I LOVE BLACK COFFEE :D I drink maybe two cups a day just because I love the taste.
What I don't understand is I think it is making my blood sugars run higher for longer, I am sure the caffeine promotes some sort of metabolic reaction but I don't know how to add insulin to the mix. I am also on an insulin pump. I've had an old nurse educator tell me that several of her pumpers were having the same issue. Like I mentioned, I drink black coffee with no added sugars, flavors, or milk. Does this happen to anyone else? Would people recommend a basal increase or a bolus? I am leaning towards a basal increase. How does everyone else take their coffee?????
Hi, i am new here.Type 2 since 2000. In response to your question, i drink five to six cups up coffee daily. I use atkins vanilla shake as creamer, sugar free syrups as flavor, and sweeten slightly with stevia. I notice no effect on my blood glucose levels. I guess everyone is different....Dale
Black coffee makes my sugars rise as well, but I just take extra bolus for it. I worked in coffee for a while, so I have my "coffee boluses" down. It took mostly trial and error, but now I can drink anything! :P
I think the response to coffee is a very personal thing. Some people react strongly to the caffeine and may need to bolus even for black coffee. I seem to have total immunity and black coffee or coffee with cream is neutral.
I have the same reaction to coffee, but only in the morning. When I brew my first cup in the a.m. I bolus 0.8 units for it. Strangely, when I brew the same exact cup in the afternoon, I don't need the small bolus. I'm sure it has something to do with Dawn Phenomenon.
Coffee is my last addiction that I refuse to give up due to diabetes. So, I bolus and enjoy my dark rich cuppa.
I like to have an espresso drink now and then, usually a cappucino. At one coffee shop I’ll spike, at another not so much…so I’m guessing the brew strength makes a difference and not just the quantity of milk. (There are shops that just don’t know the difference between a cappucino and a small latte!) Anyway, I try to plan my coffee drinking around my mealtime bolus so that any possible spike is covered.
BTW, black tea does not seem to affect my BG at all.
This is PERFECT. I came back to TuDiabetes for this exact reason. The strangest part is, I can't really figure out what triggers it. I have a cup of black coffee every morning, and some mornings my BG spikes, others it doesn't. I may just have to do a better job of tracking, so I can figure out if I need to do black tea in the morning, or what the deal is. Thanks!
I have two cups (12-oz cups) per day of coffee. I use 1/4 Tsp. of sugar & a tablespoon of half & half. Sometimes I'll add a tablespoon of sweetened whipped cream, which only ads one more gram of sugar. After hearing from some people that caffeine raises blood sugar & from others that it has no effect, I tested before & two hours after coffee. I was at 124 both times. I won't use any artificial sweeteners, BTW.
In my opinion, if you like coffee black, that's fine, but I really don't see 1 - 3 grams of sugar/carbs making much of a difference in BG. After all, a medium-sized fruit has 15 gms of carbs.
I think we, the people involved with diabetes in some way, tend to think of our bodies as pretty much predictably deterministic. I know I certainly did. I probably still mostly do, but using CGM has me wondering.
I don't see the clear, predictable ups & downs of BG which I always had in my mind when I tried to interpret my 5 to 7 BG meter tests/day pre-CGM. The expectations are of course still generally true. Carbs in pretty much result in BG up. Insulin in pretty much results in BG down. But how & to what degree it happens I'm still trying to get sorted out.
I'm not sure how many times and to what extent I would want to see an ostensibly unambiguous uptick in my SG(Sensor Glucose)/BG(Blood Glucose) post coffee before I'd try planning for it. Sometimes I think I see a coffee related BG rise. But it could just as easily be due to some other metabolic reasons I'm either not aware of or not considering.
As I say probably too often, people are wired to see patterns. It's "what we do" as a species and we are incredibly good at. So good, in fact, that we can see patterns which don't actually exist.
This is off the coffee thread but I want to respond to John’s comments on predictability. It’s taken me quite a while to figure out that all the information and guidance we newly diagnosed receive is just that–guidance, not rules that work predictably! Maybe the CDEs and docs don’t want to scare us any more than we already are when we hear the diagnosis so they prime us to look for patterns–which often are really there but sometimes are not. And it’s the exceptions which scare us newbies most!!
Guess I’ll go have some coffee after lunch and see what happens! LOL!
I have the same issue. Coffee raises your adrenaline (it's a stimulant) which causes your liver to put out glucose to handle the stress. In my case tea has the opposite effect. Sometimes I drink a lot of coffee because otherwise I have no energy but it definitely makes me run higher.
I always had problems with coffee, but Brian is correct. From conversations here over the years, it does seem to vary individually. I used to take a unit of insulin with my morning coffees(2) as a square wave bolus. Without that, I would rise significantly by lunchtime.
I gave it up when I retired--too much trouble to make for myself, and switched to tea, which causes no problem.
iam T1 and i need not only a bolus which covers 18gms carbs for coffee (with 1/2n'1/2 and Splenda, but i need to bolus for any protein which requires coverage for 10 grms of carbs.this is less frequent than most t1s, but it is not out of question. as being D for a long time, this requirement has developed. and i dont ever drink more than 2 cups of coffee a day. ALSO: i need insulin for tea (even herbal) and fats, like MAYO.
You can calculate coffee as carbs. Increase you carb amount by a certain amount if taking it with a meal or close to one. Also keep in mind even if you spontaneously drink your coffee outside meals, there's tons of other spontaneous variables that screw our blood sugars up. Eg, stress is always spontaneous at unknown times, and physical excersion is not always planned, one afternoon you walk through the mall, the other day you don't. That simple extra walking can effect you blood sugars to the downside for the next 24 hours. There so many variables other than coffee the mess up blood sugars... that my solution is to just hope the variables average each other out! That's not even mentioning Carb Counting Errors! There's no way you can always accurately count carbs when at a restaurant. It's a messed up disease. I'm thinking about getting a Dexcom CGM and just dosing insulin to the higher side, and just drinking orange juice if it beeps below a certain level.
From what I believe I read, (what???) Coffee is not what raises it, it is the caffeine part of it, what it does is stimulate your brain action, and kind of works and does what stress does. It isn't stress, but it has a similar effect. (Actually, that just came into my logical thinking hehehe)
For some people, caffeine causes the secretion of stress hormones. I can't drink it anymore as much a I love it because it bumps my blood pressure up dramatically. If those stress hormones raise your blood sugar (which they may well do) that could be the explanation.
OTOH, there are other people with diabetes (and I know a few) who don't have this problem at all. It must be another of those individual gene things. Some of us are really sensitive to caffeine, others aren't.
