About the diabetic vegetarian blog
My partner Andrew, a long-standing vegetarian, was diagnosed with
diabetes (type 2) in 2004. He's always been quite fit and not
overweight so it came as rather a shock, although since both his
parents also had the disease we shouldn't really have been all that
surprised. There's a major genetic component to the disease, but so
far he's the only one out of four siblings to be affected.
We started investigating what could be done to at best make it better, or at the least to stop it from getting any worse and to avoid those scary long-term complications such as blindness, neurological problems, etc. The general consensus seems to be lose weight, take lots of exercise, eat foods with a low glycemic load, eat little and often rather than big meals with big gaps in between. It is also argued that a very low fat vegan diet can be beneficial. There's a link to Dr Neal Barnard's diabetes web site (he's the major advocate for this diet) at the end of this entry.
We've been trying to put these various things into practice for a few years now, with varying degrees of success, so this part of the blog is about sharing our experiences and hopefully other people's too. It's been quite up and down - I don't find the low-fat vegan thing easy to stick to and as I do most of the cooking I find the fat content of our food has a habit of creeping back upwards if I'm not really careful. However, as a cookery writer and keen foodie, on my better days I see it as a positive challenge to produce something that tastes decent within these constraints.
To complicate matters there are other issues about food that concern me, such as seasonality, food miles, freshness, use of chemical inputs and so on. Following the precautionary principle almost all of what goes through our kitchen is organic, either bought in as such, or grown in our kitchen garden which hasn't seen any chemical fertilizers or pesticides for at least eleven years (since we created it from the corner of a farm field). So I won't be posting recipes for green beans flown half way round the world, or anything like that.
I'd be very happy to hear from other people trying to deal with this nasty disease - what works for you and what doesn't.
http://www.nealbarnard.org/diabetes_book.htm
We started investigating what could be done to at best make it better, or at the least to stop it from getting any worse and to avoid those scary long-term complications such as blindness, neurological problems, etc. The general consensus seems to be lose weight, take lots of exercise, eat foods with a low glycemic load, eat little and often rather than big meals with big gaps in between. It is also argued that a very low fat vegan diet can be beneficial. There's a link to Dr Neal Barnard's diabetes web site (he's the major advocate for this diet) at the end of this entry.
We've been trying to put these various things into practice for a few years now, with varying degrees of success, so this part of the blog is about sharing our experiences and hopefully other people's too. It's been quite up and down - I don't find the low-fat vegan thing easy to stick to and as I do most of the cooking I find the fat content of our food has a habit of creeping back upwards if I'm not really careful. However, as a cookery writer and keen foodie, on my better days I see it as a positive challenge to produce something that tastes decent within these constraints.
To complicate matters there are other issues about food that concern me, such as seasonality, food miles, freshness, use of chemical inputs and so on. Following the precautionary principle almost all of what goes through our kitchen is organic, either bought in as such, or grown in our kitchen garden which hasn't seen any chemical fertilizers or pesticides for at least eleven years (since we created it from the corner of a farm field). So I won't be posting recipes for green beans flown half way round the world, or anything like that.
I'd be very happy to hear from other people trying to deal with this nasty disease - what works for you and what doesn't.
http://www.nealbarnard.org/diabetes_book.htm
