Like lots of people, I stopped eating sprouts several years ago. Even though they are healthy and tasty, I had read about too many contamination scares.

But now I’m eating sprouts in my salads again. The difference is that I only eat BroccoSprouts.

These great tasting sprouts of broccoli have a lot going for them. Broccoli is well known for being one of the healthiest vegetables, but I am not crazy about how it tastes either raw or cooked.
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Many of us who have diabetes are more in tune with our minds than our bodies. We are “not athletic.” Many of us will frankly acknowledge that we are “into our heads.”

Now its clear that we can’t have a good head on our shoulders without having good shoulders and all. Our diabetic body will give us a diabetic mind — if we let it. And when we control our diabetes, not only our bodies but also our brains work better.

A diabetic body has high blood glucose. When we succeed in bringing our blood glucose level down to normal, our bodies aren’t diabetic any more. When our diabetes is controlled, it may not be cured, but it’s certainly in such remission that no tests would show that it’s diabetic.
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Just yesterday I got my first home cholesterol and triglyceride test results. It took three weeks for them to get back to me after I mailed them in. That’s acceptable.

But I have been waiting years to be able to check these levels at home. That’s not good.

The new Check Up America test from Home Access Health Corp. in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, is the only way that we can check our cholesterol levels — total, HDL (good), and LDL (bad) — at home. With the same blood sample it also checks our triglyceride levels and A1C.
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Whatever you believe about the best diet to control diabetes, this new documentary “Fat Head” is bound to shake up those beliefs. I have been studying and trying to practice good nutrition for years, and even so, some parts of it disturbed me. Still, most of it delighted me. This is a funny movie.

About half way through I almost stopped watching. “Fat Head” was beginning to look like a movie in praise of fast food.

A guy named Tom Naughton wrote, directed, and starred in this 104 minute film. Like Morgan Spurlock in his 2004 documentary “Super Size Me,” Naughton lived on fast food for a month. But unlike Spurlock, Naughton lost weight.
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You want to control your diabetes as much as possible. You wouldn’t be reading this if you didn’t.

So you regularly check your A1C level. This is the best measurement of our blood glucose control that we have now. It tells us what percentage of our hemoglobin — the protein in our red blood cells that carry oxygen — has glucose sticking to it. The less glucose that remains in our bloodstream rather than going to work in the cells that need it the better we feel now and the better our health will continue to be.

As we are able to control our diabetes better and better, the reasonable goal is to bring our A1C levels down to normal — the A1C level that people who don’t have diabetes have. But before we can even set that goal, we have to know what the target is.
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Some of us have been waiting a long time for a bluetooth blood glucose meter. Almost all cell phones and computers sold today support Bluetooth technology that lets us connect devices like blood glucose meters without using any wires.

Three different bluetooth standards permit connections between devices separated from about 1 meter to about 100 meters. In the past two and one-half years I’ve been so exciting about the prospect of automatically connecting our meters to cell phones and computers that I’ve written about three companies that promised us bluetooth meters.

Just like cures for diabetes and wonder drug that will let us perfectly control it, many of the announced devices never make it through the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and come to market. As far as I have been able to determine, theGlucoTel device that I wrote about in Diabetes Health magazine in October 2006 didn’t make it here.
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You need to help me a lot with this one.

All of you who read my articles here are motivated to control your diabetes. Almost all of you have a positive motivation. I doubt if many of you have a primarily negative motivation based on fear of the consequences of uncontrolled diabetes. Negative motivations just don’t keep us doing what we need to do for long.

What are your positive motivations? What do you tell people you know who have diabetes to encourage them to tame it?
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If you want to control your carbs, then sandwiches are one of your biggest food problems. Using bread for making sandwiches was a wonderful idea to keep our hands from getting greasy from the good stuff inside.

But using bread is a bad idea when we want to cut back on our carbs. And now we have even better ideas.

Most bread comes from wheat flour, which is one of the highest glycemic foods there is. Few foods will spike our blood glucose more and faster than wheat flour.
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