For diabetics, the menu of cookbooks is growing

Cookbooks for diabetics - which are being turned out like hotcakes now that the disease is a national health problem heading to the status of an epidemic - are not really for diabetics. They're for everyone.

Healthy cooking, which diabetics translate as cutting down on the carbohydrates that their bodies quickly convert into sugar, is good cooking, period.

I've been cooking all my adult life, and for almost two decades, battling with myself to control adult-onset diabetes - called Type 2 diabetes by more and more people who are unfortunately getting to know about it firsthand. I've discovered during all this another curiosity: Some cookbooks that call themselves diabetic aren't all that useful to those of us afflicted with the condition.

They offer a lot of carbs. The authors of their recipes assume that readers will make good choices, cooking high-carb selections but balancing the rest of the meal with slow-burning carbs (a big salad, for instance) or virtually no carbs at all.

I wish life worked for me that way. If I see a recipe in a cookbook for diabetics that calls for more carbs than I usually go for, I take it as a permission - more like a green light than a red flag.

So I approached a raft of cookbooks for diabetics with a skeptical eye. If I were cooking only for health reasons, all the books include recipes I would avoid - but diabetes insidiously affects people at different levels and in different ways, so some of the stuff I wouldn't make, others would.

Still, all the books have recipes we can agree on as worthwhile - whether we know diabetes up close or not. And most accompany each recipe with "exchange list values," the meal-planning method created by the American Diabetes Association and the American Dietetic Association.

Here's a feel, or maybe I should say a taste, for the new cookbooks.