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More than 25 million Americans have diabetes, while at least 70 million American’s blood sugar levels are considered to be near diabetic. One Boston based medical group, the Asian American Diabetes Initiative, made an iPhone app to do something about it.
Drag ‘n Cook, is a cuisine-oriented app from Joslin Diabetes Center’s AADI that allows users to digitally prepare food and monitor nutritional information. Joslin is a Harvard-affiliated diabetes research organization, and AADI was formed to educate and treat diabetes in Asian Pacific American communities.
“We really focused on empowering the patient,” said Chihiro Hernandez, communications and outreach officer at AADI. “They want to [eat healthy] by themselves, but need to be able to do it the right way.”
AADI’s new app features basic ingredients, like chicken breast and garlic, and traditional Chinese ingredients, like dried longan, a Southeast Asian fruit often used in soups, salads or desserts. Users can choose from more than 200 ingredients, the portions, and even what oil to cook in. To choose, users drag items into a frying pan on the bottom half of the screen, and make a stirring motion with their finger, or shake the phone, to digitally cook.
For each ingredient, users can view nutritional information to see how healthy their meals are. The app displays fat, cholesterol, sodium, potassium, carbohydrate, and protein counts, and compares them to one of three guidelines: percent daily value, the AADI’s traditional Asian diet, or the U.S Department of Agriculture. Numbers in green mean the meal is nutritionally ideal, while numbers in red indicate the meal is nutritionally lacking. Users can save the recipes of meals they’ve cooked, and upload to Facebook or send in an email.
Hernandez said that the app starts with a Chinese cuisine package, but future versions will include Japanese, Indian, Korean, and Vietnamese packages. Future plans also include a daily log and insulin count assistance. Though Drag ‘n Cook is currently available on the iPhone, AADI hopes to expand it to Motorola’s Droid as well.
“We’re pretty ambitious in terms of adding to [the app] and reaching more patients,” Hernandez said. “Even though we’re Asian-initiative, we want to reach everyone with diabetes needs.” Hernandez added that an American cuisine package is a possibility too.
Though diabetes is not as prevalent among APAs as it is among African Americans and Latino Americans, 8.4 percent of APAs have the disease. And though rare among children — less than one percent — they also are not immune, as 1 in every 400 youths is diabetic, according to diabetes.org.
Diabetes is a disease caused by high blood pressure, due to an inability to produce insulin, a hormone that regulates metabolism, or a condition where cells don’t use insulin properly. Type 2 diabetes — 90 to 95 percent of APAs suffer from this — describes the case of improper insulin use.
According to AADI, APAs are more at risk for diabetes than their international counterparts. Studies show that Chinese Americans have higher diabetes rates than those living in China and Japanese Americans have higher rates than those living in Japan. A western diet high in fat and calories and low on physical activity may contribute to the higher American rates, but obesity is not considered an important cause for APA diabetes because Asian descents develop the disease at a “normal” weight level by western standards, according to AADI.
“Asian descents need to carefully guard their weight because their risk for developing diabetes rises sharply even with a small amount of weight gain above the target appropriate for their ethnicity,” said Dr. William Hsu, co-director of AADI, on the organization’s website.
