Hello Everyone! I wanted to ask some questions about carbs and fruit. Yesterday I had a large pear for lunch. Looking up the carbs in my book, it says there are 33 carbs for a large pear. I am on a pump so I used the bolus wizard to calculate my insulin dosage. I had planned on checking my sugar after 2 hrs and got involved in my work and forgot. Ended up crashing and going off into my altered universe as I call it. So does everyone find that they need to take less insulin then is prescribed for just eating a piece of fruit? I am not new to this, i have been a diabetic 48 years - new to the pump for a year now. Any help would be appreciated.
I eat a lot of fruit and I rarely crash because of it. However, I weigh all my fruit on a gram scale and use the exact weight to calculate my bolus. Maybe your "large" wasn't as large as large?
Agree, I weigh my fruit whenever possible and calculate with an exact weight. Otherwise it's pretty hard to judge what is large or small.
For me, it depends on the fruit. Oranges are impossible, as are grapes and cherries. Just too much sugar into my system
I think my bolus problems come from trying to determine the "size" of the serving. Is it small, medium, or large?
I eat a lot of fruit. I find the carb slower acting and has a more sustained effect than sugar - so glucose will raise my BG very quickly and then back off, while a banana will raise it more slowly and lasts longer. I suspect that is because of the fiber and fructose that occurs naturally in fruit. This effect is even more pronounced if you eat the fruit with other foods, e.g. with lunch with a mix of carb, protein and fat.
To your question, I do not find I need less insulin for fruit. In fact I find the amount of carb in fruit very predictable, and routinely use it to treat small-scale lows (choosing from the fruit which I always keep around).
As to what happened with you, maybe by eating your pear with a lot of other food your insulin hit before the carb from your meal was in your blood? Was your meal higher in protein/fat than usual?
Another possibility is that you misjudged the amount of carb in the fruit. A "large" pear can vary dramatically in size. So I have found it important to learn to judge each new fruit by weighing it (which clearly gives a much more accurate carb count than judging "medium", "large", etc). Once you have done this you will get a feel for how much carb is in each type of fruit and you can judge them by sight. When I buy fruit at the market I will, for example, avoid the monster or miniscule fruit and buy the same size bananas that I know to have about 20g of carb.
I'm always looking for new fruit and when I spent time in Japan recently I found fresh persimmons in the market which was a new fruit for me and delicious.
Congratulations on 48 years. I have 39 years and am still injecting; wonder if I'll get to a pump at some point.
Thanks for all the replies. I will have to start weighing my fruit is what it sounds like. I never thought that my insulin would hit me before the fruit got into my system. I was not hungry so the pear is all I ate for lunch. Of course, i am seeing my doctor today so I had 2 bad days in a row. Sunday I think my infusion site was not absorbing insulin very good. I had higher then usual blood sugars. Today I have been right on...104 for breakfast and 100 for lunch. : ) Jag, if you can get a pump, it's like the best thing that ever happened to me. Used to take 4 shots a day and now with just having to use a needle once every 3 days is awesome. I have been more in control this last year than I have my entire diabetic life. To all of you who weigh your fruit and then figure your bolus, how do you do that? Whats the calculation as far as the weight/carb ratio? I have never done this.
I'm curious how did the pump change your A1c - before and after? I have no problem with needles and injections (and don't like the idea of tubing connected to my body all them time) so the only reason I would go for a pump is if I thought it would really improve my control. In the back of my mind I'm waiting for the CGM and pump to be linked together in a meaningful way because I figure the advantages would then clearly outweigh the disadvantages - though the progress on that front has been surprisingly slow.
(p.s. just to clarify I don't weigh all the fruit I eat because I don't have the patience for that - I only weigh when trying to figure out the carb content in a fruit that I'm not used to eating - once I've done that I can judge pretty accurately based on experience)
I don't weigh either - trying to reduce the amount of time and energy spent on D. Plenty of resources for carb counts and weight needs translation. Plus, as Jag says, trial and error works well as I eat fruit regularly. Just FYI I count a standard size pear as 25 and it works fine for me.
Funnily enough, for me weighting food makes me feel more normal. If a food isn't packaged, I can weigh it and then multiply it by its carbohydrate factor. No need to deal with looking up information in databases (unless it's an unfamiliar food) or using measuring equipment, etc. With something like a bowl of cereal (for an example), I can just put the bowl on the scale, press tare, and then pour in the cereal like anyone else would. The only additional step I'd need to take is multiplying the weight readout by the carb factor, and then plugging those carbs into my pump.
Another thing to consider is that Fructose is not Glucose. There is some evidence that circulating fructose lowers insulin requirements. All I know is that it's always hit and miss with me when it comes to dosing for fruits.
The pump improved my A1C significantly, I went from about 8.0 to my current 6.2 & I have been down to 5.9. Before I was on the pump I swung between highs in 300s to lows in 30s, now I very rarely have a reading above 200, still too many 40s but I'm working on it.
I weigh all carbs & use carb factors from the USDA database I downloaded a long time ago. For things like gluten free products not in the database I calculate the carb factor from the nutrition label. The thing to remember is to weigh the bit you are eating, e.g. orange without the peel. I still think fruit is iffy, it must depend on ripeness or variety, so the carb factor is really only an approximation but the best we have. Most books like Pumping Insulin or Think like a Pancreas have appendices with lists of carb factors. Sometimes they differ quite considerably from 1 book to another!
I just went to my doctor yesterday and my A1C was 5.7. Before using the pump, i would be in the 7's to upper 6's. Just more control. My shot regiment was 3 fast acting insulin shots and the overnight was long lasting. I never counted carbs. I yo yoed a lot. I am more stable in my every day life. Having a CGM would make it even better. But I test 8 times a day.