Thursday, October 13, 2011

Strange little man and Fibre

so a little while back i wrote about fibre.  or rather, about whether or not to subtract the amount of fibre in a meal from the total carbs in said meal.  the gist of this was to decide whether or not the fibre actually affects the blood sugar one way or the other.

so my little (un)science experiment is over.  for the past two days i have eaten the same thing.  EXACTLY the same.  not just the same amount of carbs, but the EXACT SAME FOOD.  at the exact same time  my grandson said "boring!!" (he is only 5 and i must say, that it was just me that did this, not my whole family).  the only difference being that on the first day i did not subtract the fibre, and on the second day i did. 

the results are in.........................


my BG results did not really differ AT ALL. what i was looking at was the pp blood sugars.  i was told by my dietitian that when you subtract the fibre you are using only the carbs that convert to glucose.  because fibre does not convert to glucose, if you include it you "may be inclined to have a low BG after eating because of incorrect carb counting".



as we all know, Diabetes is a strange little man. 

you can feed him the same thing at the same time every day for a month, and never get the same results twice. 

in this instance i found that it did not matter whether i subracted or not, my pp BG (at 2hrs) had gone up as much as 2 points.  and within 4hrs, it was back down to within range.

so for myself, i think i will just continue to do as i have been doing.  and that for the most part, my friends, is to just base my bolus on the "total carbs", without bothering to do the subtraction. 

please keep in mind that this is just my own opinion.  should you have questions regarding this, it would be best to consult with your Diabetes Health Care Team. 



1 comment:

  1. I think this is a neat experiment. The biggest lesson? if it works for you, there's no reason to change it! The only think I would think to comment on is to question the super high fibre foods. Sometimes I have black bean soup and it can have almost 20g of fibre in it! That would make me wonder.
    thanks for s'perimenting for us!

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