Jan 09 2007

Meal Plans

I risked my life today.

My ceilings are ridiculously high. Standing on the kitchen counter, I can just barely touch the ceiling. So when my last light bulb blew out the other day, I figured I’d have to borrow a ladder to change it. That’d take some arranging, though, and I’d have to haul it up the stairs; so tonight I said to heck with it, stood with one foot on the counter and one on the back of a chair, and wobbled as I changed the one bulb I could barely reach. I’ll have to have a ladder for the other two (unless I push the fridge over there and climb on top of it), but at least I don’t need a lamp in there anymore.

I finally did something else I’ve been threatening to do for a while: made up a meal plan for the next day, so I could go get the ingredients for the next few meals and not find myself getting hungry and not knowing what to make with what I happen to have on hand. I pulled out a couple recipe books and wrote down my meals for tonight and tomorrow, and made a grocery list while I was at it, then walked down to the store and got the stuff. Tonight was Hamburgers with Dill and Roasted Cauliflower, and both were pretty good. I’ve got tomorrow’s menus ready, but I’ll save them for tomorrow’s blog.

I found a great article about diabetes, low-carbing, and the ADA tonight. (If you think it doesn’t apply to you, just wait a few years. It’s now estimated that almost half of all middle-aged men are pre-diabetic or worse, and the next generation will be even worse off.) Here’s the beginning:

There’s no question that Dr. Vernon is trouble — but for whom? Not her patients, that’s for certain. They just won’t stay sick. People walk into her office afflicted with type-2 diabetes and, by every objective medical measurement, walk out cured. There’s $51 million [spent by the ADA] that says that isn’t supposed to happen, not in a clinic in Kansas, and definitely not as a result of cleaning out the refrigerator.

“My first line of treatment is to have patients remove carbohydrates from their diets,” explains Dr. Vernon, a petite, energetic mother of two who also serves as the president of the American Society of Bariatric Physicians. “This is often all it takes to reverse their symptoms, so that they no longer require medication.”

Seriously, click here and read the whole thing. It’s the best summary I’ve seen of the epidemic and the solution in a long time. None of this information is new; it’s been around for decades, even centuries; but (like many truths) it got buried under a lot of foolishness in the ’60s and ’70s, leaving us with a situation where people are eating sugar and starch by the bucketfuls and then shooting themselves up with the insulin they need to keep the sugar and starch from killing them. It’s insane, and it’s getting worse.

Here’s something to think about: when your blood sugar is at normal levels, the amount of glucose in your blood stream is the equivalent of one teaspoon (just under 5 grams) of table sugar. (By the way, your liver will happily produce that much if you don’t eat any, so you don’t need to consume any carbohydrates at all, as some Eskimo tribes have proven.) The blood sugar level which indicates likely diabetes is about 1-1/4 teaspoons.

Think about that: one little teaspoon of sugar floating around in your blood is what’s normal. That’s about the same amount that you get from one raw carrot. A piece of bread has 2-3 times as much. A Hershey bar has three times that much. A medium-sized baked potato or a can of soda: seven times. That’s a lot of sugar to dump into your blood stream all at once; a lot more than the human body was designed to handle. Eventually it can’t, leading down the path through through hyperinsulinemia to obesity and diabetes and heart disease.

But that’s enough ranting for now, considering this was just supposed to be a link. It just really burns me up to see the ADA fighting so hard to maintain their status quo, when it’s killing people.

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