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The Blood Sugar diet: The Food Table


My blog “The Blood Sugar diet: A Control Approach” introduced a spreadsheet based system for monitoring your calorie intake on a fairly detailed basis. In order undertake this the system needs information about the calorie content of what you eat. This is contained in the Food Table.

The Food Table

The table (or list) of foods you want to eat is very personal. The spreadsheet template has a list that includes those regular ingredients for our age and lifestyle. To get to it follow the link on the FrontPage shown below.
There are about 125 items in this list, but there is space for over 100 more to meet your own personal needs. There is nothing sacred about the list we have given you. You may amend, replace or delete them completely, but see later for some of the technical caveats associated with such changes.


For each named food item there are some vital pieces of information that MUST be provided with it. These are the calorie content of the item. (Strictly speaking this is the Kcal content, but this is referred to as the calorie content by us mere mortals.)

Next comes the unit or size of the foodstuff from which you calculated the calorie content. Usually this will be grams (g), because using kitchen scales is the easiest way to measure fresh food. But there are other common measurement units (e.g. teaspoon (tsp), tablespoon (tbsp), cup (cup), etc.). I have made up other units for ease and speed of posting items into the spreadsheet. Examples of these include ‘bottle’ for Becks Blue (a brand of non-alcoholic beer), ‘chunks’ for illicit chocolate eating and the ubiquitous ‘item’ for a food like falafels which are sold in spheres. These unusual units must make sense in context. It usually requires some explanation within the description as to what you mean. For example 



Finally, there is a column called multiple. It is common practice within pages of the World Wide Web to record the calorie value of a food for a 100 gram portion.


While this certainly common it is not universal or consistent through the available reference sources. Accordingly, the system requires that you specific the multiple of the unit that you are using, even when it is the obvious value of 1. The picture including falafels above provides examples of how the ‘Multiple’ column is used.

Maintaining the Food Table

The food table is a list comprising four columns Description, Calorie Value, Unit and Multiple. The table itself is named ‘MyFoodTable’. You can access it from the Name Box at the top left corner of an Excel screen. It is highlighted in the image below.


The list has about 240 rows available for different food items. Hopefully, this is far more than you will ever need in practice. Spare rows are given the description ‘zzz’. This curious anachronism is designed to ensure that when you reorder the table the unused items stay at the bottom. Use a ‘zzz’ record if you want create a new food item. If you want to delete a record, clear all four fields and replace the Description cell with ‘zzz’.


It is vital to reorder the table every time.



First select ‘MyFoodTable’ (see above), then choose ‘Sort & Filter’ from the Editing group of the Home tab. From this choose ‘Sort A to Z’.

Testing for Unique Descriptions

The Food Table depends on having unique names. However the list is long enough for an entry to be duplicated unintentionally. 

This testing system may be found to the right of the Food Table.


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