Newcastle: Gastronomic Lunch of the Year

After being cancelled in 2020, the Gastronomic Lunch of the Year was welcomed back in style at Scratchleys in May as 110 guests joined owner and event organiser Neil Slater to be wined and dined by six of Newcastle’s best chefs to raise money for HMRI diabetes research. Diners heard from HMRI researcher Professor Bruce King about his team’s work to make life easier for the families of young children living with type 1 diabetes.

Parents of children living with this condition spend a lot of their day counting carbs in food to calculate the correct insulin dose to give their child. Unfortunately, counting carbs is an imperfect metric to judge insulin requirements, leading to incorrect doses of insulin and harmful high or low blood sugar levels.
Professor King’s team has developed a first of its kind app, which allows people to input specific foods or ingredients of meals and automatically calculate the required insulin based on fat, protein and carbs.
The app has already shown great promise in trials, giving parents better information to manage their children’s insulin levels, giving them back time and enhancing their quality of life by cutting down on the need to break out the calculator for each meal.

Professor King says the money raised by the Gastronomic Lunch will be used to take the app to the next level by trying to integrate advanced image recognition into the app. “We are immensely grateful for the generous support of everyone involved with the Gastronomic Lunch.”
Neil Slater and his wife Donna have organised the Gastronomic Lunch for more than 16 years and raised over $1.9 million for HMRI research.

To learn more about HMRI visit hmri.org.au

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