MEAL-PLANNING RESOURCES

by Peter J. Nebergall, Ph.D.

Includes photo of Peter Nebergall.

Managing your diabetes is a discipline. You have to supply the motivation--the determination to keep to your schedule, your medications, and your meal plan. There's much to master, but you don't have to do it all yourself--especially not your meal planning.

Everyone should begin their "diabetic diet" by working with a dietitian competent in diabetes. The most highly trained will be certified RD CDE, and you can find the one nearest you, anywhere in the United States, by calling the American Association of Diabetes Educators; telephone: 1-800-832-6874. And there will be other individuals, hospital and clinic dietitians, also available to help you learn meal planning.

But what else can you do? You know once you design a meal plan that gives you the best compromise of balance, flexibility, and control, you have to be diligent about finding foods that fit it. To do that, you have to know what's in a given food item. How do you find out?

There are a lot of resources to help you. You know that packaged foods, canned, instant, or frozen, carry good, informative labels, sufficient for users of the carb-counting system. Fast foods may not be particularly good for diabetics, but the companies that make them are required to furnish you the nutritional information at your request. Many restaurants offer a "nutrition handout"; others have a poster on the wall with the numbers you need. You can find out how a Big Mac would (or wouldn't) fit into your meal plan. Then you can decide if eating it would be a good idea or not.You know all serious "diabetic" cookbooks have "breakdowns" for each recipe; the carb and calorie counts, and usually the older "diabetic exchanges" as well -- but what if you want to eat "normal" food? There are a couple of extremely useful pocket guides with the information you seek. One is The Diabetes Carbohydrate and Fat Gram Guide, by Lee Ann Holzmeister, RD, CDE, co-published 1997 by the American Diabetes Association and the American Dietetic Association. This little paperback lets you evaluate ingredients, like different brands of peanut butter, pasta, and frozen fish fillets. With it, you can evaluate your own menu.The other, very similar in presentation, is Hope Warshaw's Guide to Healthy Restaurant Eating, Edition 2, 2002, by McGraw-Hill. This one has food breakdowns on all your favorite fast (and not so fast) restaurant foods -- and it can surprise you. With it, I found my favorite Panera Bread Co. Asiago Roast Beef Sandwich had more calories than a Big Mac! "Healthier" may not necessarily mean less impact in your diabetic meal plan!

What other resources are out there? The Diabetic Exchange Lists for Meal Planning booklet has just been updated, and the 2003 edition is now available, in print, English or Spanish, from the American Diabetes Association; telephone: 1-800-232-6733; Web site: http://store.diabetes.org. If you are blind, you can get The Diabetic Exchange Lists for Meal Planning (1995 Edition) for $2 (on 4-track cassette) or $10 (for Braille) from the National Federation of the Blind, Materials Center, 1800 Johnson Street, Baltimore, MD 21230-4998; telephone: (410) 659-9314; Web site: www.nfb.org.

For a more complete listing of dietary materials available in alternative formats (large print, Braille, and "talking book" audiocassette), contact The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, telephone: 1-800-424-8567.

Many Web sites can help you with diabetic food information. The following is a sample--and you'll no doubt find new ones. Be careful, be sure you are dealing with a reputable organization, before you utilize its information (if its authors are RDs, "Registered Dietitians," or RD, CDEs, "Certified Diabetes Educators," you are probably all right)--just please recognize that all advice is not of equal quality; there's a lot of garbage on the Internet.

The U.S. Government offers an enormous, and downloadable, food database, at the USDA Web site: www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl

Kraft Foods offers a lot of useful diabetes-diet information on their Web site, at: www.kraftfoods.com/diabetic

A jazzy-looking site (but whose dietary information still appears to be of good quality) is: www.calorieking.com

Many local agencies (schools and hospitals) in your area may offer healthy diet information. In ours, Columbia, Missouri, a local hospital offers "good hearted cuisine," and many of these recipes are fully labeled for diabetic meal planning. Their Web site is: www.boone.org/wellaware/recipes

Diabetes writer Rick Mendosa has done a first-rate job of collecting information, and has a lot of "food and diet" links on his Web site: www.mendosa.com