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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Finding the best blood glucose meter has just become a little easier for some people who have diabetes.

If you live in the United States, you now have an extensive website that will make the quest easier. The site is part of FindTheBest where you can “Compare Blood Glucose Meters.”

FindTheBest provides “unbiased, data-driven comparisons” of everything from smart phones to dog breeds with blood glucose meters somewhere in between. The site does this with any advertising or fee.

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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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Yogurt can be one of the best foods for people with diabetes to eat. Or one of the worst.

It is the probiotic food that we eat the most. These foods have friendly bacteria that help us to drive out the bad ones. This can be good for our health, the U.S. Government’s National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine says.

But to get this benefit from yogurt or other probiotic foods, we have to avoid any of them that say on the label that they were heat treated after culturing. That kills the active cultures.

Even worse is when we eat the usual yogurt preparations that are loaded with added sugars. This includes not only frozen yogurts but also what most of us think of as regular yogurt. For example, a little 6-ounce container of “Yoplait Original Blackberry Harvest” sounds great. But its 13 ingredients include so much sugar that it packs 33 grams of carbohydrate, according to the Nutrition Facts label on the company’s website.

When we want to eat a healthy yogurt, we have to start by limiting our selection to plain ones. Then, if we like, we can add a little fresh fruit and perhaps some non-caloric sweetener. I often add a few organic blueberries and a small sprinkling of stevia.

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Eggs can be one of the healthiest foods for people with diabetes to eat. But some people still doubt that fact. And the way many of us prepare them aren’t healthy.

One large fresh, whole, raw egg has just 72 calories. It has a bit more than 6 grams of protein, a bit less than 5 grams of fat, and less than one-third of a gram of carbohydrate, according to the USDA’s National Nutrient Database. No wonder that those of us who follow the low-carb lifestyle usually eat eggs.

Eggs have complete protein with an optimal balance of the nine essential amino acids. The fats are largely monounsaturated and polyunsaturated. The carbohydrates don’t include any sucrose or fructose.

Yet some people are still concerned about the amount of cholesterol in eggs. A large one has 186 mg. The standard diet that our doctors have been recommending for decades is to consume no more than 300 mg of cholesterol a day.

However, some of the most advanced medical minds know that the cholesterol we eat has little effect on our blood levels of cholesterol, high levels of which supposedly lead to heart disease. Actually, more than 20 years ago The New England Journal of Medicine  reported that an 88-year-old man regularly ate 25 eggs a day and had a normal cholesterol level. Then, the influential Framingham Heart Study found “no relationship between egg intake and coronary heart disease.”

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Would you rather SIT or HIT?

SIT sounds like it’s too passive and HIT sounds too aggressive. But they are actually acronyms for intense forms of activity that can help us to better health and fitness in a fraction of the time that current exercise programs recommend.

SIT is Sprint Interval Training. HIT is High Intensity Interval Training (because HIIT is harder to say).

Sprint Interval Training means going all out in 30 second sprints on special laboratory bikes interspersed with four and one-half minutes of slow cycling. If you are young and healthy, this is probably the fastest way for you to get fit.

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Experts on nutrition are slowly beginning to realize that not all calories are created equal.

Many people still believe the colloquial phrase, “a calories is a calorie,” meaning that two diets with the same number of calories can’t lead to losing a different amount of weight. “We conclude that a calorie is a calorie,” write Andrea Buchholz and Dale Schoeller of the Department of Nutritional Sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison in the influential American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

But those people don’t know what they are talking about, as Professor Richard Feinman of the Department of Biochemistry, State University of New York Downstate Medical Center, cogently proved in his article,“‘A calorie is a calorie’ violates the second law of thermodynamics” in the BioMed Central Nutrition Journal.

“A calorie is a calorie” sounds nice and has a certain poetic ring about it that is equivalent to “a rose is a rose is a rose,” as Gertrude Stein wrote in one of her poems. But just like roses do come in different colors, calories come in different intensities.

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None of the charities that ask us to support them for anything related to diabetes have ever excited me. Until now.
Charity Navigator, the independent and non-profit organization that evaluates America’s charities, includes 37 charities that claim to work for people with diabetes. When my wife Catherine died six years ago, I suggested that our friends could make a contribution in her name to one of these charities. But that was only because at that time we lacked a better alternative.

Now we have a better choice. Insulin for Life USA was incorporated in August 2012, and in November the U.S. Internal Revenue Service gave it 501(c)(3) status that recognizes it as a non-profit charity.  This means that Insulin for Life USA is exempt from paying taxes and that donors to it may deduct their contributions on their federal income tax returns.

While Insulin for Life USA is a newly formed organization, it is a part ofInsulin for Life Australia, which has been helping people with diabetes around the world since 1986. Other IFL-affiliated centers already existed in Austria, Canada, Germany, Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. IFL Australia coordinates the collaborative activities of these centers and continues to start new ones.

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Everyone eats differently on vacation than at home. Those of us who have diabetes probably vary our diet less than others, but being away from our usual places always means eating different food.

On vacation we eat out more and usually go to restaurants that we have never seen before. For me, that’s one of the joys and surprises of vacation.

Since New Year’s Day I have been vacationing with a friend in a rented condo on Pine Island in Southwest Florida. Neither of us had ever been to this relatively undeveloped barrier island off the coast from Fort Myers and Cape Coral before.

Another friend, Dyveke Kanth, lives in Sweden and like me, follows a low-carb diet. She writes for the Swedish low-carb high-fat website LCHF.se and has followed a very low-carb diet for years. “I think that it is the only right way to eat even if you do not have diabetes,” she says.

When I wrote Dyveke that I was vacationing in Florida, she asked me, “How is it going with the food in Florida? Is there anything for you to eat there?”

A Reddish Egret Catches a Fish for its Breakfast
(Estero Island, Florida, January 15, 2013)

Good questions! I had the same concerns as I planned my vacation here. But finding good low-carb food here has not been as difficult as Dyveke and I had thought it would be.

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