Book Review with Tangent: Favorite Brand Name Diabetic Cooking

Title: Favorite Brand Name Diabetic Cooking

Author: Favorite Brand Name Recipe committee

Date: 2000

Publisher: Publications International

ISBN: none

Length: 96 pages

Illustrations: many full-color photos

Quote: “If you still love the taste of diner food, you won’t be disappointed with these updated versions.”

The verdict on this pretty little cookbook: If you’re not diabetic, it’s worth adding to your collection. If you are, buy The Starch Solution instead.

There are two general approaches to diabetic cooking. One is based on rat studies and presupposes that diabetics need to get as much as possible of their nutrient requirements from cow’s milk products. The other is based on human studies and acknowledges that some diabetics are lactose-intolerant and/or casein-intolerant and/or vegan. If your tastes (or your diabetic family member’s tastes) are like this web site’s, where some of us enjoy some dairy products but not every single day, the good news about this book is that our e-friends the McDougalls can advise diabetics on planning a less cowy diet.

There are, as most people know by now, two general kinds of diabetes. One is caused by permanent damage to the pancreas and is incurable. The dairy-based approach to diabetes was developed by doctors working with patients who have this kind, who can only try to “manage” their disease. The other kind is caused by poor diet and lack of exercise, and is usually curable. People have reversed “adult-onset” diabetes by strict adherence to either a dairy-based diet or a vegan diet. Either diet is a bit of a nuisance—you have to weigh out portions and eat small amounts of lots of different things at pre-set times that keep somebody in the kitchen for a good half of every single day—but worth it. The more exercise and fibre a diabetic individual can incorporate into the plan the individual works out with per doctor, the faster the individual is likely to recover. The vegan diet is generally higher in fibre and thus more likely to promote recovery, though individuals can incorporate lots of fibre into a dairy-based diet also.

Adayahi developed diabetes and cardiovascular disease to a life-threatening stage, was rushed to a hospital and given a prescription diet and exercise plan, and was able to reverse the disease and work and eat normally for decades, relying primarily on exercise. Grandma Bonnie Peters, who worked with several diabetic patients, used exercise to keep from developing diabetes, as do I now. As with many health concerns, adult-onset diabetes has a genetic component (and Adayahi asks “Have you ever met an (American) ‘Indian’ who was not diabetic?”) but people who suspect they have the gene can prevent the disease from developing and interfering with their lives. You might have inherited tendencies to diabetes if (after about age fifteen) you like sugar-based foods (candy, ice cream, sweet baked goods, soda pop), have food cravings, may faint under stress, are overweight and suspect that continual snacking is part of the reason, or feel tired or irritable after a few hours without food. You’re in no immediate danger of going diabetic if you can exercise before breakfast, can exercise vigorously without feeling sick or faint, can fast (taking water only) for a day, find it easy to stay at a reasonable weight, and are keeping those cravings for sweet, greasy, or starchy food under control—can do without them for several days even if you’ve eaten them as road food or party food.

Anyway I, personally, have neither reversed diabetes after developing it myself nor worked closely with patients who were doing that, but since Adayahi has done one of those things and GBP did the other I’ve been exposed to a lot of theoretical information, and can say: Of the members of this web site who’ve had any concerns about or experience with diabetes whatsoever, none would have much use for the recipes in this book, as written. For one thing most of those “favorite brand name” foods, especially the generic ones like all those delicious vegetables I have missed so sorely for so long, have tended to be full of glyphosate for the past five or ten years. For another thing, I like ice cream now and then, and Adayahi likes cheese now and then, but I’m not sure that I know any adult, diabetic or otherwise, who either wants or needs to ingest any dairy product every single day. Much as I enjoy one dish of ice cream on one day I certainly don’t want to eat ice cream again the next day. I’m not lactose-intolerant yet, which surprises me since both of my parents became lactose-intolerant around age 50, but I do not have and have never had the appetite of a calf.

(tangent)

I mention this because a few weeks ago another web site posted a discussion of the claim that it’s “racist” when restaurants dump cheese, whipped cream, cream sauce, etc., into everything they serve. I tend to feel that this claim is valid, myself. I’ve been chastised by Black e-friends for taking it up since “race” as such does not predict lactose tolerance. It’s a separate gene from the ones for skin color and hair texture. Some Black people can digest dairy products; quite a few White people, especially after age fifty, cannot. Still, lactase persistence is definitely a minority gene, not exclusively or definitively but typically a White Thing.

Casein intolerance, which is what I’ve always had, is a different thing. For me cheese is purely and simply an emetic and, if I wanted a purgative, rose petals certainly taste nicer. Even lobelia, a “power herb” I prefer not to use, would be cheaper and less unpalatable than cheese.

Making milk into cheese involves fermentation, with enzymes extracted from calves’ stomachs assisted by various fungi and bacteria. The process breaks down the lactose, a sugar, and concentrates the casein, a protein. In theory, if people succeed in digesting cheese, this allows lactose-intolerant people to get all that wonderful protein and calcium that many humans fail to absorb from cows’ milk. In fact, statistics suggest that cheese is junkfood for most of the people who do like it. For a large number of Americans cheese does not immediately make them sick, but either it just passes through them without them getting any benefit from the calcium, or if they do completely digest cheese they use up more calcium digesting the fat than they get from the cheese. Stooped, shrunken seniors are more numerous in cheese-eating cultures than in non-cheese-eating cultures.

People who like a dairy-based diet and people who don’t can, of course, just leave each other alone—in theory. In fact quite a lot of people find it possible to go into a restaurant where the staff are conscientious about serving “clean” food to people with different food tolerances, accurately identifying what does and does not contain dairy products or wheat or eggs or hot pepper or whatever else people are trying to avoid, and they sit down at one table, and each one orders something person can eat, and they can actually enjoy sharing the meal without touching each other’s actual food. Unfortunately, in the real world, there are food bullies. One of them popped up on that web site.

I’d posted a comment about restaurants, like Wendy’s, that lost a lot of the type of customers they thought they wanted by deliberately trying (at some locations) to discourage a different type of customers, and about how this can and should work for any person who needs to avoid any food. The successful bakery owners in my town went out of their way to advertise a range of gluten-free options. They’re conscientious about cleaning all those delicious wheat-flour products out of the kitchen when they bake gluten-free cookies and about serving gluten-free soups, salads, and snacks. They have sugar-free things; they have low-fat things; they have vegan things; they have decaf coffee, and tea, and root beer for those who don’t drink coffee. As a result Dad’s relatives, who are not celiacs but would not support a restaurant that snubbed Mother and me, have positively supported that bakery. If you visit my home town, I may or may not ever sit with a computer in a café all day again, but let me know when you’re coming and that café where I used to write is still where we’ll have lunch.

There was another restaurant where a food bully resented having to prepare a special order, just the meat and vegetables in a sandwich without letting them touch a bun or cheese, and after doing that for me once that restaurant advertised that meat-and-veg-without-the-bun would cost 60% more than the sandwiches. Quite a few people I know haven’t been in there since. In a small town, don’t you know, the coronavirus panic just wiped out restaurants where decisions had been made to discourage customers who required special orders. And I’ve gone into McDonalds a few times to use the computer, and in complete contrast to the way McDonalds used to be in Ray Kroc’s lifetime, the staff were aware of local market dynamics and they were very meticulous about preparing my clean, gluten-free meat and veg. (Too bad it became impossible to buy commercial veg that weren’t full of glyphosate. That was not the restaurant’s fault.)

You want to work in food service these days? Accept the fact that one person’s food is another’s poison. Deal with it. Restaurant owners make the highest profits when they can order large amounts of pre-mixed concoctions from which it’s not possible to clean away the ingredients that various customers can’t eat. This is not “racist” or otherwise offensive to anybody as long as the restaurant does serve some things that people avoiding any specific ingredient can eat. Just keep everything separated so that the food that contains sugar or aspartame or meat or corn never touches the food that doesn’t, and everybody can be happy.

But that wasn’t enough for the food bully, who posted a reply that can’t be quoted due to this web site’s contract, but it was insanely hostile, profane, obscene, really a bit libellous, and it contained a violent fantasy about forcibly feeding all people like me the things we weren’t built to digest. I didn’t want to feed the troll attention but that reply did arouse several different thoughts. The least violent of those thoughts was, “How interesting that anyone reacts so violently to the fact that some people don’t digest cow’s milk. I wonder if that tells us anything about his infancy?” When it’s possible to identify people like this who get jobs in restaurants, this kind of question deserves some attention from the psychiatrists responsible for medicating them, for the rest of their short lives behind bars.

Cheese is a food for most people; it’s not nearly as good a nutritional bargain in practice as it seems to be upon a merely chemical analysis, but it does contain enough calories to support life until people find more nutritious food. Cream is an even worse nutritional bargain, but it certainly offers an abundance of calories. There’s no reason why restaurants should be required to ban all the cow products, but as America “grays” restaurants will definitely be ahead if they keep most of the dairy products on the side. (If the menu says “ice cream,” the dish should contain ice cream. If it says “pie,” the restaurant should save money by letting people ask for ice cream or whipped cream on the side.) I wonder, though, about these people who want to dump cow products into everything they eat. I think the basic problem has to be that they were never properly nourished and properly weaned as infants. Psychoanalytical therapy might help them.

(/tangent)

Well, flipping through this short cookbook…there is a section on tropical fruits that will at least work for most of the vegans. (Some people, mostly those whose ancestors came from the Global North, can’t eat tropical fruits.) Nevertheless. Nearly all of these recipes are written to fit into the type of diabetic diet that assumes that a human is a big rat (or a small calf), not a different species that actually tends to thrive on different foods. The book acknowledges that using beans, whole grains, and nuts as primary proteins happens to be a more efficient approach for those diabetics who do it because the vegan diabetic diet contains more fibre, but it still assumes that you want to go on eating mostly meat with a lot of dairy products and simple carbs on the side. A lot of these recipes are the kind that, if diabetes weren’t involved, a lot of people could clean up to suit their diets, tastes, and even purses, by just leaving out those dollops of cream and sprinkles of crumbs. I don’t complain about this in recipes that aren’t advertised as being specifically for diabetic patients. It becomes a problem in recipes for diabetic patients because, when you leave out the useless-indigestible-calories-on-top as many diabetic patients will instinctively do, you mess up the “exchanges” and have to confer with the doctor or nutritionist about how to fix that.

The sad part is that people who are not diabetic, who’ve been warned off this cookbook by the title (and the ads for diabetic supplies inside), can still have fun with these recipes, happily leaving out the junk they don’t want to clutter their plates with and enjoying the meat and/or veg and/or fruit. But diabetics who want to recover can’t afford to play around with their diets.

This is why, although some diabetic patients may still want to use this book, most of the ones I know would advise me to burn it. The recipes might be repackaged for the general public, but this book fails to serve the audience to which it is addressed. Typically a diagnosis of diabetes these days generates a time-tested generic diet plan that contains a reasonable number of calories and balance of nutrients for the individual’s size, with a few guidelines about allowable substitutions for anything the patient is known not to tolerate. If you are (or cook for) a diabetic patient who wants to explore food beyond that diet plan, I recommend exploring the vegan options the McDougalls will (unlike some M.D.’s!) be delighted to discuss with you. They have trained people to crunch the numbers and advise you on how much to cook, how much to serve, and what to serve with each recipe. Their consultations aren’t free, but they’re affordable and unlikely to leave you with an overwhelmingly expensive prescription.  Their recipes are the ones that, when served at buffet parties, lure the carnivores over to the vegan table and leave people saying “I wish there’d been more of the vegan food.”