[PERKDOUG]

I have a question for high carb intake Type 1's eating > 200 gr/day of carbs. After a typical meal, how high does you blood sugar go and how much does it deviate from meal to meal?

Thanks for you help!

[ant hill]

Hello PERKDOUG, I eat too many carbs and the BG can go high like today is anything to go buy. I had 16.5 CP's which is 165 Grammes of carbs and I take a 3:1 Ratio and that makes this equation 16.5 X 3 = 49.5 so 49.5U of novorapid!!
So yes it can be quite high but then it would be interesting to see what the BG will be like after 2 hours?

165 Grammes is a lot!!!

[Subby]

I don't know if I can help you in the research, usually eat less that 200g myself. I am interested in why you are asking this?

[PERKDOUG]

Originally Posted by Subby

I don't know if I can help you in the research, usually eat less that 200g myself. I am interested in why you are asking this?

I have a Type 1 friend in his 50's that eats this way and is beginning to experience the classic complications. I wanted to know if high peaks might be common with this high carb protocal. Perhaps the new insulins properly used may avoid large peaks. I don't know. My friend is not into learning much on his own. I would pass the info on to him. This info also has relevance to Type 2 and Prediabetes. If Type 1's with large BS peaks but low A1c's are having progressive complications, this would be a warning that post meal peaks need to be reduced.
Maybe I should change my threshold to 150 gr/day of carbs and I could get a better response from the DF. I am not trying to start a thread to beat up on high carb type 1's.

Thanks if you can help!

[Subby]

Yeah, I didn't think you were making trouble at all, it's just good to see where and why someone is coming from... you know, a bit of story to make things meaningful...

If you are after a kind of poll effect here, I fear that the variety is just too much for decent data out of the few replies you'll get (Even if lots of people do reply, it's a tiny sample).

However let the feedback role, of course

Now, I'll just open my big fat mouth and then shut it.

First, for some people (myself included) there is no doubt that lots of carbs make post meal spikes hard to control. No doubt. This is usually observed over many events. It's not some static thing and may have all sorts of conditions or modifiers. For example, given times of the day when my insulin works better, I can eat high carb no problem. But it's really hard to predict. To all intents and purposes I try not to pig out on carbs.

For others, they seem to be able to cope well with say 200+ carbs and not particularly spike, from discussions I have had. It appears to be a basic variation between people.

Rapid acting insulin is still to all intents and purposes slow compared to internal insulin action. The peak is seen at about 2 hours, trail off at 4. We were looking at normal action just a few threads ago, and it was clear that in non diabetics the peak is more like 1 hour.

But, exogenous insulin onset and action is different for all.

Therefore modification of amount of carbs and also GI of carbs (yes it can make a difference) to better match whatever insulin action one gets, is indeed a worthy endeavour, and modification of amount of carbs to a greater or lesser extent is certainly a primary tool, many type 1s find.

Being a scenario where every parameter is different per person, I will suggest there is only one way to determine if your supposition applies to your friend. He needs to test. If you want to thoroughly map carb spike, a good start would be pre meal 1 hour, 2 hour, 4 hour. It would need to be done with a variety of meals, spikes, carbs, to be useful in everyday application.

There is no other way to determine how his body works, and no universal experience to back up your supposition (although many of us find personally, and suspect commonly, hi carb causes spikes).

Mouth closed.

[fgummett]

Bernstein discusses the "law of small numbers" which suggests that minimal inputs improve your chances of more stable control, as compared to larger inputs...

more carbs = more insulin = greater chance of giving too much insulin = need to compensate with more carbs = overcompensated so need more insulin... and so on...