Help...Carbs

Hi, sorry you got so confused.

The short answer is that if you keep really good bg levels on what you are eating and you are happy with your medication then thats absolutely fine, stick with it.
Many diabetics find it difficult to get good bg readings if they eat carbs and needing to increase their medication so going lower carb is their best option for them.

If you cut out carbs from your diet you still can get all the nutrients that you need from meat, fish, dairy products, eggs, vegetables and fruit.

I hope that you will stay really healthy.

Karen

Hi Mr Conkers and a warm welcome to the forum.

The topic of carbohydrates can be very confusing, and often contentious, but the simple basics are that carbohydrates are what creates blood sugar (or blood glucose to be technically correct). Some people have great difficulty in controlling their BS without a reduction in their carb intake. In some cases the reduction can be a fairly small one (as seems to be your case). In others it needs a more drastic reduction to achieve the same results.

You have mentioned a healthy diet, but what exactly is a healthy diet? According to the medical profession, and based on research that is very out of date and has recently been found to be totally flawed, a "healthy diet" is one that is high in carbohydrate. Now if you have a medical problem that prevents your body from dealing with a high carbohydrate intake, this is anything but a healthy diet. But unfortunately the medical profession makes no allowance for the different metabolic abilities of diabetics. You mentioned rice and wheat products (and you could add to these pasta and potatoes), but these are primarily starch, and have very little value other than as bulkers. A far richer form of carbs is from vegetables, with the added advantage that they provide the vitamins and minerals that our bodies need.

Many of the regular contributors to this forum have found that the best way they can control their BS is to reduce the carbs to a level that their body's insulin production is capable of dealing with. None of us cut out fruit, but we are careful with the quantity we eat, as I'm sure you are. When you mention "keeping my BS to normal", can I ask what your HBA1C and typical daily BS readings are? The reason I ask is that we often hear of patients being told by their medical team that levels of 10mmol are perfectly ok, when in fact that is a level at which blindness and circulatory problems are practically guaranteed.

Let me pose you a question. Your medication helps you to maintain a BS level you are happy with. But wouldn't you prefer to have that same level with either no medication, or a reduced level of medication?

Wow excellent BS,I'm jealous!!what ever you are doing you are getting it right with the help of medication.Lowering carbs may mean that you may require less medication in the future.

As Dennis has written, there's much controversy over what constitutes a Healthy diet.
the current medical view appears to be that a diet high in wholegrains is a healthy one. This hasn't ever been scientifically tested and since we cannot digest unprocessed whole grains, I for one have serious reservations about this. Grains as a food source were not available to humans early in evolution. not until farming developed , which was only a second ago in evolutionary terms. We have not lived with grains long enough to evolve ways of digesting them. The same is true of other main starch foods, such as roots. We can digest sugars and thus are fine with fruits. We can also handle the traces of available carbohydrate in green leafy vegetables. the main plant carbohydrate is cellulose, which we cannot digest and which we call dietary fibre. Available Dietary carbs are sugars and starches ( yes the stuff Granny used on shirt collars!) Starches are polymers of sugars. These are converted by metabolism into glucose ( a very basic sugar ) which circulates in the body and is used as fuel. It's such an accessible fuel that it has been assumed for ages that it's essential. you will often hear that you MUST have carbs for your brainand/or energy. It's not true. You can run your body perfectly satisfactorily on fats, proteins and ketones, which are produced from fat.
There is Nothin essential in carbohydrates. All the nutrients they provide can be derived from other sources. Whereas it is possible to live a long time on nothing but fatty meats, you wouldn't last long on grains alone.
If you feel drawn to the low carb life, but have been warned off it by well meaning health professionals, just try it. You will not be harmed and will be able to reduce your use of medication.
If however you are controlling your condition well. ( HBA1c below 6.5% , low LDL and high HDL cholesterol and Bgs in the 4.5 -5.5 range, ) And are happy with your routine/ medication and feel well. then continue with what you're doing.

Mr Conkers said:

So it would seem that i was nearly on the right track. i do see your point about going on a low carb diet to reduce the meds does seem a benefit.i suppose as i'm new to all this i have resided to the fact of taking med's not realising that it may be controlled by diet alone in my case.I know this is a totally unanswerable question, but i'll ask anyway....if i had a general good diabetic diet which included guideline portions of carbs, how much would you say the average reduction in a person BS would be. 0.5, 1 mmol maybe??

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I'm not sure what you mean by "guideline portions" - if this is the government guidelines then your BS would not decrease but would almost certainly increase. This is one of the most common complaints we see on the forum. People follow the "eat more carbs" advice given by their medical team and find that their BS is spiralling slowly out of control. They go back to their doctors, are given increasingly higher doses of medication and yet more advice to eat plenty of starchy carbs. It becomes a vicious circle. People either tend to work out for themselves what the problem is (as Fergus and I and many others have done) or they turn to us for advice.

My HBA was 5.8 last time round and daily (2 hours after meal) it doesnt get much above 6. Since my last HBA i've really been trying hard with my diet, including more veg and cutting out completely anything with sugar in at all, which has been hard, as probably for everyone too, so hopefully my next HBA should be slightly lower.

I think that without thinking i'm slowly reducing the carbs by having smaller meals, the next step would be to replace them with lower carb items until it becomes routine.

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Well, what can I say - your BS figures are what most diabetics dream of reaching. As you said you have probably subconsciously reduced your carb intake, or at least are aware of the carb content in what you are eating. From the sound of it you really don't need to make much more adjustment. You are already within the normal (i.e. non-diabetic) range, although only just. Any further adjustment would need to be very small. Because we all have different metabolisms it really isn't possible to say to that if you just reduce x in your diet then your BS will reduce by y. We all react to different foods in different ways, so If you really want to reduce any further all I can suggest is that you experiment and test, experiment and test, etc, until you reach the figures you are happy with.