So, first off, commercial salad dressing almost always has sugar in it. Look at the nutritional facts label next time you're shopping for it. There's a few brands that offer "simple vinegar and oil" style dressings that don't have any sugar in them, but MOST salad dressings Americans come in contact with are full of sugar.
Even low GI foods still cause blood sugar to raise by some amount.
All of the vegetables in the salad have carbohydrates that will raise blood sugar. Carrots, onions, tomatoes, all of that will raise blood sugar. Croutons? Blood sugar.
Obviously selecting a garden salad with no dressing is a healthier choice than "sweet ribs". Most diabetics (that are managing their condition) are not going to be ordering things with refined sugar in them.
Where things get tricky is asking questions like "what's healthier, a honey-miso glazed salmon with brown rice or a salad with croutons and a honey and berry dressing?" or "What's better for you, grilled chicken with a sugary barbeque sauce or fried chicken with no sauce?"
Also watch out for "sugar by another name" ... pineapple puree, white grape juice/concentrate, apple juice/concentrate are very common commercial dressing ingredients to load up on sugar.
Sure always ask for the vinaigrette eating out, but at home make your own salad dressing:
* get a mixing bowl big enough to toss salad in, and a whisk
* add 1T dijon mustard, 1T not-balsamic vinegar (balsamic is high sugar! I like sherry or beer vinegar), salt & pepper
* drizzle in 1T olive oil while rapidly whisking.
* Add 3 oz or more salad, toss, done for 2 servings
A few years ago organic/natural products were marketed as containing "Evaporated Cane Juice" (aka Cane Sugar) but my understanding is the FDA put an end to that one.
> commercial salad dressing almost always has sugar in it. Look at the nutritional facts label next time you're shopping for it. There's a few brands that offer "simple vinegar and oil" style dressings that don't have any sugar in them, but MOST salad dressings Americans come in contact with are full of sugar.
Making salad dressing is really easy btw in case anyone wants to try. Often all you need is olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper and you're set for most salads. Even a restaurant should be able to whip that up.
I love this author's recipes; it's the opposite of the normal recipe-preamble-slop. All of the stuff before the actual recipe is relevant information. In more complex recipes, he goes over the testing and process that led to the finished recipe. It's a wonderful view into the world of recipe creation.
Awesome, I'll give that a try. What I like about it is that you can use whatever high quality eggs you normally use instead of the cage eggs that mass producers will use. Until now I had to resort to vegan mayo.
It's so much easier to do it with a hand blender though. It takes longer to clean up afterwards than it takes to make. And no maintaining a steady thin stream of oil, you just put it all into a container and blitz it.
You can make meringues and cakes with a whisk, too, but most people I know have electric mixers for that.
Mechanical eggbeaters with little flywheels were popular before the electric ones, too!
> Often all you need is olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper and you're set for most salads.
Why do you need a "dressing"? In my corner of Europe they put the above by default on every restaurant table and the salad has nothing in it (or maybe a tiny bit of oil and vinegar), you adjust it to taste.
The only places that offer salad "dressings" are american inspired and even those mostly serve it separately so you can ignore it.
Mayonnaise alone is used to dress salads, and mayonnaise is used as the base for many more elaborate salad dressings. The famous American "ranch" dressing is basically mayonnaise with buttermilk and allium and herbs added.
I buy a salad kit at Trader Joe's. It has sugar in it. And I buy arugula and make 4 salads out of that one salad. I add a dash of olive oil and pecans. And end up throwing out 1/3 of dressing that came with the salad.
So I get some of the sugar sources in the kit. Just smaller amounts.
Otherwise, I just use olive oil and balsamic vinegar with arugula, pecans.
Arugula is a good source of nitrates, which are good for nitric acid.
Not a diabetic but adult later onset lactose intolerant and the problem is you really have NO idea what restaurants put into stuff, even if you ask.
Even a stupid salad, what's in the dressing, what's in the bread/croutons, what was the meat glazed with. Etc.
Restaurant food tastes good because it is generally unhealthy top to bottom, with quantities of salt, butter, etc no sane person would use at home.
One thought experiment - when was the last time you ate out and needed to add salt to anything? Now thing of home cooking how often you might add a little salt while you are eating.
The easiest thing to do is ruling out restaurants entirely, but then that's rather anti-social.. Not to mention family/friends gatherings, etc.
Things are changing nonetheless. My wife is celiac (we’re quite a problematic family: I’m diabetic, she’s celiac), but by law, she is guaranteed that a suitable menu must be available wherever she goes, or at least that waitstaff and business owners know how to handle the situation when she informs them.
(I know for a fact that managing celiac disease and the most severe and dangerous intolerances is a mandatory requirement for obtaining a business license.)
I think in the US, it's basically an intractable problem the way restaurants operate and are staffed. Low margin, high failure rate businesses with many fly by night small operators. Front of house staff is high turnover, while back of house staff is largely non-English speaking of sometimes questionable immigration/work permit status.
And then there is the supply chain since most restaurants are not cooking every single part of every meal from absolute scratch ingredients.
There was a story about a woman near us operating some sort of celiac friendly/gluten free bakery. One day the donuts were delivered and she noticed some D shaped sprinkles and realized her supplier had come up short and just put some random Dunkin Donuts into the delivery. Good on her catching it, but how in good conscience could she operate a bakery advertising itself as celiac friendly/gluten free if she was outsourcing like this?
If I had any sort of food allergy that could result in hospitalization or death, I'd just stop eating out. I'd rather be a little boring than very dead.
I didn’t know their simple and will try. To answer your question, perhaps donuts aren’t her main product, for me it’s more about pastry which is a side bonus for bakeries, thought if I go to a personal shop I expect 95% hand made products but that my differ depending on the culture (I’m not from the US). Also they may be just cheaper (taking into account your time)
You go to a place advertising itself as gluten free / vegan / celiac safe / whatever .. and its been outsourced.
Once it's outsourced, all bets are off. Who knows if the vendor subbed it out further, etc.
Which is why for a certain level of food sensitivity it's almost not worth eating out. It comes down to - do you trust random strangers with your life?
If you're healthy between the pancreas and the liver you maintain homeostasis and things are fine.
As a T1D you don't get that base rate, so your blood sugar will mostly trend up and stay high, even without eating anything. You simply have to get more insulin to avoid burning out all the systems in your body and dying slowly.
Is a really complex game.
The basic reasoning is that for every X carbohydrates ingested, you need to inject Y insulin (according to a personal ratio).
However, everything is complicated by numerous factors and the technology you use.
Factors: how you feel, stress, exercise, what you ate in previous meals, your blood sugar level at the start of the meal, and the activities you’ll engage in after the meal (physical or mental).
There’s also the issue of how you administer insulin.
In Italy, up until 3-5 years ago, most of us were using the “multiple daily injections” method, which involved taking a dose of “long-acting” insulin (lasting 24 hours) as a “base” and using “rapid or ultra-rapid” insulin at meals.
Clearly, this approach provides limited control and requires a VERY habitual lifestyle (you can’t skip a meal; the long-acting insulin keeps working regardless).
Now (at least here in Italy), we are all transitioning to or already using CGM systems, which are more or less intelligent systems that continuously administer insulin at a “medium” rate. Based on input from the patient regarding the predicted amount of carbohydrates (and fats) they will consume, the system calculates the best strategy for what is called the “meal bolus” (using strategies like multi-phase, direct, etc.) and at the same time, it maintains a continuous but adaptable level of injection to achieve a target blood sugar level (day and NIGHT!!)
In essence, it’s a very nerdy way of dying slowly (hopefully as slowly as possible).
È un mondo difficile
E vita intensa
Felicità a momenti
E futuro incerto
Diabetes is a complex and mentally demanding disease. It affects you in the short term and has a significant impact in the long term. Everything is in your hands, fully aware that every mistake has immediate consequences but, worse, accumulates over time.
That phrase (from this song) perfectly capture the mental state of my 20 years living with the disease. No tragedy (there are worse things), just deep awareness.
Salad is great for diabetics. The problem is everything else:). Like for instance I've discovered that 99% of all rice is extremely bad, even good pasta is bad, potatoes are poison, bread also bad, and the list goes on. Fruits are bad too.
Cooking at home can be managed, and still heavily limiting. Eating out is a nightmare. First of all there are no "diabetes" places in the similar style to "vegan". And eating in a restaurant with at least some diabetes friendly selection of dishes is hard. For example there are may be 4 soup dishes. But 3 of them or even all will have either potatoes or pasta as ingredient (and leaving out said ingredient makes for a very mall meal, because those are often added to compensate). Salad section - the same issue, too often they have sweet syrup added for flavor. Anything Asian has rice or noodles in large quantities (I often wonder what diabetics in Asia eat). Second course dishes like meat or fish also sometimes contain sweet "surprises". All in all it is very hard task to find something, in a big city even.
This depends on a lot of factors. There are some type II diabetics like this: they might need insulin after a meal with a high glycemic index, but not after a meal with a low glycemic index. There are some type II diabetics with more advanced disease who need insulin after eating anything. Type I diabetics entirely lose their ability to make insulin, which is why the disease was fatal before insulin was discovered, no matter what the kids (it was almost always kids) ate or didn’t eat. As a general rule, it is inaccurate to equate diabetes with unhealthy eating. The Venn diagram only overlaps.
Healthier isn't a good metric, A carb heavy salad will probably be worse than those protein heavy ribs by themselves (Maybe the rib sauce will tip you over, or maybe you will use a salad dressing that put any "healthiness" to the test)
does choosing healthier meal, a salad instead of sweet ribs, not suffice for a good blood sugar?