General good/bad food charts?

[alex_read]

Hi everyone!

I'm living abroad and am coming back to the UK for a Christmas holiday (yey!) I'm a really keen cook and am looking forward to cooking for my family and making the most of the lovely ingredients there - can't wait.

My brother is a type 1 diabetic and will be eating everything that I cook, so I need to plan pretty carefully. Now the last time I made him anything, I was using tables & pie charts I had found from the net which were saying things like:

* x% of the meal should be carbs, y% protien and whathaveyou
* brocolli abc sugars in 100g
cauliflower def sugars in 100g

That sort of thing. This time round not only can I not find many charts I trust, but there's been talk on the forums on whether a lad of carbs are good or not and am feeling a little confused. Are there any tables/charts like this which any of you use? Are there any on this site at all too (I have had a look before posting but am still searching).

Thanks everyone!

 

[Dennis]

Hi Alex,
Have you checked with your brother what his normal eating regime is? As he is Type-1 he will medicate with insulin injections. Some Type-1s prefer to live on a low or lowish-carb diet so that they need less insulin. Others will eat whetever they want and deal with sugar spikes by injecting more insulin. Also most type-1s these days are taught to carb-count so that they know exactly how many carbs they are eating and can inject an appropriate amount of insulin at each meal to deal with the carbs.

I haven't come across any form of carb chart on this website, and most of those you find on the internet are American ones. There are 2 books that are frequently recommended that you would probably find useful: the Collins Little Gem Calorie Counter and the Collins Little Gen Carb Counter.
Both are available from Smiths or most other bookshops at around £2.99 each (a bit cheaper from Amazon). The Carb Counter concentrates solely on carbs and includes just about every food type and brand you can buy in the UK. The Calorie Counter gives information on calories, carbs and fat content of each food item. I have both books and can thoroughly recommend either or both of them.

 

[Stuboy]

perhaps this is a chance for us all to jump on this issue?

Diabetes.co.uk (it's members) can all club together and create a food chart! All we need is for the owners to create a small program where we can put the data in and show it on a chart!?

I'd use it...

 

[Dennis]

Dan,

If you are monitoring, a request for a chart showing the carb content of food items is something that has often been raised in the past. Even better if, like the Collins Calorie counter, it carried calorific and fat info on each food as well as the carb content. Perhaps get one of the big food chains (Sainsbury, Waitrose, Tesco, Morrisons) to sponsor it?

 

[alex_read]

Many thanks for all the replies never short of good advice on these forums!

My brother (Carl) is good at eating healthily and knowing when best to take his injections, but at the same time doesn't like to dwell on being diabetic - he wouldn't go on forums or sites or read books so I think it's more a case that he knows roughly which foods to avoid and eats enough veg & carbs to fill him up. I'd like to do a little more research both on his part and to design some dinners & recipes which would suit him best which is why I need all the fact & figure side more & the reason for the question here.

The books are a great suggestion thanks & I'll be ordering at least one of those shortly. Unfortunately I live in Finland now so it'll take a few days to pop through the post. In the meantime I've still been trying to find some online versions too (which, as mentioned above seem really useful as you could pop on to check a food no matter where you are). Unfortunately I'm coming across USA and other sites which I don't really trust too well. I have found these so far though:
* http://www.gilisting.com/glycemic-index ... -diet.html
* http://www.southbeach-diet-plan.com/gly ... dchart.htm

and have E-mailed these teams to see if they can point me in the direction of any online tables & charts too. I'll keep everyone posted if I get any useful replies back.
* British Dietetic Association
* Food Standards Agency
* Nutrition Society

Do you each have any measures of the foods which you all use please? Are there any hard & fast rules which say a general dinner should consist of x % amount of protien, x % carbs, x % fibre etc. at all? Thanks again each of you for your time to reply to this post to help me.

 

[jopar]

If your brother is used to eyeballing his meals and adjusting his insulin to match, you then need to remember that if you adjust the carb content of a individual dish to let your brother know that you have, this will enable him to adjust his calculation to match... As sometimes dishes can looked itdentical to the higher carb content version of the dish...

 

[Administrator]

Hi All,

Thanks for this, and to Sue for bringing it to my attention. I'll speak to the tech wizards and see what we can come up with.

Regards,

Dan

 

[hanadr]

The original GI tables are helpful. the ones from the University of Sydney Australia.

 

[alex_read]

Wow thanks hanadr, that's a huge list.

If anyone else needs/wants the link to the Uni one just mentioned (which took a little while to find), it's at http://www.glycemicindex.com/ . It's not a listing of the fats and protien and energy etc. of each food as mentioned/wanted by others above, just the GI value but this is fine for me.

Thanks,
Alex

 

[Trinkwasser]

Wow thanks hanadr, that's a huge list.

If anyone else needs/wants the link to the Uni one just mentioned (which took a little while to find), it's at http://www.glycemicindex.com/ . It's not a listing of the fats and protien and energy etc. of each food as mentioned/wanted by others above, just the GI value but this is fine for me.

Thanks,
Alex

More on GI

http://www.mendosa.com/gi.htm

also check out his take on the Satiety Index

http://mendosa.com/satiety.htm