Chromium supplements for diabetics

Here's a look at chromium supplements for diabetics that you might find interesting.

Heart Healthy

The comments in this thread have some good, useful observations about heart healthy lifestyle and diet for diabetics.

Diet Soda makes you fat

Drinking diet soda seems to lead to weight gain.

It's not clear why that would happen. One possibility is that the sweet taste stimulates cravings for food.

Avoiding blood sugar spikes

Whole grain breads seems to be better choice than fresh fruit.

New Watermelon

I read about a new low sugar watermelon for diabetics that might be hitting the produce sections soon.

I'll be watching for it.

low-carb coconut flour

I got Bob's Red Mill Organic Coconut Flour, 16-Ounce Units (Pack of 4)
delivered from Amazon today and tried it out. I'd never even heard of coconut flour until I ran across this product.

2 tbsp has 10 g. of carbs, 6 of which is dietary fiber. Dietary fiber is a good thing, not getting absorbed so not needing insulin for the body to use. Just a guess, that's probably about how much is needed to make one biscuit.

I made a batch of low carb biscuits using the following recipe.

1/2 cup corn muffin mix
1/2 cup coconut flour
1 egg
a small splash of cooking oil
milk until the mixture is the right consistency

The consistency I'm looking for is wet, but sticky. Sticks to a spoon, needing to be dropped onto a backing pan by using your thumb to get it off the spoon (or another spoon).

I cooked it in a covered electric skillet, but baking at about 350 for about 10 minutes seems about right. Bake until the outside starts getting golden brown.

The coconut flour has a strong, pleasant odor of coconut. It really smells good. The coconut taste isn't really in the biscuits, they have a light, fluffy taste and texture. But there is a slight coconut aftertaste.

So far I like the product.

I bought some brown sugar substitute at the store this morning -- a box of equal mixed with an artificial (no carb) molasses flavor.

Later today I'll try some peanut butter cookies, with peanut butter, margarine, coconut flour, and brown sugar substitute. I actually won a blue ribbon at for peanut butter cookies at a county fair in Bee County Texas back in the 10th grade. I'm expecting the ones I'll make later today to be an improvement on those award winning cookies.

Eating Chocolate

I guess as we discover more and more reasons to eat dark chocolate loaded with cocoa instead of milk chocolate loaded with sugar we'll start to notice the subtlies of the taste of real chocolate and the technique for eating chocolate will become more and more important.

Happy Chyck Wonders has procedure for eating chocolte for us to think about.

Vegetable Cornbread, low-carb style

I'm a southern boy with diabetes. And cornbread is pretty high in carbs. That's a problem.

Start with one pachage of corn muffin mix.

Add an egg.

Chop up a large yellow squash (or a couple of medium sized zucchini) and put it in a blender along with a handfull of sliced jalepenos.

Puree it. Run the blender until it turns to mush.

Add it to the corn muffin mix. Mix it all up with a fork.

You want the mixture to be somewhat firm. Firm enough so that you can pick up a large glob with spoon and have to remove it from the spoon by using your finger.

Add Carbquik Baking Mix until the mixture reaches the right consistency. If you add to much you can thin with low-fat milk or with water.

I don't know how much of the low-carb flour substitute you'll have to add because it depends on how much water was in the squash, and how much squash you used.

The more squash you use the lower the carbs, but also the lower the cornbread taste. So you'll have to find you own level.

Scott's Diabetes Journal

A good blog of interest to diabetics. Here's the last 10 posts.

Dry Red Wine

It appears that dry red wine (keyword dry) does have a few carbs but it's good for glucose levels anyway when drunk with a meal.

Hershey's enters the health sweepstakes.

Recent research suggests that Dark Chocolate is good for you. Among other things it lowers your blood pressure, which is very good thing for diabetics.

People at Hershey's read the paper also and they've quickly introduced a premium line of dark chocolate, with the term cacao all over the wrapper. That's the ingredient of dark chocolate that appears to convey all those health benefits.

I don't trust them. I don't know why I don't trust them, I just don't.

I saw some of the new bars displayed near the checkout at the grocery this morning. I didn't buy any. I took a quick look, 18-19 grams of carbs per serving.

You can get 70% Cocoa Extra Dark Sugar Free Low Carb 3 oz. Bars, Twelve (12) Bars, (36 Ounces Total) with about 2g of carbs per 42g serving. It costs slightly more than Hershey's, but the lack of carbs is certainly worth it for a diabetic.

Dark Chocolate is good for you, but you can still skip the carbs and get even more health benefit.

A no carb salad

Well, maybe not no carb, but very, very low carb.

A cup of shredded lettuce has 1 gram of carbs.

Cucumber, the same thing.

Olives have no carbs.

Boiled eggs have no carbs.
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Mayonoise has no carb, and neither does olive oil.

Walnuts have about 3 grams of carbs per 1 oz serving.

Diabetes and life expectancy

Having diabetes seems to cut a lot off your life expectancy.

A diagnosis of diabetes means losing an average of eight years from your expected life span, new research shows.

In addition, diabetics are more likely to develop heart disease sooner than non-diabetics, the study found.

I'm not sure that's actuall new, I think we pretty much already knew that. But it's a reminder that keeping that blood sugar under control is important.