Sunday musings

Let's face it, not very much is happening here. It's a lazy Sunday (so far anyway), a cool and beautiful spring morning, and I have my tea. So I'm just going to babble about some things on my mind.

1. Ads on blogsites... just how much money is in these things?

I hate ads. I hate the prevalence of ads on the internet. Yes, I'm an economist, and I understand the economics of why, and I also know that people have to earn a living. Which makes ads on sites like Jimmy Moore's a lot more acceptable to me (although, could we not have ALL the banners on the top? Makes it hard to see if there's a new post without scrolling down, and hey, I'm lazy.) But why does the Protein Power blog have Google ad feeds for things that are clearly snake oil? Diet pills and weird diets and things like that which the authors of the blog would never endorse. Is this really necessary to support the blog, and if it is, wouldn't a few well-chosen sponsors be more credible? Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe the cost of this is a lot higher than I think or the revenues are a lot higher than I think, but I'm just so tired of looking at this stuff. And so many of the sites that do advertise have so MUCH of it that it obscures the content. And as long as I'm complaining, things (not just ads) that flash and pop and swirl and move around make it very hard to actually read things. Like that trend on eBay for a while (fortunately mostly absent these days) for flashy cursors and flashing stuff. Just annoying, and distracts from what you want to read.

2. Blood glucose meters-- what use are these things if they're not accurate?

We have an Ultra Touch 2 ( I think) blood glucose meter. This is supposed to be a good meter, one of the better ones on the market, and, ok , it's the one the doctor gave us. I'm sure that the doctor gets them free from the manufacturer, because the big money in blood glucose testing isn't in the meters; it's in the $1 per strip test strips... which are unique to the meter, so if you get someone using your meter, bingo, huge profits on something that doesn't cost even close to that to manufacture. It's all part of the huge diabetes industry ripoff, but that's another rant. Anyway, I'd sort of assumed that these things were reasonably accurate, but then I read a review that someone had written on Amazon, talking about inaccuracy of results, and that the company says that its error range is +/- 30 points. If you have really high blood sugar, that might marginally be acceptable, but if your blood sugar is close to the normal range, that 30 points... 60 point range really... is all of your readings, which in theory makes every reading meaningless. I checked this out yesterday when we got a weirdly high reading... 146. Tested again... 116. Tested again... 120. The last two seem to be to be in an acceptable range, but since you'd only think to retest if you got a goofy reading, the results are by definition both biased and pretty meaningless. I don't know what to do about this. It is not necessary to test his blood sugar all the time, but certainly it's desirable some of the time, especially in relation to certain foods. I read some other reviews... but of course, they're biased to the bad, to people who've had trouble with them, and so how do you find one that's accurate? (Thoughts appreciated if anyone has any experience.)

3. Return of the Legumes

Michael has been having serious issues with fatigue for some time now, and part of it is disturbed sleep, but... I think on the whole, it's lack of carbohydrates. Ok, low carb fans, I know perfectly well that there is no dietary NEED for carbs, that you can survive just fine on no carbs (or close to that), but carbs are energy. I've seen him go, over the last four months, from someone who I would call energetic to this lethargic dishrag thing. It got a little better when he returned to eating a little fruit, mostly berries and melons plus the occasional apple. That seemed to give him enough quick energy to move around. But he has still been fatigued and low, and I've had to admit that it correlates with diet. So I've been searching for a way of adding more carbs without adding things like rice and wheat and potatoes... all of which are not good for blood sugar and not things that I think one should really be eating much of at all. And it finally dawned on me... legumes. The wonderful world of beans. Varied. Low-glycemic. High fiber. And maybe enough extra energy to solve some of the lethargy problem. We're giving it a try.