Recently I wrote here about the tastiest and healthiest salad dressing, which you can easily prepare at home. If you can find anything like it at a restaurant, I would be surprised. The best you can do when eating out is to use a traditional olive oil and vinegar dressing.

Complementing the best salad dressing are the best salad fixings. You can easily prepare this salad and salad dressing at home for the nutrition that all of us, whether we have diabetes or not, need. Even when you eat out, you can find often good salad fixings — along with many others that you might regret eating.

If you can stand the crowds and the usual lack of ambiance, you can find the best ingredients in the deli section of Whole Foods stores. Many of their ingredients are organic.
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More protein in our diet is good for us, says one of the country’s top diabetes researchers, Osama Hamdy, MD and PhD. He is the medical director of the obesity clinical program at Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston.

But whether you are a vegetarian or not protein still presents problems.

He spoke about “Higher Levels of Protein Intake are Good” at the American Diabetes Association’s June annual meeting in San Francisco, as I previously reported here. Since then, he has posted his slides for that presentation online.

We got to know each other in San Francisco and have been in touch by email.  And we just got another chance to talk about his protein concerns.

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If you read my articles about diabetes here regularly, you might have noticed that I rarely cover four topics in the news:

1. Knowing the causes of diabetes. This doesn’t help us control it.

2. Learning how to avoid diabetes. This comes too late for most of us.
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Almost everyone says that organic, cold pressed, extra virgin olive oil is best for salads and for cooking. But almost everyone is wrong.

Of course, you could do a lot worse. Some oils are high in trans fats. Some may be contaminated with pesticides. Some knowledgeable people even have serious doubts about canola oil.

“Canola oil is a poisonous substance, an industrial oil that does not belong in the body,” write Sally Fallow and Mary G. Enig, PhD, in “The Great Con-ola.”
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The Novo Nordisk travelling exhibit of the faces of people who have changed for the better after a diabetes diagnosis is now online. It’s been a long time coming.

For several months the exhibit has been on tour in major cities around the country. Now it’s coming to Chicago’s Navy Pier from September 26-29 and Atlanta’s Woodruff Park on October 17-20. Novo Nordisk is planning to continue promoting the Meet the Face of Change exhibit in 2009, but hasn’t announced the details yet.
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My new blog,  “Fitness and Photography for Fun” is a special part of my Web site. The reason for it is to inspire other people — particularly people with diabetes — to get the exercise they need in a way that they enjoy.

For me it’s photographing nature. For some people it’s listening to music they love on their iPod. For others it’s going out with friends.

When you do something that you love, it’s easy. Even if it’s also exercise. I make my exercise easy and enjoyable for myself by taking along my camera whenever I go out.

When I was in high school, I got my first film camera. I went digital a few years ago. I love to take photographs of the beauty of nature everywhere that I go.

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If you get your blood glucose meters and test strips by mail order, you have a new choice that is well worth considering. It’s the OneTouch Select from LifeScan, one of the top two meter manufacturers in terms of volume.

OneTouch Select

While LifeScan pushes its top-of-the-line meters like the OneTouch Ultra2 and UltraSmart, you may never had heard of the OneTouch Select before. I know that I didn’t know anything about it until my friend, Tim Cady, the president of Advanced Diabetes Supply in Carlsbad, California, happened to mention it to my on the phone recently.

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For most of my life I was addicted to carbohydrates. Like almost everyone else.

Even after reading Sugar Blues by William Dufty and The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet and other books by Rachael and Richard Heller years ago, I refused to accept that this addiction existed. Gary Taubes finally persuaded me that a high-carb diet is addicting after I studied his recent book, Good Calories, Bad Calories. Now I know that it does, and it is really easier to understand than any other addiction.

Carbs make us hungry. When we’re hungry, we eat more. The more we eat the more we want, so we gain weight. It’s the classic vicious circle of addiction.

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The problem with the review of a new study showing that we have to exercise an hour a day to keep the weight off is that almost no one has time for it.

“People, let’s be realistic,” writes one reader of the review in the Los Angeles Times. “One person in one hundred may be able to exercise one hour each day. What about the rest of us?”

So true. Technology has improved the lives of almost all Americans and other fortunate people in the developed world so much that the only muscles we need any more are those in our eyes, our ears, and our fingers. And our mouth muscles, of course.
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