Sugar Turned On Me

A question came to me while at lunch yesterday. I was sitting in a mexican restaurant, waiting for my carnitas, when I looked at the nigh empty basket of chips in front of me and wondered how many carbs I’d added to my meal. This expanded to wondering what other “free food” might be something to pay a bit more attention to.

By “free food” I mean the things that come out at some restaurants before the meal, usally before you’ve ordered a drink that they will refill if you ask. Establishments do this first to make you feel welcome and attended to and second to make you feel like you’ve gotten a good value. They tend to be cheap and surprisingly filling, which usually means they’re bad for people with diabetes in the long run.

So after a little Googling, I found out information about the following:

• Olive Garden Salad and Breadsticks -  I checked the Olive Garden website and found nothing on their salad except that it didn’t appear on their “healthy” selections. This may be because they didn’t have it listed as an entree. According to the Daily Plate though, their salad is listed as having 36g of carbs per bowl. By this I’m assuming they mean the one that you could give a baby a bath in, not the serving bowls. As they will bring you this till you cry mercy, it’s not an insignificant amount and that’s before the dressing or the 23g of carbs per breadstick. If you’re exceptionally careful about carbs, you’re probably not going to Olive Garden a lot to begin with, but if you do, be careful.
• Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuts - These aren’t as bad as I thought. Individually, the carb count on them is 17g, about the same as a slice of bread. The downside is that they are pretty high in fat, at about 9g. One is probably not going to kill you, but stick to one biscut. One tasty, buttery, savory biscut.
• Ryan’s Bread Rolls - Bread is by and large not going to be low carb and I don’t expect it to be… but I also don’t expect it to be a meal’s worth of carbs per serving. While I found different numbers on different sites, the yeast rolls are reported to have 50-60g of carbs per roll. Their smaller rolls have around 35g.
• Chips and Salsa - Where as I was mentioning brand names for the other, the food item that inspired this post I’m leaving generic because there’s a lot of variance from restaurant to restaurant. In general, 10 or 15 white tortilla chips are going to run 12-18g of carbs. Salsa will add another 3 carbs to that. It’s not a lot in moderation, but the trick actually moderating yourself.

The thing I have to remember is that all food counts. It’s easy for me to forget that when I’m watching soccer, crunching down chips, trying to figure out how much time I have left on my lunch hour.  Fortunately, with awareness, these are not foods I have to give up so much as keep track of.

Especially the rolls at Ryan’s. Like half of one at most from now on.

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