foods, my son has become a meat and potatoes guy, my wife eats most anything, except a variety of veggies. I do not want to have to cook 3 separate plates to satisfy all. How do you cater to each taste, or do you? Is there a happy middle?

The same problem occurs for the person who is not the cook but does not want to offend the person who is. This may help those people: Cooking as a Survival Skill. But I realise that is not possible or practical for some.

Here is my own method for dealing with the situation. I am the cook in our household, mostly just for the two of us. Mum is invited for dinner a couple of times a week.

It is important to keep in mind that I am the only person with diabetes. Although I may believe others would benefit from my way of eating it is not my role or place to force them to eat as I do. We each have our own food likes, dislikes, aversions or allergies.

I am diabetic and careful about carbohydrates but otherwise omnivorous. My wife has a very limited menu, by choice, and a long list of foods she detests. For example, she will not eat fish or seafood, eggs, steak, many vegetables, milk, the list goes on. Her likes are basically meat (other than steak), starchy vegetables, peas, tomatoes and silverbeet (chard). My mother is omnivorous but, like most people, has a few foods she prefers to avoid.

If I restricted myself to cooking only the foods we all like my menu would become very limited and boring. I also actively seek to include fish and a wide range of seasonal vegetables in my diet. Therefore, at most meals for the two of us I cook three types of foods. Those I can eat, those my wife will eat, and those we both eat. The other night was a typical example. In the steamer I had potato and pumpkin (winter squash) simmering in the bottom section with silverbeet, carrots, cabbage and broccoli in the top. I cooked two loin lamb chops under the grill (broiler) for her and when they were almost cooked I seared and fried a fillet of Atlantic Salmon in a small skillet for myself.

At the table I put the salmon on my plate, the lamb chops on hers, and all the vegetables on a platter in the middle. We served ourselves from the platter. She had most of the potato and silverbeet; I took most of the rest.

When my mother or other people are dining with us I use the same method. I find out whether anyone has specific protein likes or dislikes and serve that appropriately, letting them select their own vegetables and starches from the centre of the table. For major feasts such as Christmas dinner everything is served buffet-style for diners to select as they wish.

It really isn't as difficult as it sounds, with a small amount of extra thought and effort keeping everyone at the table happy and healthy.

It Must Be OK - It's Sugar-Free! Wrong!

A very brief post to emphasise an important point.

When we as diabetics are choosing foods for the menu or checking the ingredients of a recipe, sugar should be treated as just another carbohydrate. It is more concentrated than most carbs but my meter has repeatedly shown me it is the total carbs that count, not just the sugar content, when I test my blood glucose after eating.

Food products which are marketed as sugar-free are very rarely carbohydrate-free. In fact, more often than not they have just as many carbs as the sugared versions. I encountered a classic example of this a couple of days ago when I saw a large display in my local Aldi store promoting 'healthy' sugar-free products. 

These are photos of just some of the products. Sorry about the smart-phone quality of the pics; the carb counts are clear enough. I'll let them prove my point.

99.5% Sugar-free Shortbread = 67.9% carbohydrates

 

99.5% Sugar-free Chocolate Digestive Biscuits = 61.3% carbohydrates

99.5% Sugar-free Wafer Biscuits = 62.4% carbohydrates

99.5% No Added Sugar Dark Chocolate = 57% carbohydrates

 

The piece-de-resistance. Sugar-free Mixed Fruit Drops:

  

I could not believe this one when I turned the can over. There was no added sugar, so it must be healthier than other fruit drops...yeah, right. 

It is 93% carbohydrates.

  

Always read those labels, folks.

Cheers, Alan, T2, Australia.
Everything in Moderation - Except Laughter

Do Doctors Matter?

I feel this is a very important point needing emphasis for the many type 2 diabetics I know participating in diabetes web forums, social media groups and similar online support groups.

I have seen this question posed too often lately:

"Do doctors matter other than for renewing prescriptions?"

The questioner usually complains about poor support (in their eyes) from their medical advisors and praises the help and support they have received from other diabetics on the web.

I understand where they are coming from. I have seen some abysmal diagnostic, testing and dietary advice by medical professionals reported on many forums by newly diagnosed people. I have seen those same people turn their lives around using suggestions from experienced people on those forums. 

I still unequivocally believe our doctors matter and must always be our primary source of medical information. 

I have learned a great deal about type 2 diabetes over the past decade but I do not pretend to have medical qualifications even though in some specific areas, such as testing or diet for type 2, I may believe I know more than some doctors.

I know my own limitations. If and when the time comes for more medication or insulin the doctor will be the first person I consult. After I consult him I may use the web or ask questions on forums to research the meds he prescribes to decide whether or not I will choose to follow his advice. But I will always see him first. 

If your own doctor does not meet your needs it is time to find another better doctor, not to simply ignore your doctor's advice.

On the rare occasions I decide not to follow prescribed advice after doing my own research I will also let him know and discuss it further with him before acting; as I have for the statins my doctor prescribes but I choose not to take. 

The final decision deciding the action to take is mine but I would be a fool to weigh anonymous advice on the web higher than the qualified advice of my doctor without a lot of thought and discussion with him.

The web is an incredible, wonderful and very useful information source but it is not always easy to sift the wheat from the chaff nor do we always have the training or experience to do that sifting wisely. The web will never replace the ability of a good doctor to interact with and personally treat a patient.

Cheers, Alan, T2, Australia.
Everything in Moderation - Except Laughter 

Must I test Before Meals Too?

Over a decade ago I learned this advice from a wise lady named Jennifer: Test, Test, Test. These days I endeavour to pay it forward by passing that on to every newly diagnosed person I encounter who is prepared to read it or listen to it. In that respect I am a testing evangelist ‘spreading the word’ although I do not press the point if the person does not want to hear it. My reasons are simple: twelve years later I am still awaiting the development of complications. When I look back to the day I first read it in 2002 I am quite convinced reading those words saved my life. 

Not all want to hear it, nor do those who do always accept it.  By far the two most common reasons for resistance are inconvenience and cost of the initial level of testing. Although I do not consider it a high level of testing new people do because their doctors either did not recommend testing at all or suggested only once or twice a day. Although my usual response to those objections is to point out everything has a price and failing to test sufficiently now may have a much higher health cost in later years, I fully accept that both points can be valid for individuals.

If the new type 2 diabetic leads a busy life, at home or at work or both, it can be a major inconvenience to put everything on hold for five minutes one and two hours after every meal. Add fasting and bedtime tests and you have a minimum of eight tests per day, more if snacks are included. That is swiftly reduced when discovery of the post-prandial peak enables reduction of post-meal tests from two to one, but that is still five to eight tests daily. Personally, I tested up to 20 times a day in that first week but I had the luxury of being retired at the time with government-subsidised test strips.

The good news is that such a high level of testing is not necessary for very long as the personal food-effect data-base grows from the results. I discuss that in detail in I'm a New Type 2. Do I Really Have to Test so Much? But for a new person the initial high testing load I suggest can be quite daunting.

The other objection is also valid for many. In some countries test strips can be either very expensive or restricted in prescribed quantity for type 2s by insurers or misguided doctors. When it can cost up to a dollar a test, ten tests a day can be a very significant drain on a limited budget. Some solve the problem by buying less expensively on the web, with associated risks including possibly dishonest suppliers and passed expiry dates; others search for the cheapest meters and strips available to them. Some of those can be good (I read good reports on forums about the Walmart Relion, but I have not used it myself) but in general ‘you get what you pay for’ tends to be true in any marketplace.

Those are the reasons I wrote Testing on a Budget. The method works less rapidly, but it still works eventually and uses a lot less strips.

With that background I quite deliberately choose not to recommend testing before meals to newly diagnosed people. Persuading a new person to test whose doctor did not even suggest a meter is hard enough, persuading them to test as Jennifer suggests is more difficult. Adding even more tests before meals can be pushing the envelope too far.

Those who promote testing before the meal tend to ignore that aspect. They suggest testing after meals is a waste of time if the person does not also test before the meal. Their logic is that without the pre-meal test the rise in blood glucose caused by the meal cannot be accurately known. That last part is technically true but I do not think it is of sufficient value to add those tests to the load. Knowing the trends for the actual peaks reached, without knowing the pre-meal base levels, was quite sufficient for me to swiftly modify my menu for good post-meal blood glucose levels.

Pre-meal testing adds three to five tests daily to the high level of testing I suggested. As I mentioned earlier my primary reason for not recommending pre-meal testing is that it is difficult enough to convince newly diagnosed type 2s, shocked and scared from their diagnosis and nervous about poking holes in themselves, to test peak-post-prandial at all when the doctors do not prescribe it. It is even more difficult to convince them to do it as often as suggested in Test, Test, Test or Test, Review, Adjust. My first aim is to persuade them to do that much. Adding even more tests to that advice can be counter-productive.

A motivated minority follows the pre-meal testing advice but, sadly, being told to add even more tests is the last straw for some. They revert back to the ‘test fasting and pre-dinner, if at all’ advice they heard from their doctor and drop the idea of post-meal testing altogether.

In my own case I tested pre-meal a few times in the first couple of weeks but soon found those tests became boringly predictable, apart from the odd crazy result. Later I started to understand why some of those results weren't crazy. Many factors, not just food, affect the pre-meal level: dawn phenomenon or liver dumps; exercise; stress; other medical conditions and medications; infections and illness; or excessive time since the last meal to mention just some. The same carbohydrate input at the same time of day may cause quite different rises if the pre-meal test was affected by those factors because the ingestion of the food may cause other reactions in the body as well as some becoming blood glucose. As a personal example I suffer from dawn phenomenon. My post-breakfast one-hour level is often lower than my fasting level because the low-carb meal stopped the liver dump without adding to the load.

More significantly, I found that my trends for the post-meal peak after identical meals at the same time of day were remarkably consistent regardless of the pre-meal tests. The delta or rise was sometimes very different, but the absolute level reached was rarely off the trend line. Try it yourself to see. My logic is if I reach levels I do not like, such as 10 mmol/l (180 mg/dl), it didn’t matter much whether I started at 5 (90) or 8 (133) – I still went too high and I should review the menu. Following that logic worked pretty well for me. Minor variations are ironed out as I do not base decisions on one test but on the trending effects of many.

I do not use insulin or an insulin-stimulating medication. For those that do, your doctors or educators will advise whether pre-meal testing is necessary to calculate doses. That is a quite different reason for testing.

If you have the time, motivation and cash to support pre-meal testing as well as one or two tests after every meal, plus fasting and bedtime, do it. But I see no need to, especially in the first few weeks.

For the rest of us I consider pre-meal testing to be usually a waste of a test strip unless it was prescribed by your medical advisor for their information. The only time I test pre-meal apart from my pre-breakfast fasting is occasionally an hour or two after lunch or dinner to see if I can have a dessert. If I am high, the answer is no. If not, I might indulge in a treat.

Cheers, Alan, T2, Australia.

Everything in Moderation - Except Laughter