TobeSoft’s GlycoMeal Software

Well, it was a good weekend. Work on GlycoMeal 2006 continued with good progress towards the Journal section. Users will be able to track their meals daily including snacks. There is also a fitness journal where you can enter in weight, height (with automatic calculation of BMI) , bloodpressure, heartrate, notes, and how you feel. You will then be able to pull up the reports section and look at graphs of each measure as well as see what your daily Glycemic Load is and how you have been trending. The work continues. I will be putting more screen shots out tonight (hopefully).

I did a search on Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load calculators this weekend and came up with few hits. I did find one sight that promised to give you the Glycemic Load of meals that you sibmitted the recipe for. I would like to caution everyone out there that this simply can’t be done. The only way for it to work would be for every ingredient in the meal to have already been tested for Glycemic Index and then there is an equation to determine your Glycemic Load for the meal.

There is no good way to guess at or even calculate the Glycemic Index of a food unless it has been tested. Lets look at an example to show why. If you take a food seemingly simple like rice: Rice has a Glycemic index ranging from about 27 to an incredible 129!!! These measurements depend greatly on the type of rice, and how it is prepared. By the way, for those of you that are confused by the 129 number, think of it this way. If you ate pure glucose and the high Glycemic rice, the rice would raise and maintain your blood sugar 30% higher over a two hour period. All of this together means that if you take what would seem to be like foods and compare them, they may or may not be close of the Glcyemic Index scale.

This is the first post of what will become a grassroots movement to add to the number of foods that are tested for Glycemic Index!!!

When I started on my path towards living a low Glycemic lifestyle, I was hindered by the lack of information that was available. I found very little information on food that had been tested, and the bulk of what I found was from Australia. Nothing against Australia, but you just can’t buy the same brands in the U.S. I found Mendosa’s site and it quickly showed itself to be the authoritative source of information. http://www.mendoas.com

The one major problem that I had was that when I was looking at the Glycemic Load of a food, it was hard to decide what amount of food I could eat without cranking up my blood sugar. That was the start of my first product, GlycoLoad. GlycoLoad

Once GlycoLoad was out, I could tell what the Glycemic Load was for a food, but only for those foods that had been tested. That is when I decided to do something about it.

With the release of my new software, GlycoMeal 2006, we will be starting a program to allow home users to test their own foods. Foods will be tracked by UPC ensuring that individuals will be comparing apples to apples. A test will go like this:

Get a blood glucose monitor
Get 50 grams of glucose (tablets, or gel)
get 50 grams available carbs of the test food

Day 1:
After a 10 hours fast (overnight), consume the glucose for your standard.
Get blood glucose readings every 15 minutes for one hour.
Get blood glucose readings every 30 minutes for another hour (That is two hours in total).
Enter your results into the tracking software.

Day 2:
After a 10 hour fast (overnight again), consume the test food receiving 50 grams of available carbs.
Get blood glucose readings every 15 minutes for one hour.
Get blood glucose readings every 30 minutes for another hour.
Enter your final results into the tracking software.
Fill in the nutritional information for the food as well as the UPC code for the food.
Submit the food the TobeSoft website.

Now looking at this process, you might think that I am crazy to think that people will put aside the time to do something like this. Well, let me tell you that the desire to get more foods tested and published will overcome any lack of interest. My wife and I have already tested several foods to get the process started and to give people a choice of foods to start with.

Now on to the sticky part. This really makes up what can only be called pseudo-science. I don’t disagree with that assessment, but in the absence of information that people desperately need to make good dietary choices, something has to be done. All data published will be clearly marked as user submitted and people will be given ample warning to use the numbers with a certain level of caution. That being said, the process that is being put together matches the processes that are used by most of the major labs doing the testing and is the process that has been published by the United Nations. It is about as good as your are going to get for an uncontrolled group of testers.

Please keep checking back as this service gets started and as it starts to grow.

As a side note, information gathered as part of this project will be published quarterly for those individuals who do not want to purchase my software. This information is meant to be public, the software only provides an esthetically pleasing wrapper for the information.

- Tobe