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Bacon for type 1s

Jazz97

Well-Known Member
Messages
151
Type of diabetes
Type 1
Treatment type
Insulin
Is anyone able to tell me if t1s can eat UK bacon? Technically it doesn't have carbs, but I cant quite work it out from info online.
I had a couple of fry ups last week, where the only carbs should have been bread, yet my BS sky rocketed.
Anyone know if it could be the bacon making me go this way?
Thanks
 

What did the full meal consist of?
 
urbanracer said:
What did the full meal consist of?
Click to expand...
Eggs, bacon, mushrooms, toast. I did have small spread of jam on one slice of toast, so that's the only other thing I can think of if it's not the bacon...
 
What about the toast? Depending on the type of bread there's up to 31g of carb in some medium sliced loaves of wholemeal bread. Add on some jam and you're looking at about 40g of carb. I think any T1 who didn't inject would have high bloods after that.
 
I did inject though... 7 units I think it was, as I'm on a fixed dose
 
I've read posts from other people on the forums in the past suggesting that they get high BG after eating eggs
Jazz97 said:
I did inject though... 7 units I think it was, as I'm on a fixed dose
Click to expand...

Ah - so have you worked out what your insulin to carb ratio is? Because a fixed dose limits what you can eat.

7units of what? Is this a mixed insulin?
 
Hi @Jazz97, If you are on a fixed dose, I assume your meals will be also fixed in terms of how many
carbs you are supposed to eat ? Do you have a number of grams of carbs for each meal?
Many of us can vary our before meal insulin doses depending on varying levels of carbs we chose to eat
(even if not varying them necessarily all the time).
 
Tbh I've just checked my glucose, and the egg might have something to do with it. Only had a hard boiled egg this morning, and my BS has gone up by 4mml

7 units of novorapid. Problem is, my nurse has said to eat as normally as possible, but just cutting down on sugary sweet things until my levels are normal.
I dont known ratio. I've only been diagnosed 2 weeks, so a lot of this has just been trial and error
 
@Knikki, Eggs, bacon etc could do so, probably moreso under low carb conditions @ 50% of grams of protein counted as carbs.
See also" insulin index".
Separately: Why are not diets prescribed these days for new TIDs?
How can anyone be expected to muddle through the early weeks with this sort of malarky @Jazz97 ?
Please consider asking your nurse if there is a better way (and one where she has to do more work to help you rather than this way)??
I expect my nurse and I to be talking on the phone to help sort this stuff !!
Have you suffered any low BSLS or hypo's as we called them? Have you and family been educated about them? How to recognise them and how to deal with them?
See Home page: Type 1 and hypoglycaemia (hypo- = low,- glyc- = glucose (sugar). and -aemia = in the blood,
'hypo' for short = low blood sugar, defined as either less than 4 mmmol/l or less then 3.6 mmol/l
 
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Not been told how many carbs to eat, just to eat as normally as possible...
Problem is, my BS will go back down to normal by the next meal, so my nurse has said not to worry about the spikes for the time being. However, if I can barely move after eating for a couple of hours, it can really impact on my day.
I've heard that people tend to start on a 10:1 ration for carbs to insulin, but I'm not sure that's working for me at the moment
 
When I had the fry up last week it went up to 28.
This morning I woke up at 6.3 and a few hours later after only eating 1 hard boiled egg, and I'm at 10.2. I have been working, so maybe a little bit of stress also contributed.
Its confusing me that the nurse keeps saying not to worry about the spikes between meals, as my levels do come back down to normal after 4 hours. Does this mean that ultimately I will have to change my diet, despite being told repeatedly that I will not have to do this?
 
Yeah I've thought of this. I've been told different things by different nurses about waiting. One said to wait 15 minutes, the other said not to. As the second is the out patient nurse, that's whose rules I'm following at the moment. I had a look on the novorapid website and that says to not wait longer that 5-10 minutes after injecting to start eating.
I've got an appointment with my nurse this week, so will definitely be asking all these questions
 
Take a look at this thread -
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/forum/threads/fried-egg-carbs.127950/#post-1590473

I do know a couple of T1's in the real world who eat anything and claim to have good control. It seems many of us here have had to make some minor adjustments to whatever best suits us individually. I personally have lowered my carb intake to around 40g per meal as I find it easier to control my BG at this level.

I attended a course at my local endocrine centre last year where I too was faced with nurses saying things like 'dont worry about how high your glucose levels go after eating as long as they are in range by the next meal time.' Many of us would disagree with this advice as being dangerous in the longer term.

This information page gives you the NICE recommended levels but DON'T get stressed about not acheiving these figures - you'll get better as your knowledge improves.
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes_care/blood-sugar-level-ranges.html
 
It wasn't the bacon!
I find bread very hard to dose for without spiking, especially in the mornings. The rise after your egg may well have to do with feet on the floor effect or dawn phenomenon, where your liver thinks it's helpful by dumping glucose in your bloodstream upon getting out of bed to get you going for the day. Add to that the bread and jam and there's your spike.

Take your time learning, there's a lot to learn if you want to become an expert at correctly dosing for different foods and you can't learn it all at once.

What helped me a lot in the beginning was logging food (trying to work out the carbs will help a lot in the long term), insulin, blood sugar and 'exercise' on a sheet of graph paper. Amazing how much information it gave me to help work out how much insulin to take when and a great help in learning how much carbs are in what foods as well.

Good luck!
 
Knikki said:
Didn't someone in another post say something about Egg's causing BS rise because of the amount of protein in them?
Click to expand...

I think it was Tim2000s who said that eggs contain an amino acid which has an effect.

I googled it out of curiousity, the science was just too "sciencey" for me to follow, but the gist of it seemed to be that eggs have a high concentration of the amino acid arginine which is known to make the alpha cells release glucagon which in turn causes the liver to release glycogen as glucose, so, hey presto, even though eggs have very little carbs, the arginine still causes a rise in bg so we'll need more insulin to counter that than we might expect.

This is consistent with the many posts I've seen from folks saying they need to bolus more for scrambled eggs than for a bit of toast.

Interestingly, some of the google stuff says that the amino acid lysine has the opposite effect. I've had a lot of situations where different meals containing broadly the same amount of carbs have completely different effects requiring different amounts of bolus - I'm wondering whether the food types in the meal have higher and lower amounts of the two amino acids which have that knock-on effect of promoting or inhibiting glucagon response.

I'm not sure of any of this yet, as the articles need a degree in biology to understand, but it's an interesting little puzzle which I may require to adjourn to the pub this afternoon to see if I can solve it over a few beers.
 
The thing about pre-injecting is you are them committed to that amount of carbs. If you decide halfway through that you don't like it, are full or find it is off for example your body doesn't care. So you will then need to find an equivalent. Say you burn your toast and have no time to make more. You might need to gulp down some fresh orange in its place. Some choose not do to risk that on some or all occasions and others are ok with it. You find your way
 
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