What a school-day carbohydrate log should record — and what it should not

Write it for the person who reads it in three weeks

Almost everything that goes wrong with a food log goes wrong because it was written for the person writing it. At 1:40 in the afternoon “tiffin” is unambiguous. In a consulting room in October it is a word with no content, sitting next to a blood-sugar reading nobody can now explain.

So the test for every entry is simple: will this sentence still mean something to a stranger who was not in the kitchen? “Two rotis and a katori of dal, about half the tiffin came back” passes. “Lunch” does not.

The four things worth recording

The time. Not the meal name — the clock time. A reading two hours after eating and a reading two hours after a snack that was not written down are the same number on the page and completely different facts.

What was eaten, in your child’s words. The portion as your household serves it: one katori, two rotis, half a plate. Converting to grams in your head at the moment of writing loses the only description anybody can check later.

A carbohydrate range. Two kitchens make two theplas; a band is what is actually known. If your dietitian has given you a firmer figure for your own kitchen, use theirs and record that it is theirs.

What came back. The half a tiffin that returned uneaten is the single most useful thing on a school day and the thing most often left out. A log that records what was served rather than what was eaten will mislead everybody who reads it.

The three things that should stay out

Anything worked out rather than observed. A log is a record of what happened. The moment it starts carrying arithmetic — a dose derived from a ratio, a correction, a total somebody computed — it becomes a mixture of evidence and reasoning, and three weeks later nobody can tell which line is which.

A guess dressed as a measurement. If nobody knows what was in the birthday cake, the honest entry says so. An invented number is worse than a blank, because it will be read as a measurement by a clinician who has no way to know it was not.

The same food twice. This one is specific and it catches people. If you attach a carbohydrate figure to a blood-sugar reading to explain that reading, and you also log the meal, you have described one plate of food in two places. Kulraise deliberately does not add the reading’s figure into the day’s total for exactly this reason — the day’s total is the meal plan plus the food log, and the figure on a reading is context for that reading, not another meal.

Who should be able to see it

Parents, and the child. That is the list. Inside a family, a parent can see a child’s health log because a parent is who acts on it; between families there is no sharing of any kind; and outside the family, nobody at Kulraise can read the contents of a reading, a food note or a message, with or without a support key.

That is not a policy written in a help page and hoped for — a support key at its most permissive shows the times entries were made and never what they said, and there is no button anywhere, for anyone, that logs a staff member in as you or as your child.