unappetizing | Slow Food Fast

10 (or so) Warning Signs of a Half-Baked Diabetes Cookbook

Posted on November 4, 2013 by DebbieN

For the past two months I’ve been scouring the library and bookstore shelves in search of practical guidelines for preventing and managing Type II diabetes with diabetes-careful meal plans.

I have two goals for myself:

1. Get down to a healthier weight by eating less and exercising more–this is the big one with the best correlation to reversing prediabetes. And it’s going okay but slowly.

2. Eat balanced meals with somewhat less carb per meal, fewer free sugars and fewer calories overall than usual. This is the easier one generally…as long as I keep a food diary. Luckily, I know how to cook and I’ve been doing meal planning for a Type I diabetic child for four years now, so I know how to count carbs. And when I don’t, I have a copy of the American Dietetic Association’s handy, simple and cheap $3 or so guide on the shelf. And a link to the USDA nutrition database for the exotic occasional items like chestnuts in the shell (note to self, about 5 grams apiece).

But I still wondered if the diabetes and weight loss cookbooks I see around are solid and I’ve just been too lazy, arrogant or impatient to take them seriously all these years. Hence the trips to the library.

Because no doubt about it, the diabetes cookbook scene is burgeoning. There are loads of good-looking cookbooks out with pretty, gourmet-looking recipe photos and promises of perfect blood sugar management amid the desserts on the cover.

Here’s the short version of this post: a read through most of these books is NOT encouraging. All the popular diet book gimmickry of the past 40 years seems to have been transferred to a lucrative new target (read: gullible victim) market, complete with bright, shiny new drug company advertising and sponsorship potential on the coordinating web sites.

Considering that there’s no precise required diet for diabetes, just guidelines for budgeting meal carb totals and keeping some kind of commonsense balance between starches, fiber and sugars, even the premise of prescriptive diabetic cooking guides is a little shaky to start with. But what’s actually being presented as guidance in these popular books is far from that approach.

Even cookbooks affiliated with or endorsed by organizations like the American Diabetes Association and so on fail some pretty simple commonsense tests for honesty, accuracy, consistency, or relevance to standard public health guidance on preventing, managing and reversing Type II diabetes by way of diet. And if you don’t already know your way around carb counting and portion size measurement, they’re extremely confusing. Sometimes even on purpose.

So here are the main common flaws I’ve discovered in most of these books, with a few books singled out for personal ire and bemusement. You might want to consider these as warning signs if you’re looking for actual guidance to get you through.

10 Warning Signs that Your Diabetes Guide Cookbook is Half-Baked

1. The Dessert First approach to diabetes management. Telltale sign: does it show cake or ice cream on the cover? About half the books I scanned do. They treat desserts and snacks as a top priority, as though that were what diabetes control is all about. As though sweets were somehow necessary at every meal, or even every week. None of them ever say, “just stick with a small apple or orange most days. No recipe required.” Actual endocrinologists recommend keeping desserts occasional and snacks un-glamorous and limited in carb.

1b. Aside: Many of the dessert-first books show cheesecake on the cover, usually a 1/8 to 1/10 cake portion–a pretty hefty wedge by any standards. This is a come-on–cheesecake is usually high in fat calories, so it’s rarely a good pick for anyone attempting to lose weight (the main strategy for Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Desserts, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Magazines, nutrition, top 10, unappetizing | Tagged: agave syrup, artificial sweeteners, carb counting, diabetes cookbooks, diabetic desserts, Eat This, Flat Belly Diet! Cookbook, glycemic index, Joslin Diabetes Center Gourmet Cookbook, MUFAs, Not That!, online diet plans, Splenda, Type 2 diabetes, weight loss cookbooks | Comments Off on 10 (or so) Warning Signs of a Half-Baked Diabetes Cookbook

Fifty, or “Sugar Shock, Part II”

Posted on October 9, 2013 by DebbieN

I’m back, though a little bummed out. I didn’t post anything at all in September. There’s a reason for that. No, it’s not because I turned 50 last month (which I did). No, it’s not because I rebelled and declared against cooking anything ever again (which I almost wish I had, even though most of what I cooked was pretty good).

It’s because my routine physical showed up with a higher-than-normal-for-nondiabetics A1c even though my fasting blood glucose was under 100. The A1c measures the fraction of hemoglobins (the red blood cell proteins that include iron atoms and transport oxygen) with glucose molecules stuck to them. There’s always some level of glycosylated protein in the bloodstream, but above a certain threshold it means your average blood glucose for the previous 3 months or so has been over 100. Not a good thing at 50. And when I borrowed my daughter’s old glucose meter and tested myself before breakfast a couple of days in a row, I saw why my A1c had been up–my fasting glucose was now hovering about 105, 110, even though it didn’t happen to be up on the day I tested at the lab.

Don’t that just figure, I thought. Happy birthday to me.

So I’ve been pretty PO’d and somewhat panicked. I do NOT want to become a full-blown diabetic. One in the family is more than plenty, thanks. Even though all the finest news outlets announced today that Tom Hanks is now diabetic. Not a huge comfort.

I think of myself as eating a generally healthy diet. I know full well how to count carbs, having had to for the past 4 years. My blood pressure’s good. I walk nearly every day. I know how to balance a meal.

But the Type II diabetes prevention and management advice I can find in the popular diabetes magazines and cookbooks (and online sites), even the ones endorsed by the American Diabetes Association, always seems to be ludicrously lax and useless compared with what we already have to do at home.

I’ve spent the past month reading up and seeing why the popular diabetes cookbooks and magazine recipe sections seem so useless–or even deceptive. Next post, coming up this week. You won’t believe what I found in most of them (other than all the pharmaceutical and sweetener ads, of course).

But for now, back to basics. Can I do the simple common-sense stuff they tell you (without actual instructions) at the doctor’s office to back away from diabetes risk?

Marion Nestle has pointed out that in large studies, the factors with the highest Continue reading →

Filed under: books, cooking, Diabetes, Food Politics, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: A1c, caffeine and diabetes, carb counting, diabetes prevention, fasting blood glucose, food diary, Marion Nestle, prediabetes, Tom Hanks, Type II diabetes, weight loss | Comments Off on Fifty, or “Sugar Shock, Part II”

Beating sugar shock

Posted on August 26, 2013 by DebbieN

A new dietary sugar intake study from the University of Utah shows what happens when mice eat the kind of diet many Americans now eat: 25% of total calories in added sugars and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS). The results were chilling: females died at twice the rate of controls, while males lost fertility and territorial instinct. And as the researchers pointed out when the corn and sugar associations tried to downplay the significance and shuffle blame, city mice tend to eat what humans near them eat. Yeah.

So of course, as the mother of a diabetic kid with a known and prominent sweet tooth (that goes for both of us, but we also love vegetables, or we’d never survive), I have to ask, how do you keep your added sugar calories under maybe 13% instead of 25%?

I don’t have a simple answer to this, particularly as I’ve discovered that most of my friends don’t cook anymore, if they ever did. Most of them think making soup means opening a can and dinner means ordering pizza. Snack, and occasionally breakfast too, is a power bar (shudder). All vegetables are precut, and many die in the fridge of sad neglect. They have good intentions; Whole Foods rubs its hands with glee when they see them wander in.

And although they’re smart, they have a very hard time wrapping their heads around the differences between added sugar, “naturally”-sourced or “unprocessed” brown sugar, sugars naturally present in whole unprocessed foods…agave syrup, power bars, “sugar-free” cookies…blah blah blah…all the gimmicks, in other words.

They don’t really understand the noncommercial measure that counts most for actual diabetics: total grams of carbohydrate in the current meal. Because that’s what you have to calculate and dose insulin for. Not just the sugars.

But even then, you don’t calculate for the whole day’s eating and just give one big dose based on a guess of what you might eat later. You calculate meal by meal and give a dose of short-acting insulin for that meal.

Calculating added sugar calories against total calories in a day is really difficult when you’re the mouse, so to speak. That’s the way nutrition researchers think about measuring the effects of your diet. It’s not the way people think as they’re getting ready to eat.

Especially if you’re eating out or you don’t have every food label right in front of you or you don’t walk around every minute with a meticulous food diary. It’s like doing taxes when all you want to do is choose and eat a decent lunch.

WHAT DOES WORK?

I’d say, thinking like a diabetic. Or rather, in this case, like a diabetic’s mom.

First, definitely go meal-by-meal. Be sane.
Second, in any given meal–or snack–estimate the sugar grams as a fraction of the total carb grams, not the total calories, which can come from fat as well as carb. Too confusing.
Third, just count all the sweet stuff together. The whole idea of comparing added sugar vs. total consumed sugar is a pain in the tush to figure out. Once it’s in your system, it’s all sugar, and popular New Age-y fantasies about agave syrup and Hawaiian brown sugar and palm sugar being “natural” and “healthier” tend to fog things even worse.
Count fresh fruit, plain milk and yogurt–-these are also in the form of sugar, not starch–and just figure that fresh fruit, milk and yogurt are the best choices (duh) per serving because they’re less concentrated in sugars than candy, pies, cakes, cookies, snack bars, power bars and …. syrup.
And then really look at the nutrition labels for anything packaged or processed. Including vegetables. If nothing else, it’ll be obvious why I rant against carrot juice instead of whole carrots, for example…

The first step for any of this, though is to know how much carb you’re actually eating.

Step 0. Know thou thy carbs. Continue reading →

Filed under: Desserts, Diabetes, Food Politics, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: added sugars, carb counting, diabetes, low-carb diet, nutrition labeling, sugar consumption, sugar-free | Comments Off on Beating sugar shock

What’s my beef with burgers?

Posted on August 20, 2013 by DebbieN

As usual, I’m slightly behind the times on all the really exciting and futuristic food news. But a conversation I had yesterday with an older volunteer at my local library brought back the article and my (as usual) sarcastic thoughts on the way forward in American food culture. The man I talked to grew up in Arcadia, about 10 minutes southeast of Pasadena, back in the 1950s when it was still mostly farmland, and he rode a horse to school–and was often sent home with it early because it started fertilizing the school grounds at a copious rate. Nowadays, they’d have to pay good money for the stuff.

This gentleman, about my mother’s age, was talking about the younger generation, his grandkids, and while he admired how adept they seem to be with sophisticated technology, he shook his head at the fact that his grandson was the only kid last year in his kindergarten class who had any idea where tomatoes come from, because his family was the only one that had a garden or (perhaps) ate vegetables that didn’t miraculously appear, wan, grainy orangeish slices, mixed with pickle slices, on top of a hamburger in foil paper. “It’s all burgers now,” the man shook his head. “That’s all anyone seems to eat anymore–hamburgers and hotdogs. That’s not food.”

It was exactly what I’d been thinking all summer long, looking at the magazine covers and newspaper food sections. Which is why I view the biggest food story of the year a little differently than most biochem-trained enthusiasts….

Two weeks ago, an Austrian nutritionist, an American journalist, and a cell biologist in the Netherlands shared the first public taste of a hamburger made from beef tissue cultured in laboratory from cattle stem cells.

Ordinarily we’d all be running around in circles throwing our hands up in the air and, depending on our political bent, either chanting “This is the Age of Aquarius” or else screaming “Soylent Green is People!” Or possibly “It’s Alive! It’s Alive!” (quickly followed with a heavy-booted reprise of “Puttin’ on the Ritz”). I mean, it’s a big deal. Right? It is.

Yeah. Well. So, what is it, really, this synthetic stem cell-derived miracle burger? Synthetic beef, lab-cultured in (yes) flasks of nutrient sera as the starting stem cells differentiate into beef-style shoulder muscle (read, brisket?) cells and some fat cells. The animal rights people are thrilled and dreaming of scaleup that could eliminate the need for stockyard cruelties, the vegetarians say they’d be first in line to try it, and…apparently no one yet has asked what exactly is in the nutrient serum to grow the little strings of muscle tissue.

Is it a vegetarian-sourced solution of amino acids and so on or does it (as I suspect) derive from the more usual beef and other animal broth, made (inexpensively for laboratory consumption) from boiled-down hooves and skins and various meat scraps? Maybe it ain’t time to celebrate that aspect just yet.

But still, it’s a big step forward. Isn’t it?

I mean, an actual New Age synthetic beef alternative using the latest advances in cell biology. Very exciting.

Except…they’ve used all this very sophisticated technology to develop…a hamburger.

For this test, the 20,000 or so individual strands of muscle tissue they managed to harvest (after a five-year developmental process funded by by Sergey Brin, cofounder of Google, no less, and 3 months or so of growing this particular sample) were patted lovingly into shape and fluffed out to reasonable volume and held together with the help of some salt, some breadcrumbs, and some egg powder. And some beet juice for realistic coloring because the strands were a little more yellow than pink, somehow. And then the sample was cooked and eaten plain by the lab director and his two volunteers.

Who complained that it was really hard to judge the flavor of the synthesized beef without any of their favorite toppings on board. No jalapenos or cheese or pickle relish, no salt and pepper, no aged gouda, no ketchup. They both skipped the lettuce and tomato they were offered, to say nothing of the bun. And they couldn’t judge the meat on its own. Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Food Politics, meat and poultry, Odd food, Oddities, unappetizing | Tagged: fast food, hamburgers, lab burger, meat industry, Morgan Spurlock, Sergey Brin, stem cell technology, synthetic beef | 4 Comments »

Say “Celà n’est sûre[-gelée-]ment pas le cas”

Posted on July 14, 2013 by DebbieN

Following on reports this spring that Polish (and probably other-sourced) horsemeat made it through France and into British frozen supermarket lasagne, now we get word of even more devious (and frankly depressing) culinary misdeeds in today’s Washington Post online:

French restaurants acknowledge serving factory-frozen food

A surprising number of cafés are apparently serving up microwaved meals instead of cooking them in-house. Even the éclair, which doesn’t take a lot of time to cobble together, even for an amateur like me, is no longer safe. The profit margin is too high on these items, and the savings in cooking staff are phenomenal. In a down market, what else would you expect?

But it’s a big embarrassment for a country that’s traded primarily on its gastronomic leadership for decades since WWII. No, WWI. No, wait–probably since the Napoleonic era. Or before the Revolution. Cyrano de Bergerac does a soliloquy based on cream horns and other such items, if I recall.

Well, to tell you the truth, though, I’m not sure whether I’m shocked or relieved. Judging from what my family and I were able to eat in 2006 in Paris, I’d say that in a few cases (cafés within walking distance of museum exits, chosen in part for meltdown-avoidance) frozen might even be a step up from one or two of the overpriced restaurant meals we had (a horrid, horrid “salade niçoise” featuring canned green beans comes to mind). Those few meals were, and I can be generous when I have to, mediocre in a way that would be excusable in suburban America on travel but which were much less than okay given that it was Paris.

Mostly we ate food that wasn’t (comparatively, anyhow) too expensive (we skipped the meat dishes, since we keep kosher) and couldn’t be frozen well enough to fool customers who know how to cook. So omelets cooked where we could see them, felafel served with freshly chopped red cabbage, open-faced sandwiches, breads from a bakery that smelled like yeast and flour, not like plastic bags, and so on. The frozen items tended to be ice cream, which is supposed to be frozen. But that was a year or so before the big bank crashes, the collapse of the housing bubble in America and “too big to fail” and even the Madoff scandal. And even then things weren’t quite as glam, at the moderate end, as we’d been primed for.

And on the other other hand, what does it mean that so many French restaurants have resorted to this kind of tactic, microwaving (and charging for) tuna steaks with ratatouille accompaniment, as in the article? What, other than money of course, and the effects of a deep recession that’s hit France pretty hard this past year.

What it means, in part, is that (also according to the article) flash-freezing techniques are now at a point, at least in France, where they can keep the food acceptable in quality and that the suburban factories where these dishes are put together and frozen are doing a pretty fair job, fair enough to fool even moderately experienced diners (not just tourists). And that the “restaurants”–who knows if they’ll get to keep that title now that they’ve been exposed–have figured out how to be at least marginally competent at microwaving so they don’t just ruin the food.

Better if they were cooking fresh. Or, from the perspective of an avid microwaver, better if they were using their microwaves for something more sophisticated than defrost-and-warm. Better, since so many of the younger working French no longer cook for themselves very much, if the restaurants, cafés and bistros took their role as gastronomic role-model and rallying point a little more to heart. Certainly they shouldn’t be pretending to cook from scratch and charging commensurate prices.

But I wonder–is the food they’re serving significantly better in quality than America’s mass-produced frozen meals-for-one? It might just be, since it’s a more recently introduced phenomenon in France, and it’s been designed to pass muster as though it were cooked fresh. For such a fraud to be successful, the flash-frozen food cannot be like American tv dinners. It just can’t. It might be that many of these factory-produced dishes are still a lot less processed than the miseries perpetrated by Swanson, Kraft, Stouffer’s and so on over here. So maybe we need to take another look at their techniques and demand better quality in the frozen food section here, foods that don’t have aroma of oversalted wet cardboard clinging to them once thawed.

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Food Politics, haute cuisine, history, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: culinary standards, food fraud, France, French restaurants, frozen foods, gastronomy, microwaving | Comments Off on Say “Celà n’est sûre[-gelée-]ment pas le cas”

Post-Passover and the Unholy Host(ess)

Posted on May 1, 2013 by DebbieN

Grating horseradish (at least for a small quantity) is not really the big deal I once thought because I saw a superhostess friend of mine struggle with it every year. While you’re admiring my diligence and handmade everything, just like my friend but slightly saner, please go ahead and dig the groovy paper plates. The only way to do Passover, or any obligatory celebration, in my humble opinion.

Last week a friend at shul asked me, tongue in cheek, whether we could use an extra couple of boxes of leftover matzah. What can you say to an offer like that?

I asked him if he wanted to trade with us–we both seemed to have the same amount and brand. He sighed and said that even his chickens, which eat almost any kind of scraps, are still sick of matzah at this point. So’s our cat (do not ask why cats think matzah is interesting. It makes no more sense than why they go after taco chips).

This is all by way of explaining why I haven’t been blogging so much lately. Is there still something new to discover about Passover cooking? Other, I mean, than the tentative trend to re-include legumes and rice. This year, unpleasantly, the bag of rice I bought turned out to be rancid (you don’t need me to explain this. The sour or barny smell will clue you in if you ever get a bag that’s off, and no it won’t rinse or cook out. Take it back to the store). Was it a Message from the Almighty ™ or just a bad bag of rice? Only the potato knows. In any case…

The week before Passover, I tend to feel a lot more like Bart Simpson than usual. Even my hair gets spikier (though not blond, never blond). I envision Bart standing before the chalkboard at Pesach, having committed yet another farfetched classroom sin. Only my litany goes something like this:

I will eat mostly vegetables.
I will not eat any foods containing hidden matzah after the seder.
I will not eat foods adding up in practice to six eggs a day OR anything made mostly of potato–except for an actual plain steamed potato.
I will not just scarf canned coconut macaroons when I don’t know what I really need to be eating or am too lazy to find it.
I will not let my husband buy fake Passover cheerios for a zillion bucks a box when five full boxes of whole wheat matzah are staring at me, I have sliced almonds AND steam-defatted organic coconut shreds in the freezer, AND brown sugar and cinnamon, and that’s all you need to make matzahnola from scratch in five seconds flat. Or we can just eat plain yogurt with a spoonful of jam or some berries.
I will eat yogurt.
I will make soup.
I will resist the temptation to buy yet another fresh unopened can of potato starch. I still have 95 percent of last year’s.
Next year I am launching the Paschal answer to the Washington Post‘s Peeps Competition. I think I’ll call it The ‘Roon Run. Dioramas made from canned macaroons in any configuration, with or without goggle-eyes, toothpicks, pipe cleaners, construction paper in many forms and (of course) glitter. Almost like the real thing, only not purple, pink or yellow…

Sigh. Now that Pesach is over, except for the three boxes of matzah we still have and which we are supposedly allowed to eat any time of the year….I can add one or two more items to my chalkboard manifesto.

Number one, I will not cook seventy-two times a day. For anyone. Which is what it often feels like when your husband and child are both at home the whole week, or nearly.

And really, what great things was I making? Mostly the same stuff I always make, only with potatoes instead of pasta or rice.

Well, there were a few improvements this year:

Zucchini latkes–Grate a zucchini or two and about a quarter of an onion or just add a couple of chopped scallions into a bowl, then a clove of garlic, then crumble some feta and add chopped basil or a bit of thyme, stir in an egg and a spoonful of matzah meal, and fry in patties in olive oil. Quantities? Quantities are for finicky people who actually follow recipes. I’m not sure I qualify anymore.

More refined whole-wheat Passover blintzes: Whole wheat matzah cake meal still tends to be a bit gritty if you use it straight, and it doesn’t have as much cohesiveness as you’d like for crêpes. I found I could grind it finer successfully by dumping half a cup at a time in my poor abused coffee grinder and whizzing it a few seconds.

Crêpes for 10 blintzes should be about half a cup of “Turkish grind” whole wheat matzah cake meal, a spoonful of potato starch, a cup of milk and two eggs mixed in. Then you have to let the batter sit because matzah meal is so much drier than regular flour that it will thicken much further than you expected. Add more milk to thin it out to a drizzle, about the texture of cream. A spoonful of sugar and a small shake or pinch of nutmeg will give it that French flair.

What else? Oh yeah:

Hrein. Horseradish. I’ve never made it by hand before, and whenever we go over to a super-cook friend’s house for Passover, she makes a blenderful of excessively potent horseradish and says how tough it was to grind up, so I always figured it was more trouble than it was worth. The fresh roots always look awful and muddy, too. But this year there wasn’t any horseradish in the supermarket without either dairy or odd ingredients. So I bought one of the huge foul-looking muddy roots on sale in the produce section.

I have a very sharp paring knife, and the peeling went much easier than advertised. I cut a two-inch chunk of the peeled root and grated it on the small holes of my trusty cheap plane grater (note, not “microplane”, which might not hold up under the pressure) by hand over a plate. It took only a minute or so. I piled the shavings into a cup, poured just as much apple cider vinegar over them as they could absorb, added a pinch of salt (Joan Nathan and most others say add a pinch of sugar and some black pepper as well, but I didn’t bother), and stir and cover and chill.

Verdict: pretty good!

– – – – –

But back to the chalkboard litany. My second hard-won lesson, which I assure you I will exercise much past the final sundown of Passover, is to pick my guests carefully.

I got an eye-opener as to why hostesses with the mostess use white tablecloths and cloth napkins and those awful cut-glass olive dishes when they have people over. Turns out it’s not just to be fussy. No. All that formal crap I always hated is very important protective armor to keep the guests in line via mild intimidation and prevent them from taking advantage of you. Same strategy as used by all the major French restaurants. To wit:

We had friends over for the 7th night. Stressful enough without it also being a seder they had suggested–and somehow it ended up being at our house! Which meant I had to do the cleaning and yelling at my nearest and dearest to help get the bathrooms and living room cleaned up somewhat in advance of the guests’ arrival…and it meant doing most of the cooking! How did I let this happen?!

It would never have worked at all if our friends hadn’t been reasonably unpicky, and to be honest in the aftermath, it mostly turned out okay. It was still stressful in unpredictable ways, though, ways I am planning to learn from for my daughter’s bat mitzvah celebrations in a couple of months.

What exactly went wrong? Despite a simple but pretty decent menu for 6 Continue reading →

Filed under: cooking, Desserts, holiday cooking, unappetizing | Tagged: cautionary tales, etiquette, horseradish, Passover, tableware, tips on entertaining, WPlongform | Comments Off on Post-Passover and the Unholy Host(ess)

You must read this. Take an hour if you have to.

Posted on February 20, 2013 by DebbieN

Today’s New York Times has an excerpt from investigative reporter Michael Moss’s forthcoming book on the processed food industry’s push to engineer addictive foods. It’s a long article, more than 12 pages, but well worth the read.

The Extraordinary Science of Addictive Junk Food – NYTimes.com.

Filed under: books, Diabetes, Eating out, Food Politics, history, kid food, nutrition, Oddities, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: appetite research, childhood nutrition, food science, high blood pressure, junk food, Michael Moss, nutrition labeling, obesity, processed food industry, snacking | Comments Off on You must read this. Take an hour if you have to.

Paying the piper too young

Posted on January 20, 2013 by DebbieN

This winter break we traveled east to celebrate with friends who are as close as family. Our daughters hit it off immediately as they do every couple of years when we manage to get back together. But the contrast between them had become striking in only two years away: our daughter, although (or perhaps because) she’s Type I diabetic and has to pay attention to what she’s eating, is growing up basically healthy. Our friends’ daughter, a few months older, is shorter but 25 pounds heavier and her mother told me she’s spent the past year taking her to a slew of medical specialists to figure out why she’s suddenly having so much pain in her legs and feet.

This girl is wonderful and energetic, full of beans, a live wire, and smart as a whip, but she doesn’t last long on the the gym floor at school, and worse yet, she had to leave the dance floor at her own celebration just as the dj was getting started because her feet and legs started hurting so much she had to sit down within minutes. The night before, she’d taken four ibuprofens for pain in a single day–just from walking around at school and later at the hotel.

So far nobody’s found much except low vitamin D and iron. The spine guy, the neurologist, nobody’s found anything they think could be doing this. The pain clinic is apparently all too ready to dish out a laundry list of pills nobody should be taking at age 13–among them antidepressants, despite the fact that they haven’t found a cause for what is obviously physical pain, and that nobody’s actually diagnosed major clinical depression. My friend is beyond worried for her daughter and exasperated at what is looking like the classic runaround from an otherwise very highly regarded medical system.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Diabetes, nutrition, unappetizing | Tagged: adolescent health, cardiovascular health, child nutrition, diabetes, diet soda, lifestyle modifications, swollen ankles, varicose veins | 2 Comments »

More “breathable foods” weirdness

Posted on December 4, 2012 by DebbieN

A couple of days ago, Entertainment Tonight posted a new video tidbit on “breathable” food from the same Harvard professor, David Edwards, who invented the AeroShot “breathable caffeine” cartridge that has drawn some serious FDA attention of the negative sort.

ET’s anchor breathlessly posed the question, could this become The Next New Diet Fad in Southern California, when what the LeWhaf vaporizer was invented for was the “aesthetic experience” of breathing food flavors. This according to Edwards, whose Paris-based design lab, Le Laboratoire (names aren’t really his thing?) offers a number of vaporized cocktails at a small sit-down bar.

When I wrote about the first set of inventions, I said I thought it might be an interesting molecular gastronomy-style taste experiment (at least if the flavors were something more sophisticated than “lime,” the flavoring in the AeroShot cartridge), depending on what was being used to create and propel the vapor.

The ET video presents an interview with a young up-and-coming chef who’s offering cocktails of various kinds served in the Le Whaf vaporizers–to be inhaled through a special straw. The accompanying visual looks, frankly, like someone about to use a bong or snort a line of coke, but that could just be the way ET’s camera crew are used to shooting bar scenes…

The chef they interviewed doesn’t serve these vaporized cocktails, not all of which are standard drinks in the daily repertoire (some of them look like beef broth) as a low-cal diet offering but rather as a sideline to enhance some other dish. Very molecular gastronomy. Still he concedes, when pushed, that he can’t see how it would have calories.

(From his doubtful expression, they must have edited out the part where the Barbie Doll reporter shoved a mike in his face repeatedly and insisted with desperation that the vapor must make it calorie-free, it just MUST. She’s the one who tried the AeroShot caffeine spritzer on-camera in the studio to demonstrate the concept, and quickly uttered the dutiful “Mmmm”, but the video jumped at that point, so I wonder if she really sampled it or not. At least she didn’t start coughing…unless they cut that part too…)

And yet I wonder if ET hasn’t hit on something here–no, not the diet fad. One can’t live on pâté-flavored air alone. One must also vaporize some champagne to go with it, preferably Krug. Could possibly clog the nozzles otherwise.

No. In the frenzy to discover the new French technology that magically removes all calories, ET seems to have let the chef describe the mechanism at the bottom of the vaporizer. Here you are, at a cocktail bar, leaning over the open mouth of a carafe, straw in mouth, ready to inhale cocktail-flavored vapor…produced, about 12 inches from your face, by three ultrasound probes at the bottom of the carafe. Continue reading →

Filed under: Eating out, Food Politics, Food TV, haute cuisine, Odd food, Oddities, unappetizing, wine | Tagged: AeroShot, Art/Design Lab, Breathable Foods, cocktails, David Edwards, Entertainment Tonight, FDA, Harvard, Le Laboratoire, LeWhaf, medical device regulation, molecular gastronomy, ultrasound, vaporizers | Comments Off on More “breathable foods” weirdness

Government nutritional estimates for “mixed dishes”–where do they come from?

Posted on September 29, 2012 by DebbieN

The federal “MyPlate” program has expanded its consumer information on dietary guidelines but some of it looks suspiciously old-hat and soft on nutritional crime, very much in keeping with the USDA’s traditional approach of pandering to the processed food industry. I stumbled across it while helping my daughter find school lunch nutrition information for her latest science project, which was to analyze her new public school’s lunch program.

Of course, my 7th grade daughter’s reaction to her first day in a real live public school cafeteria last month was shock. Because she’s diabetic and vegetarian, we agreed the best strategy for her would be to bring her standard lunch from home–PBJ on whole wheat with an apple. She had trouble the first day with the routine–shove through the cafeteria line, squeeze in at a table, shovel down food, run for the bell.

What did the other kids eat? I asked. “They ate crap,” she answered without so much as a pause. “Pizza and french fries, stuff they can eat in about five minutes while gossiping with their friends. They hardly even notice.”

Now–as I’ve said before–peanut butter and jam on whole wheat is not gourmet, but it’s fairly nutritious (beats Oscar Meyer bologna for protein, believe it or not) and with a small apple, it’s reasonably worthwhile and you can eat it fairly quickly–certainly within 15 minutes, if you can shove through the cafeteria line and find a seat. If you make friends, as my daughter quickly did, you can even find some time for gossiping and having fun. And it costs less than a dollar and takes less than 5 minutes to pack at home. The school lunch is $2.35, and yes they do offer apples and some sort of packaged salad stuff and skim milk, but as my daughter noticed, few of the kids actually eat those items. Maybe the milk–well, at least offering the fresher food is a start.

Still–“crap” is not that far off. Pizza AND fries? A tough act to follow with anything but gallbladder surgery at 40.

And as she looks at the school menus online for September–they declare that they follow the USDA school nutrition guidelines–we notice a lot of things that aren’t really sound thinking from a diabetic’s point of view. A lot of menus that don’t come close to matching the ChooseMyPlate.gov guidelines, which call for half the plate to be vegetables and fruits (in that descending order of quantity), a quarter of the plate protein, a quarter complex carbohydrate.

“There’s a lot more meat,” she says. “Actually, my friend had the chicken patty today and spat it out. She said it wasn’t chicken. My other friend said it was, it was just cafeteria chicken.” Sounds like some of her new friends have a better take on the school food than the government does. My bet–the chicken patty is like standard bologna, only about half is anything that actually came from a chicken–including fat and skin–and the rest is probably starchy and high-salt fillers.

So, speaking of food that really isn’t as good as it seems…

The ChooseMyPlate.gov brochure on “mixed foods”, which is what I promised up at the top, might be part of the same sad thing. Here’s the sample chart they offer for things like pizza, lasagne, double cheeseburgers, burritos…that are supposedly hard to judge on nutrition.

MixedDishes.pdf

Any takers on this one? My first impression is that the calorie counts are probably low–maybe as little as half–for a standard chain restaurant or frozen-entree serving of any of these items. Probably because a USDA recommended standardized “portion” for nutrition labeling purposes is very small compared with what people are actually eating and what companies are serving.

My second impression is–fruit servings? for pizza? who are they kidding, and why is this column even in here? Fruit is optional–it’s a carb. Nonstarchy vegetables with some actual vitamins and fiber are required eating. It’s pretty obvious from the table that the vegetables are pretty scant in this list of “mixed foods” too–mixed in this case seems to mean starches and fats plus some form of meat.

And what isn’t listed–the salt and fat and total carb. The fiber, vitamins and minerals. Most of this food is high in stuff that should be low, and low in stuff that should be high.

On second thought, maybe we should just read down this table for suggestions on what not to serve.

Filed under: cooking, Eating out, Food Politics, meat and poultry, nutrition, Pasta, shopping, unappetizing | Tagged: carb counts, dietary sodium, MyPlate, nutrition labeling, school cafeterias, school lunch, USDA | Comments Off on Government nutritional estimates for “mixed dishes”–where do they come from?

« Previous Page — Next Page »

Slow Food Fast

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

10 (or so) Warning Signs of a Half-Baked Diabetes Cookbook

10 Warning Signs that Your Diabetes Guide Cookbook is Half-Baked

Fifty, or “Sugar Shock, Part II”

Beating sugar shock

What’s my beef with burgers?

Say “Celà n’est sûre[-gelée-]ment pas le cas”

Post-Passover and the Unholy Host(ess)

You must read this. Take an hour if you have to.

Paying the piper too young

More “breathable foods” weirdness

Government nutritional estimates for “mixed dishes”–where do they come from?

About Slow Food Fast

Downloadable Docs

Pyrex Warning

Blog Stats

Subscribe to SlowFoodFast!

Noshing on

Recent Posts

Contents

Archives

Now Reading

Copyright, Disclaimer, Affiliate Links

10 Warning Signs that Your Diabetes Guide Cookbook is Half-Baked

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

About Slow Food Fast

Downloadable Docs

Pyrex Warning

What's cooking

Blog Stats