Random Ads for the Big D...

I put up an ad-sense block, although I kept it out of the way, in my other blog about racing, primarily since it would keep track of hits for me, which makes it easy for me to see if anybody is reading it (answer, a few). When I started it was also a source of unintentional hilarity. You see my very first post was about my deciding to get my race car’s nose fixed during the pre-season, since it was dinged a bit from a prior incident. I called the post, “The Nose Job.”

For the next month all the ads were about plastic surgery.

I swear for awhile it seemed like if you googled Rhinoplasty my blog might have made the top ten.

Anyway, I put a block at the bottom of this blog as well as a column to the right, partly in the hope that if I ultimately developed a modest readership it would provide me with beer money, even though, ironically, I had to stop drinking beer. But I’m thinking it’s a mistake (the Ad-Sense bit, not, sadly, the stopping beer bit).

I actually followed one of the ads myself, something called “Levolar Forte” which is a supplement that is mainly mushrooms, but which also claims a Mega-Dose of Chromium. Nearly six times the recommended dosage of Chromium in each and every pill and they are suggesting taking four a day. Twenty plus times the recommended dosage and completely ignoring the fact that most western diets already have more than enough. So it’s partly harmless (OK, in the diet some mushrooms may, or may not be helpful, but as a supplement, just how big a pill is it?) and partly a potential toxic overdose. Here I am researching like mad to pluck the best practices out of this mass of confusion and yet I put a link to stuff un-vetted that may reach near-quack if not quack status in the hope of picking up a three dollar check in six months.

God, sometimes I wonder if I was born a moron or have just been practicing my stupid for too long...

Anyway, I’m taking the random blocks down, but keeping some referral’s up like for Diabetes Daily. That way if you do click on something it is less likely to lead to something flim-flam. No guarantees, this is the Internet after all.

Drat

Now I know all about fantasies. Angelina leaving Brad for my obvious prowess and good looks, Ferrari offering me Masa’s seat in their F1 car, and Dr. Yang apologizing profusely for the mixed up test results, “No, really you’re the picture of health” being my current top three. The point being I know I haven’t quite lost my mind as long as I know they are just that. Fantasies.

I did kind of expect that my efforts would be starting to pay off and that at my next appointment Dr. Yang would remark, “Terrific, you are completely under control, just keep up what you’re doing and you will be fine.” And I’ve certainly been pleased with my recent results.

I had another meal lined up to test, to keep on plugging away, pulled out the meter to get the pre-meal baseline and…

225.

That can’t be right, I was disappointed yesterday with a pre-meal 91. So I tested again.

225.

No way. That’s only five points lower than my all time highest, post meal, reading. Maybe I got the calibration wrong or it’s a bad batch. Swap to the spare strips, code is 30, check it in the meter, prick, bleed and…

225.

Damn.

Lunch-time Timewaster

The lovely Jessica, my trainer, sent me this one: here that calculates your "real" age. She was so happy that it put her well under thirty. As for me, well if this was the standard I'd be expecting my social security checks to start arriving any day now...

Fat vs. Lean Muscle

While I am waiting a bit for the opportunity to get a GAD test, to be sure I’m with the 70% of lean people who have type 2 and not the 30% who have 1.5, I decided to go with the odds for now and revamp my workout under the assumption I’m a two.

The difference is simple enough. Insulin resistance, which type 2’s have, can be decreased by increasing the ratio of lean muscle to fat. I have some fat, I am pushing fifty (not that I get any credit for lugging such a large number around) and my waist has expanded to a 33” over the last couple of years. So my aerobic routine continues. But with the fairly low amount of fat for me to lose it makes sense for me to make an effort to gain lean muscle at the same time. If I am in fact a 2. Once I get the test, if I come back positive for the antibodies, then exercise isn't quite as critical to success and I can reevaluate.

So Saturday it was over to the Y for some weight training. And Sunday was a day to remember just how much that can hurt if you over do it.

Sirloin steak w/lemon sauce, fish sticks’n tarter, and banana w/chocolate dollop

Here’s a test I’ve been thinking of, a nearly no-carb meal. The dollop is, frankly, a tiny bit of syrup, otherwise it has virtually no carbs. So what does going so low in carbs mean to my meal spike? Will I still have one at all? Just a modest raise, or stay flat? Here goes…

Carbohydrates: 6-10
Fructose: Very Low
GI Index: N/A


Ingredients:
4 tblspns margarine
½ Cup Onion
1 Bay Leaf
½ tsp. dried thyme
1 ½ cups, red wine
1 New York steak (@1 pound)
3 tblspns dried parsley
1 tblspn lemon juice
10 Groton’s fish sticks
Tarter sauce
1 Medium Banana
Very small, remember I said very small, dollop of Hershey’s chocolate syrup.

How:
Put tarter sauce aside, let it get to room temp. Start baking fish sticks in oven bake at 425 for about fifteen minutes.

Start the steak sauce. In skillet melt 2 tablespoons of margarine over high heat. Sauté onions, bay leaf, and thyme 2-3 minutes or until onions are transparent. Add wine and cook until reduced by 1/3 in volume. Set aside everything but the bay leaf (toss it). The sauce itself is good for two or three steaks and will keep in the fridge for a bit.

In same skillet, still on high, sear steak for 1 ½ minutes per side. Reduce heat to medium, add 2 more tablespoons of margarine, parsley, and lemon juice. Then add sauce. Cook steak for 2-4 minutes per side to suit.

Cut banana into chunks and place in bowl, pour just a whisper of chocolate syrup and serve cold.

Results:
This is my very best steak and I’d be willing to put it up against anybody’s. I used to serve it with a baked potato, but I tried fish sticks thinking the tartar sauce would work OK with the lemon.

Remind me to stop thinking. As a combo it’s beyond awful. The Steak is so good and the sticks so bad, and the flavors clash besides, so much so that I couldn’t stand it. I’ll try again someday with something else for a side.

It was impressive how just a tiny bit of chocolate, once you’ve stopped shoving it down your throat every minute, can be a real dessert treat.

Effect on BG Level:
Lowest spike of any meal I’ve tested so far (not that that is many yet), just a 125 despite starting with a bit of a high baseline of 91. It also seems to drop very slowly still being 6 points above baseline two hours after the meal. It fits with everything I’ve been reading.

First they came for my potatoes…

While researching some stuff for the Carbohydrate wars I kept stumbling across references to fructose. So I picked up Dr. Johnson’s book, ‘The Sugar Fix.’ Bottom line, fruit is bad for me too.

Oh well.

It doesn’t mean no fruit of course. And it isn’t even fruit that is the source of way too much of our fructose. No, it’s corn. It seems that we’ve discovered how to create fructose, a specific kind of sugar, out of corn. Called High Fructose Corn Syrup, or HFCS, it’s pretty much in everything these days.

His audience is mostly people trying to loose weight by dieting. He does, however, have a number of tidbits for diabetics. Among those are his lab rat studies in which he induced glucose intolerance by putting the little boogers on a high fructose diet while his control group was actually on plain sugar. His theory, in a nutshell, is that as we’ve added fructose to most everything over the last thirty years we’ve got over selves overloading on a food that used to be available only in moderation.

He goes on to explain the important of ‘Uric Acid’ as a mechanism, and provides advice on reducing intake.

The one piece of good news is that I’ve already dropped soda, and that seems to be the biggest single source. I will miss Gatorade through, since that was a common fruit drink for me.

To bottom line it, he doesn’t claim it causes a BG spike. In fact, fruit is highly recommended, in moderation, for diabetics following the Low-GI method. No, his research tends to point to fructose increasing insulin resistance in type 2’s. Type one’s probably don’t have that much fruit in their diet anymore anyway since they are so high in carbohydrates.

Garlic Cheese Turkey-Burger, Fries, Banana

The hope against hope was that by substituting out the bread, killing off the starter, and having a banana instead of cake for dessert, I could preserve a small measure of fries.

Even the low-GI types are still suggesting a top end of just 50-60 grams of carbohydrates at any particular sitting, and with the fries this doesn’t quite make the cut at 63 grams, but for science sake and to clear out the fridge, I thought to give it a try. Five grams can be cut by dumping the modest amount of bread crumbs to fit low-GI and the bread could be dumped and drop it another 28 at which time it would be nearly low-carb, despite the small serving of potatoes.

I’m going to assume, for the purpose of these experiments, that you can’t cook. So even something quick and simple like this I’ll be giving instructions.

Carbohydrates: High
Fructose: Low
GI Index: Medium

Ingredients:
1/3 pound Jenni-O ground turkey
1 tablespoon Progresso garlic and herb breadcrumbs
Powdered garlic to suit
Dellao pre-sliced garlic in water (half dozen slices)
1 Oro-wheat cracked wheat hamburger bun
12 Ore-Ida crinkle-cut fries (to bake, not fry, please)
1 medium size Banana
Olive Oil
Black Pepper, Dried Basil
2 Slices of Sargento reduced fat medium cheddar
Pickles, Mustard, Mayo, Ketchup

How:
Start by placing the fries on a cookie sheet and bake in the oven at broil. Slice the banana and put in a small bowl and place in the fridge to cool.

Take the ground turkey and blend in the breadcrumbs and garlic by kneading. Once blended, use your hands to roll it into a smooth ball and gently squeeze into a patty about an inch to an inch and a half high. It should be smooth since any cracks might make it fall apart.

Once the fries are half done, put a triple dollop of olive oil (turkey does'nt self-oil as well as beef) in a frying pan, then the patty and put the flame on high. Sprinkle black pepper and dried basil to suit on up side. Sear for about a minute on each side, should turn a nice dark brown to slightly burnt, and the meat shouldn’t be visibly raw on the edges. Then turn down the heat to medium and cook for another three minutes or so on a side. It’s fairly hard to overcook, so if in doubt give it another minute.

Results:
Far… far better than most fast food cheeseburgers it’s mean to replace. I’ll really miss the fries (have I told you how much I like potatoes?) but I think I’ll try fish sticks with a dipping tarter sauce as a fries replacement. The banana somehow felt more like dessert, already being chopped into bite size pieces in the bowl, and chilled. A dollop of chocolate,even without ice-cream, would have helped but first I'd have to really drop the carbs.

Effect on BG level:
Not bad. As you can see from the chart I didn’t spike all that high, although I admit I have to decide on a more consistent testing regimen (I did a hour apart instead of a half hour.) What was different, and worrisome, was how long it took to return to baseline. I’ll try the same meal with fish-sticks in place of fries, to lower the carbs and see if I can get it to return to baseline quicker.