donnellysdogs
Master
- Messages
- 13,233
- Location
- Northampton
- Type of diabetes
- Type 1
- Treatment type
- Pump
- Dislikes
- People that can't listen to other people's opinions.
People that can't say sorry.
I know this is probably a silly question as it has quite an obvious answer!
I love my carbs. I love pasta, rice and potatoes. In the past, I've tried to take the right amount of insulin to cover this but it's so easy to get it wrong and misjudge it - it also means I can end up taking whopping amounts of insulin!
Would you recommend I reduce my carbs? It should make my diabetes easier to manage, yes?
(I'm also doing Slimming World so although I've read a little about LCHF, I'm not keen to start eating loads of 'fattier' foods!)
.My reply was actually agreeing with what Noblehead said to the OP about not going lower than she needed to after it was recommend by Zand why not try to go down to 50g as this was the proper way to do it. How can that be the proper way to do it when we are all different and some can tolerate more carbs than othersI think it would be difficult and unhealthy to aim for total exclusion of carbs, all you would be left with is fats and protein ( which I personally need to bolus for)
I have to say that I don't have any problems bolusing for very low carb as I do calculate the carbs in everything , vegetables included , but that's meMy aim was to achieve good control, which I have , without needing a tanker load of insulin to do it. The one time in my life that I did higher carb over a significant period of time, my insulin needs tripled, and I wasn't at all happy with the way I felt on what I was eating.
It's not clear cut as people are so different, someone else may need higher insulin levels than I do for exactly the same diet, or be happy using more insulin so as to be able to eat more carbs. My personal issue is against diabetic nutritional advice to have starchy carbohydrates with every meal for quite baseless reasons ( in my opinion ) so that people who may not want or need to do eat more and suffer from poor BG levels and weight gain as a result . There should at least be options in advice given for people to find out what works for them instead of one size fits all advice.
Horses for courses, and my way suits me
To return to @Cookiebell ' s original question - yes, I do recommend it, but it takes a while to discover your personal levels and what works for YOU. Corn is carby, but doesn't spike me at all, wheat in any shape or form doesIt takes work, but you soon learn and adapt to something that is sustainable long term and for me it's got so that I don't even think about it apart from ferreting out new options ( thanks @Brunneria for the 9 Bars mention ! ) and adding to my enormous collection of low carb recipes that have resulted in some gorgeous grub and using foodstuffs in ways I never considered before
@AnnieC , to answer your question from my own perspective, I may be able to tolerate more carbs than I eat, but don't actually feel the need to or want to. I see nothing I would gain from that .
Signy
If you only eat very few carbs, your body starts converting protein into carbs. You then need to bolus for the protein-derived carbs inside you.Why do some people have to bolus for protein?
Gosh, I've not checked in for a day or so and it's all kicked off!
Seriously though, thank you for every single reply - I think we can all agree we are very passionate about out diabetes and controlling it. I think it's all about finding what works for you and appreciating that it might not work for everyone.
That is the best approach, finding your own way rather than others Cookiebell., but you are right that we are all passionate and proactive in controlling our diabetes..............no matter what our dietary preference may be.
Apologies that you thread went off the rails, that is the nature of forums sometimes
Well, reduce your carbs then and your HbA1cs will improve.[] I am genuinely at a loss as to why the usual suspects get so upset that people actually do recommend that approach. If you don't want to do it then fine; the buffet tables that way, but why not allow people who haven't made up their minds the chance to consider alternative approaches, especially when they are as effective and as simple as not eating starchy carbs? Dillinger
Really? And your evidence for this claim is... ?
My evidence is in the same place as Dillinger's evidence that lowering carbs will sort out the 94% of bad T1's.
[OMFG this makes my blood boil. There is no way 94% are non compliant with those points and most of them are marginal anyway.
This is EXACTLY what we get from HCPs every bloody checkup. Hba1c went up again? You're obviously not doing the basics. You say you are testing etc? You're obviously lying. Incredibly offensive and logically stupid. They make a circular argument that we are lying about our compliance because "if we followed the rules our Hba1c would be good". Therefore we are lying.
Meanwhile there is NO **** evidence that following their recommendations actually works ***.
It is this head in the sand arrogant non-listening circular argument shoot-the-messenger blame game that causes diabetic burnout when we become utterly frustrated banging our heads against this HCP brick wall of blind, patient-blaming ignorance.
Diabetes is a disease of carbohydrate intolerance, ***! What part of that is hard to understand????
And your HBa1c is stellar, and improving? Alas neither.In almost 7 years of having T1 I have never reduced my carbs and eat more than recommended
Quiz - Scardoc or anybody - who knows how the RDA for carbs was determined, and how it is maintained and adjusted? Or the RDA for any macronutrient, for that matter.
"Nil points".Have to admit I had to Google it:
Expert Working Groups, created by the panel on Dietary Reference Values (DRVs), set up in 1987 by the Committee on Medical Aspects of Food Policy (COMA)[1] set DRVs for energy, protein, fats, sugars, starches, non-polysaccharides (NPS), 13 vitamins, 15 minerals and considered 18 other minerals.
This Government report still stands today as the basis for dietary recommendations in the UK and is underpinned by objective, science-based evidence which has not been superseded.
Do I get a prize?
I said most points were marginal. Exercise is marginal for a T1, as is compliance with the NHS diet - marginal to negative. Testing and commitment are critical, I agree.
And your HBa1c is stellar, and improving? Alas neither.
It is good you have OK HBa1c using NHS methods, but that is not any kind of proof that low carb would not be more effective for you, let alone might be for others.
Sorry to rant, it was not you Scardoc, it was the echoes of all the patient-blaming HCPs in my head. :-(
Why do some people have to bolus for protein?
"Nil points".
The point is the methodology. All they did was look at the nutrient composition in the typical adult male diet. They then recycle that as the RDA. It has no evidence base whatsoever.
Because many of us find that we need to!
There has been some work that may throw some light on this.
High protein foods elicit an insulin release in a person with a working pancreas and also with many T2 diabetes. This makes sense since one of the roles of insulin is also involved in protein metabolism . At the same time protein foods also elicit a glucagon response (how much is variable depending on the protein ). This presumably stops the insulin from causing blood glucose falling too low. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/iub.375/full (it isn't completely understood as shown in the article)
Do some of us have the glucagon response but not of course the insulin without injecting it.? I think it's a possibility. Conversion of excess protein to glucose also takes place but perhaps over a longer time frame than we normally look at.
In the 90s some researchers started work on an insulin index to try to put foods into order as to the amount of insulin produced in response to eating them. It is quite surprising just how some foods compare.(look at eggs and All Bran or beef and white pasta)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index
More recently there have been 2 small studies that have used this idea
1) They developed the insulin index a bit further with more testing to increase then index. They then used the insulin index to predict the insulin released by normal, subjects after a mixed meal..
They found that
"carbohydrate, fiber, and protein content were found to be relatively poor predictors of the overall insulin response, whereas GL (the product of the available carbohydrate content and the GI of the component foods) and fat content were significant predictors, although less so than the FII" (food insulin index)
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/90/4/986.full
2) They used this revised insulin index to calculate insulin doses for people with T1. They hypothesised that dosing according to insulin demand rather than carbs alone would result in lowered post prandial levels . This proved to be the case Table 2 really shows how effective it was
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3177729/
The trouble is very few foods have been indexed so for the meantime most of us will have to continue to rely on trial and refine methods!
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