why dose diet matter ?

Hi @Cliodb

You can (within reason, of course). Lots of the dietary advice is aimed at Type 2s or those who need to lose weight. The important thing is that you eat a good diet for you - one that suits you, keeps your blood sugars good, and your general health good too.

People with diabetes do have a slightly increased risk of some illnesses, so that's something we need to think about too.

Would you like me to move this to the Type 1 section for you?

You don't have to go on a low carb diet - please don't think that's compulsory or be misled by what you read on the Internet. What you need to do is control your blood sugar You'll probably find that there's a 'sweet spot' of carbs for you - an amount that suits you.

I personally eat approx 180g carbs a day.

If you eat more carbs, then yes, you'll need more insulin to make sure your blood sugar is in range. Type 1s take varying amounts of insulin. The 'right' amount is what keeps your blood sugar in range

I,eat bread, pasta, potatoes, fruit, cereal,,etc I'm careful to count the carbs carefully and take an appropriate amount of insuoin for them.

I'd recommend the book Think Like A Pancreas - it's excellent

Also, bear in mind that if you lost weight prior to,diagnosis, you might need to,eat more for a while to put that weight back on.

Hi @Cliodb
welcome to the forum !!

perhaps you could ask your Diabetic nurse if you could have an appointment with a dietician to discuss your concerns.

I agree with @azure that you do not need to eat a low carb diet !

Ask your diabetic team about DAFNE (dose adjustment for normal eating) and all will be revealed! It's fantastic!
Only issue with new T1Ds is the "honeymoon" effect which means our own pancreas comes back to life reducing the amount we need to inject. I only need 4 units of Levemir/day at the moment and zero fast acting, long may this last - sometimes people get a couple of years out of this! My wife is a T1D so I had a 13 year apprenticeship before being diagnosed in March this year...

Hi @Cliodb
Like others have said it's entirely up to you what you eat, but you will soon realise that a large portion of carbs can have a big impact on your blood sugars and having higher readings is harder to control and get back to within target with everything else you need to consider. Each person like @azure says needs to find their own level, I personally try to eat less than 100g of carbs a day.
I wish you luck with finding out what suits you, welcome to the forum

Diet is important, as being diabetic, the body will have less tolerance to certain foods and its content of sugar, fat and carbohydrate content. You don't produce enough insulin to deal with these items, so you need to curb them to halt the damage created by overloading of glucose in the vascular system. We as diabetics cannot hope to live as others do. It is a cross we need to bear, hate it, loathe it - there is nothing we can do to change it. Think of it this way - if you are driving a high performance vehicle, would you use cheap, oil laden fuel to power it - and still expect it to perform?

Type 1 diabetics can have 20 year less than average life expectancy. See http://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes-life-expectancy.html Type 2 have a 10 year less life expectancy. This is quite scary. What can be done about it? For type 2, the answer seems to be to get blood glucose down to non-diabetic levels and a low carb diet seems to be very effective at doing that.

There are many type 2 patients who still eat a lot of carbs and have to take insulin to manage this. Dr Jason Fung say that such patients often get diabetic complications such as heart disease, kidney disease, strokes, blindness despite having good glucose levels. His solution is to use low carb diet and fasting to enable such type 2 patients to come off insulin and all other diabetes medication. This begs the question "Does the amount of insulin needed for type 1 have a long term impact on their health"? If so, a lower carb diet with lower insulin required may be more healthy than a high carb diet requiring a high amount of insulin.

Cliodb said:

hello , im a newly diagnosed type 1 and am confused as to why diet matters so much in a diabetic compared to a non diabetic (we should all try to have a good diet).

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It's important for everyone to eat a healthy diet whether they have diabetes or not, but what constitutes a healthy diet varies.........especially on diabetes forums so its best to find your own way @Cliodb

However (and this in my opinion only), if you follow a diet based on the Mediterranean Diet you won't go wrong, it's often said to be the best diet for all-round health. Best wishes.

I agree with the other posts - good food is good for you bad food is bad for you! Whether you have diabetes or not, being none diabetic does not give you a blank cheque to eat as you please. I think you will find your feet and if you read some of the books out there you will build your own knowledge. I have been type 1 for about a year now and I haven't tried low carb, I have had a fee carb free meals and found that protein turns to glucose anyway so needed insulin for that. (But that's a whole other conversation) it is easy to let yourself get overwhelmed by the risks of health issues with diabetes but take one day at a time. Use your blood testing device to monitor and make discoveries.

Art Of Flowers said:

Type 1 diabetics can have 20 year less than average life expectancy. See http://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes-life-expectancy.html Type 2 have a 10 year less life expectancy. This is quite scary. What can be done about it? For type 2, the answer seems to be to get blood glucose down to non-diabetic levels and a low carb diet seems to be very effective at doing that.

There are many type 2 patients who still eat a lot of carbs and have to take insulin to manage this. Dr Jason Fung say that such patients often get diabetic complications such as heart disease, kidney disease, strokes, blindness despite having good glucose levels. His solution is to use low carb diet and fasting to enable such type 2 patients to come off insulin and all other diabetes medication. This begs the question "Does the amount of insulin needed for type 1 have a long term impact on their health"? If so, a lower carb diet with lower insulin required may be more healthy than a high carb diet requiring a high amount of insulin.

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Please note that when quoting information like this to understand that with advances in diabetes care that type 1's do in fact live much longer now as some of our more mature members will happily testify for.

Cliodb said:

why cant i eat the same carbs as i did before and just take the extra insulin need for them ?

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Within reason, you can carry on eating as you did before.

Once you start learning carb counting and maybe go on a DAFNE course, what you'll be taught as a very rough rule is 10 grams of carbs raises by 2 to 3 on a meter, and 1 unit of insulin will lower by 2 to 3.

So, all other things being equal, your average punter will need to have 1 unit for each 10 grams to keep things stable. Remember, though, those are averages. I tend to need 1.5 for every 10 g, others will be higher, others lower. Your dsn will help you find out what ratio works for you (it can change during the day too...aargh!).

So, once you know how many units or parts of a unit you need for each 10 g, it's just a bit of arithmetic to figure out how much insulin is needed for it, whether it's a slice of toast or a plate of pasta (other dose adjustments would also be made depending on other factors like whether you're going to be exercising later on in which case you might want to lower it).

If you're eating a higher carb meal, you'll be taking more insulin, and the problem that sometimes causes is that if you've miscalculated and taken too much or too little there's a higher chance of a hypo or hyper., but you'll learn to watch out for those anyway, so it's not usually anything that a biscuit or two or some glucose for a hypo, or an extra unit (or 2 or 3)for a hyper won't sort out, so I think the risks are overstated.

The other thing with hig carb meals is they can spike your levels high quite sharply, but over time you'll learn how to pre-bolus, taking your shot a while before the meal to let the insulin get to work before the food hits it. And you'll maybe find that you're fine with some high carbs and not others - white rice and potatoes are crazy with me, but brown rice and egg noodles are fine.

Eating low carbs is a perfectly viable option, but it's not compulsory.

The other night I had some chicken broth with a slice of bread, then some lamb chops and steamed veg, them some raspberries. That's pretty low carb, but that's not why I ate it - I just fancied some lamb chops. The next night, I had some tortellini, and an eclair, which is fairly high carb. Net result over thr next few hours was pretty much the same as the low carb meal, because I'd taken the right amount of insulin and timed it right.

It"s not so much avoiding sugar altogether thst matters, more the rate at which it gets absorbed into your bloodstream. So, if you decide to hoover down a Mars bar on an empty stomach, you'll likely go high, but if you have a bit of cake at the end of a meal, likely not.

All in all, it's really not as restricted as you think. Best of luck!

@Cliodb if you're teaching yourself carb counting you should check out the Bertie online course, it's a free NHS course - https://www.bertieonline.org.uk

Most people will be started off on fixed doses at least temporarily - it takes a little bit of experience of using insulin and understanding how it works with your body before you can attempt to figure out your insulin to carb ratio. They probably would have made some assumptions on what you would be eating and your insulin sensitivity throughout the day to come up with the advised fixed doses.

A good start to carb counting would be to assess whether your fixed doses are adequately covering your meals. Do some 2 hour post prandial readings to check this out. The NICE target is to be 5-9 at least 90 minutes after eating. If your doses are covering meals then you need to do a bit of label reading and weighing to work out exactly how many grams of carbs are in the meals that are covered. Then divide the grams of carbs by the units of insulin to get X, your insulin to carb ratio will be 1:X as a rough start, but your I:C ratio may be different at different times of day and depend on activity etc.

Cliodb said:

so im not sure why they told me to take set amounts?

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It's so long since I was dx'd that I don't know how docs treat newbies nowadays, but they're probably trying to keep things simple and reduce the variables by having you on a set amount of insulin, set amount of carbs for each meal, to get you settled down a bit blood sugar wise and then start playing around a bit from there.

Set amounts of insulin won't always be the case. Sure, it's fine when you're just starting out, because it makes it easier for the docs and you, but there will be a fine day one time soon when you'll be let loose on the wider world and have to make your own decisions about what you eat and how much insulin to take for it.

It's a bit like driving a car for the first time on your own. Scary, but then you think, ****, yeah, this is my car!

You'll generally only see your docs once or twice a year. The hospital will have diabetes specialist nurses: get on good terms with them, get their phone numbers, their e-mails. They'll do a lot to help newbies out, so ask them questions if you're in doubt.

T1 is a self treated condition: we need to deal with this 24 hours a day, and we end up knowing more about our own personal experience of it than our doctors ever will. Sure, in these early days, you'll need to rely on your dsn a lot for answers, but you'll reach a point within a few months where you're making judgement calls on your own. Not all of those will be right - it's a random condition, we all make mistakes, but by and large, you'll manage.

Art Of Flowers said:

Type 1 diabetics can have 20 year less than average life expectancy. See http://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes-life-expectancy.html Type 2 have a 10 year less life expectancy. This is quite scary. What can be done about it? For type 2, the answer seems to be to get blood glucose down to non-diabetic levels and a low carb diet seems to be very effective at doing that.

There are many type 2 patients who still eat a lot of carbs and have to take insulin to manage this. Dr Jason Fung say that such patients often get diabetic complications such as heart disease, kidney disease, strokes, blindness despite having good glucose levels. His solution is to use low carb diet and fasting to enable such type 2 patients to come off insulin and all other diabetes medication. This begs the question "Does the amount of insulin needed for type 1 have a long term impact on their health"? If so, a lower carb diet with lower insulin required may be more healthy than a high carb diet requiring a high amount of insulin.

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I should be dead then, plus cancer!!

Dont believe statistics... but aim not to be one of them!!

The lower the carbs, lesser insulin-less room for error.
10% of 200g of food/insulin is a lot more than 10% of 50g food/insulin.

You will find your own balance, and your own way.. T1's can eat the same **** as "normal" people, but why? Majority of "normal" people diet is processed/ready meals/junk foods/not enough balance of meat and good veg...

Hi. Although you don't have to have a low-carb diet when on insulin it's advisable to keep the carbs down to avoid weight gain and larger blood sugar swings which in turn can lead to more frequent hypos. Always think carbs and not just sugar. Carb-counting for meals is essential for best control and I have never understood why GPs and DNs don't teach this from day one. My DN explained carb-counting to me in 15 minutes when I started insulin - it's that simple. BTW I would personally never want to see a dietician as so many of them don't seem to understand diet and are influenced by bad research data. It's your choice, however.

On diagnosis 3 years ago I was seen in clinic the day after hospital discharge and shown the different options for insulin and diet control. The decision for my life style was handed over to me. Some people prefer less injections apparently, but I opted for carb counting. I was given lots of written info and my nurse contacted me regularly for the next fortnight and was easily available if I needed her. I was also booked in there and then to see the dietician. What is apparent from reading posts on this site is the variation ,throughout different health authorities, of the care we all receive. On top of this I also had great support from my brother, a 35 year veteran with this disease.
As regards low carb, I just naturally eat in a lowish carb way. 100-150 daily. I let myself go occasionally, life is for living and I may get carried off by something else unconnected! However, good control enables us to function at a higher level each day, without the irritations highs and lows deliver. My general attitude to food 99% of the time is, if it doesn't have any good nutritional content it doesn't make it past my lips. Jelly babies aside!!

becca59 said:

On diagnosis 3 years ago I was seen in clinic the day after hospital discharge and shown the different options for insulin and diet control. The decision for my life style was handed over to me. Some people prefer less injections apparently, but I opted for carb counting. I was given lots of written info and my nurse contacted me regularly for the next fortnight and was easily available if I needed her. I was also booked in there and then to see the dietician. What is apparent from reading posts on this site is the variation ,throughout different health authorities, of the care we all receive. On top of this I also had great support from my brother, a 35 year veteran with this disease.
As regards low carb, I just naturally eat in a lowish carb way. 100-150 daily. I let myself go occasionally, life is for living and I may get carried off by something else unconnected! However, good control enables us to function at a higher level each day, without the irritations highs and lows deliver. My general attitude to food 99% of the time is, if it doesn't have any good nutritional content it doesn't make it past my lips. Jelly babies aside!!

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Oh and you'll master it and be fine. Good luck!