There are a heck of a lot of carb-counting “tools” out there. Today, we’re taking a look at the utility of one in particular…
My 10-year-old son Rio and I have been watching the 1960s Sci-fi show Time Tunnel on DVD. It’s about two government scientists lost in time. Every week it’s a different century. So my first impression of the new SureCount “carb tool” was that it must have fallen out of the Time Tunnel. It’s state of the art — for diabetes 1960. But for today?
Ummmm…. Frankly, my first impression was: Is this product even necessary? But after studying it and talking to its inventor, I think it may have a place in our time after all.
SureCount is the brainchild of Melanie Weiss of Oak Park, Illinois. Weiss doesn’t have diabetes. Her children don’t have diabetes. None of her family has diabetes. In fact, Weiss confesses that she’s never even spent an entire day with a person who has diabetes. So what on Earth would inspire her to spend the last three years assembling a twenty-year out-of-date diabetes tool?
Weiss has a Master’s in health administration and a passion for health education. She says that at first she started to work on a meal planner for weight loss, but that over time, as it evolved, she felt it was better suited to help people with diabetes. She turned to four different CDEs to help her develop the SureCount system.
The CDEs must have fallen through the time tunnel, too.
Counts or Exchanges?
SureCount is poorly named. It’s billed as “a carb counting tool,” but there’s not a single carb count in it. What the tool really is, is a modern, well-organized, portable and durable exchange list. It’s about the size and thickness of a checkbook, with full-color printing on slick card stock and a small metal spiral binding across the top.
Wait a minute. Did you say exchange list? Does anybody use that system anymore? In a word: No. Oh, wait. There’s that one little old lady in Tulsa. She still uses it. But generally speaking, when we talk about carb counting, we’re talking about adding up the carbs in a meal, using reference guides to help us figure out exactly how many carbs are in our meals. And SureCount can’t help with that. At all.
SureCount contains nine pages of food servings that are purported to be 15 carbs each, broken into categories like cereals, grains, fruits, etc. Weiss tells me that in her research for SureCount she was surprised to learn that fruit and milk had sugar in them.
So, with that, my next question was inevitably: How sure is this SureCount?
SureCount seems to be forcing round pegs into square holes, by making everything 15 carbs, and some errors jumped out at me immediately. SureCount lists one slice of bread as being 15 carbs. Of course, a slice of bread can range between 9 and 19 carbs per slice, depending on the type. I find most run 18. What do you find? Do three extra carbs matter? It does if you’re off by three carbs on everything you eat. SureCount shows a small apple, banana, or pear at 15 carbs. Really? My other resources show a typical apple at 21 carbs, a pear at 25 carbs, and a banana at 28 carbs.
Who’s SureCount For?
SureCount’s marketing materials and website boldly declare that the booklet is “especially tailored to meet the needs of people with: pre-diabetes, type 1 diabetes, type 2 diabetes, and gestational diabetes.” Really? All of us?
Weiss admits that she took some copies to a local type 1 support group recently where it generated very little interest. She says she now thinks her product is best suited for newly diagnosed type 2s, women with gestational diabetes, and family members of people with diabetes who want to understand what to cook when “grandpa comes to visit.”
A Downloadable Alternative
If you want a book to help count carbs the modern way, I would suggest that you get your paws on a copy of Sanofi’s Take Charge by Counting Carbs (downloadable at the site), an excellent carb data base only slightly larger than Weiss’ SureCount. Take Charge not only lists the carb counts of various foods that don’t have labels, but teaches you how to read labels on foods that have labels.
Plus, Take Charge has a measuring guide, sorely missing from Weiss’ SureCount book. To her credit, wherever possible, Weiss gives us countable food items: 5 chocolate Kisses, 8 animal crackers, 12 tortilla chips; but as with all carb guides, she’s had to fall back on 1/3 cup and 3 ounces too much of the time. The real-world problem is that most of us (including me) are very bad at estimating how much 1/3 of a cup of rice is when it’s on a dinner plate. Take Charge gives us a reference guide to sizes using concepts like servings the size of a bar of soap, a ping pong ball, a nine-volt battery, or a light bulb.
Why Not Just Use a Smartphone App?
With an abundance of food and carb apps in the world, I asked Weiss what advantage she thought her dead-tree pocket book had. “If you’re newly diagnosed and out to dinner, you don’t know what to look up” in a smartphone app, she says. She feels the format of her booklet makes it easy for new members of our club to see how much of various foods they “can” eat. She views SureCount not as a lifelong resource, but as an educational tool to “get grounded,” and as an out-of-the-starting-gate meal planner.
So think diabetes nutrition boot camp. But that assumes you subscribe to the notion of a diabetes diet based on eating a set number of carbs in a given meal. Quoting Weiss’ “How to Use SureCount” document: “People who have been diagnosed with pre-diabetes or diabetes need to keep their blood glucose in a targeted range by managing the amount of carbs they eat throughout the day.”
Off to a Rough Start
Weiss originally planned a launch of her product at the American Diabetes Association New York Expo, which was scrubbed in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. Now she’s been focused on optimizing her website, which she confesses has had only 71 unique visitors. A statistic, Weiss says, that “is kind of embarrassing.”
She’s also submitted to Amazon and hopes she may be able to generate sales there. She’s confident that there is nothing else like her booklet on the market. And that’s true. But is there any need for it?
Despite all my criticisms, maybe so. It’s a quick way for someone new to the effects of food and drink on blood sugar to compare… well, apples to apples. For a newbie, a simple, well-organized pocket reference guide that lets you see that, for example, 40 Goldfish crackers has the same carb count as three cups of popcorn or a half cup of refried beans, could be eye-opening information.
But is it worth $6? I guess the market will decide that.
In the fullness of time.
This book is what I would expect from someone who admittedly has not clue about diabetes or the life of a person with diabetes.
Definitely, she has used an archaic system and wants to market it to 21st-century people. I was diagnosed in 1972, and the “exchange system” actually served me well, at least in one way. I was prescribed a diet, which I was told to adhere to. And I did adhere to it for a few decades. What was good about it was that the dietician had prescribed a BALANCED diet for me. I ate an abundance of vegetables and fruits, while I know too many recently-diagnosed children who are counting carbs only, and would gladly have Pirate’s Booty, or even candy, as carbs rather than bread. Also, I was hospitalized briefly last year (kidney stone) and was shocked to see that the food they sent me from the hospital’s kitchen was listed according to the “exchange system” and that there were no carb counts listed. This was in an otherwise modern hospital, not far from NYC!
Having used the exchange system back in the 70′s and 80′s, it is still fully ingrained in me. Even when I carb count, I still seem to think in blocks of 15 carbs.
In lots of ways the exchange system is a balanced diet with portion control that would be a healthy diet for most of us. I eat fewer carbs and snacks than my prescribed exchange diet had, but i think it would still work for me as long as I used carb counting to adjust for things that might have fewer or more carbs than 15 grams.
Those of us who spend a lot of time online and take smartphones for granted sometimes don’t realize that there is a huge population of people with diabetes who don’t have smartphones. They may be too expensive or complicated.
If this SureCount book had some real carb counts in it, it might be something that would be valuable to some people. Books like Calorie King can be overwhelming because they have so much information. Right now it just looks like something that would come in your “Welcome to Diabetes” packet that lives eternally in the bottom of a drawer somewhere.
I loved Time Tunnel when I was 12 and was madly in love with James Darren. You brought back happy memories.
I learned to carb count and micromanage my pump settings. But I’ve eaten in restaurants with the exchange listed and I know plenty of people, young and old, of both Types who never carb count (or test), including a 30-something guy whose pump is set at 1:15 and who estimates by 15s.They all think I’m weird.
I”m only 28 so definitely not the little old lady in Tulsa, but I must say I still use the exchange system. After 20 years my brain is just trained to think in units of 15. Sometimes that means I add up all the carbs on labels and divide by 15 which may be more work, but it’s the way my pump has always been set up.
Don’t know that I see any use in this book though.
Hmmm… looks like the exact same info that was on all of those useless photocopies they gave us at the hospital when my daughter was diagnosed with T1. They all went directly into the recycling bin.
While I would not use this as a type I, I do see a market it for it with gestestational diabetes. As the resident diabetes expert at my company, I can’t tell you how many women with gestational seek me out, and are overwhelmed by true carb counting.
SureCount, is like listening to an .mp3 recorded onto a cassette tape played on a $5,000 stereo. Any questions I have are better answered by going to the product itself. And 15 carbs for a slice of bread? Not really. 18-20, depending on which brand I buy.
Roman Meal is 25 carbs for 2 slices.
You have to be careful though. Sometimes they, I won’t say lie, but certainly take advantage of the “at least 80% but no upper limit” FDA guideline. Ate some expensive bread that purportedly had 7g carbs for 1 oz (note: not per slice). The 2 slices had many more carbs than 14.
This is a suggestion for a tool to use at home. There is an EatSmart Nutrition Scale by Health Tools LLC. There is a wide variation in attempting to “guess” how many carbs are contained within a given item. An orange is an orange, BUT how large the orange is a different matter. The actual weight of the time can be used to the determine the number of carbs in a particular item. Hope this helps and as always have a great day.
Dan
I would like it to become common knowledge that 15 grams of carbs from oatmeal is not equivalent to 15 grams of carbs from raspberries. It’s so different it’s not surprising my previous efforts were so sadly rewarded.
I’m sure tools like this are a fit for some but we’re all definitely moving away from books whose pages we can flip.
I was never introduced to the exchange system because even in 1994 my doctor said it was a little bit outdated. But I guess there is a population out there that benefits from it.
I have actually used this product – I’m newly diagnosed and I have no clue how to get started about what I can eat. This makes it easy for me to figure out what to look for. I know – obviously its supposed to be used as a guide, so if it lists an apple at 15 carbs, I know if I have a gigantic apple, its going to be more than that. BUT, for people just learning – I think its a great product to use, its small and I don’t have a smart phone, so downloading an app won’t work for me. Definitely worth the price in my book!
Thanks- as a T1- I learned the Hard way..
“If I don’t Know the Carbs? THEN I CAN”T EAT IT !
Go eat something you Do know what the carbs are..
So many Lables are So Misleading too !
Total Carbs = 10 g
But Have to Look as per Serving all the time
and have to Use a MAGNIFYING GLASS
I gave up!
Set up 5 Bkfts/10 Lunches/10 Dinners
Looked up the Carbs and the Weight and measured them All out
They are My Bible of what to Eat and I Don’t Diviate from it.. That is all the types of Food I keep in my Kitchen/Cabinets and Frig and when I go eat out..
If all else Fails? Its Steak, some Palm size Veggies and that’s it..
And oddly enough? McD’s have been Very Good with their Carb readings..
Of course< most Women I know, can't stand the Same O, Same O. so that is a Problem with them..Not Us Guys.. We're just Anixious to get to having a Beer afterwards anyway..