April 2013

Multitasking comes easy to busy people. But it comes at too big a price. The trouble with multitasking is that we can’t give our full attention to any of the tasks that we do simultaneously.

The big trouble comes when we think of eating and drinking as a task to get finished as soon as we can. When we think that way, we eat and drink when we work at the computer, read the newspaper, or chat with our family. We think about our nourishment with only half of our mind or less.

I probably have been more guilty of eating and drinking with my mind on other things than most of you. I lead a busy life, and that’s not because I have to but because I find so much to enjoy in my life.

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Many of us want to manage our diabetes by following a vegetarian diet. Most vegetarians object to eating meat because of ethical motivations stemming from respect for sentient life or for environmental concerns. These are worthy motivations.

Others are vegetarians because they believe that avoiding meat is healthier. Until now, however, a vegetarian diet is clearly less healthy in at least one crucial respect.

Getting enough heart-healthy and anti-inflammatory omega-3 fatty acids has been essentially impossible without eating fish or supplementing our diet with krill or fish oil. Many of us have the mistaken belief that vegetarian sources of omega-3 from chia or flax seeds will satisfy the requirements of our bodies for this essential nutrient.

But typically only 4 to 8 percent of the type of omega-3 fat found in these vegetarian sources get converted into the the long-chain fatty acids that our bodies need. This is according to a special report on “Omega-3 Fatty Acids and Cardiac Arrhythmias: Prior Studies and Recommendations for Future Research” in Circulation, the official journal of the American Heart Association.

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Most of us are confused about diabetes, even our doctors. The confusion is mostly about how to manage this chronic disease, rather than what we want to achieve.

Most of us want to live as normal a life as we can. We know our goal, but not the roadmap to get there.

Normal for those of us who have diabetes means having a normal blood sugar level as measured by an A1C test. That level is certainly below 6.0 as I wrote in “The Normal A1C Level” and probably 5.4 or below as I wrote later in “How You Can Reduce Your Risk of Heart Attacks.”

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When I decided to live with diabetes but without sugar, I had no idea how hard reaching my goal would be. Three-fourths of all the foods for sale in America have added sweeteners, according to an analysis of 85,451 foods that Dr. Barry Popkin of the University of North Carolina and his team studied.

As a careful shopper, I thought that I could kick added sugar right out of my life. After all, I buy all my groceries at Whole Foods and at an even more selective local natural foods store. As Humphrey Bogart said in the film Casablanca, “I was misinformed.”

Ever since 2007 I have followed a very low-carb lifestyle. You might call it my diet, but I prefer to think of it as the way I prefer to eat for the rest of my life. On this so-called “diet” I have kept my A1C and weight levels right where I want them to be.

Added sugar doesn’t fit in my life. Sugar is not only empty calories, which people might think of as being neutral, neither good nor bad. But one sugar in particular can also be hard for our bodies to handle.

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