Eat Well Live Well With Diabetes: Low-GI Recipes And Tips by Karen Kingham

As someone who frequently looks at cookbooks to see how they handle different health conditions, I am still surprised by just how badly authors can mess up the task of making accessible books that handle the issue of what one is to eat to help control different health conditions. There are at least a few factors that make this particular cookbook a particularly poor one with regards to the disease it is meant to assist with, and it is worth discussing some of the reasons why. For one, it appears that the low-GI element of the book leads the author to provide recipe suggestions that appear to mirror her own tastes rather than provide a suitably varied diet for those who are trying to eat well. Particularly, the recipes of this book are filled by such ingredients as pork, shrimp, peppers, and tomatoes, which are either going to be unclean meats on the one hand or high-inflammatory foods on the other which many people are sensitive to. To be sure, one could simply remove these from the ingredients or substitute, say, a lean turkey bacon for the pork bacon that the author adds so liberally to her recipes, the effort of the author is particularly poor in providing an acceptable set of recipes. Given the foods included, this is no guide to eat well or live well at all.

Where the book succeeds relatively well, comparatively speaking, is with regards to the sweets included, which tend to include some excellent fruit-based suggestions to eating, though frequently the author feels it necessary to mention that sweets are to be enjoyed in moderation as even the sweets included here tend to raise blood sugar, which is often a major concern for people with diabetes, who may have a high resting blood sugar rate as a result of the complications of the disease. When the sweets section of a cookbook designed for people who need to drastically limit their intake of sugar is by far the best section of a cookbook, one knows that the author has messed up. In general, the reader would be good to accept the statement that for those with diabetes (or even pre-diabetes), the enjoyment of low-GI foods can help to regulate the condition. That said, the specific recipes included may not be particularly helpful to the reader, especially if their diabetes is combined with other health concerns that preclude the eating of large amounts of red meat, for example. The author claims more than fifteen years of clinical and research expertise in nutrition, but this book does not show a particularly high level of achievement when it comes to designing a cookbook.

In terms of its contents, this book is nearly 200 pages in length and is divided into various sections. The book begins with a worthwhile and general guide to living with diabetes that includes a discussion of why it is that the author (and reader) should care about the glycemic index and the way that the body digests foods. This is followed by several sections where the author provides recipes, with somewhat simple and straightforward directions and plenty of pictures of the dishes. The author begins with breakfasts, with some obvious options like homemade fruit options and egg-based options, smoothies, and cereals on the one hand, and some odd recommendations like baked beans on the other hand. The author then moves to snacks and light meals, including such dishes as stuffed peppers, rice paper rolls with shrimp, as well as plenty of chickpea options (which I enjoy more than most, it seems). This is followed by a section on soups and salads, which ramps up the tomatoes and peppers and strangely does not included any basic but worthwhile chicken or beef and vegetable options. Even the salads included are heavy on spicy and tomato-based options. For main meal options, the author again turns up the suggestions for spicy foods and plenty of pork-based dishes, which seems wildly inappropriate for many potential readers. The last section of the recipes proper includes a lot of fruit options, many of which appear to be tasty and worth trying, it must be admitted. After this, the author includes a shopping list, which seems recklessly expensive in the contemporary economic situation, as well as contact information and an index.