![]() Why is carb counting important?Ī study by Barton Center for Diabetes Education Data Center looked at 48 individuals, ages 12 to 18. If your blood sugar rises and stays high after correctly counting your carbs and dosing according to your insulin-to-carb ratio, you’ll want to talk to your endocrinologist about adjusting your ratio numbers. Insulin works in the body for about three hours, and the goal is that within the three-hour window after eating, that your blood sugar may rise slightly but return to normal, or have little to no rise at all. You take 60 (amount of carbs eaten) divided by 10 (your unit of insulin per 10 carbs, as recommended by your endocrinologist) and you will take 6 units of insulin before you eat lunch. You are having 60 grams of carbs at lunch. Here’s an example: Say your insulin-to-carb ratio is 1 unit of insulin for every 10 grams of carbs. This means 1 unit of insulin will cover a certain number of grams of carbohydrates. This is called the insulin-to-carb ratio. Our goal is to use a calculation that matches the two: So, we take the correct amount of insulin for the correct amount of carbs that we’ve eaten to have the best blood sugar levels possible after we eat. When we deliver insulin into our body, it lowers our blood sugar. When we eat carbs, they are digested and broken down into glucose into our bloodstream, which in turn raises our blood sugar. ![]() Insulin-to-carb ratio: How carbs work for Type 1 diabetes Starchy vegetables such as peas, corn, potatoes.Examples of carbsīefore we get started, what are these carbs that we’re going to be counting? Examples of foods with carbohydrates include: If you take carb counting out of the three pillars, we would start to see our blood sugar be affected because we are not getting the correct dose of insulin. You can do a sliding scale or set dose of insulin, but if we don’t count carbs, it’s likely that we won’t have the best blood sugar levels we could have. Each one of these is as important, and they are all interconnected and related. Carbohydrate counting is both a science and an art –– let’s discover it.ĭiabetes management has three pillars: checking your blood glucose (blood sugar) regularly, insulin delivery and counting carbs. It can be a lot, and it can be easy to become frustrated sometimes. And that’s because there’s a lot of math to think about when you sit down to eat when you have diabetes: You have to count carbohydrates (carbs) and calculate your insulin-to-carb ratio. Carbohydrate counting is as integral to a meal to me as chewing. I have lived with Type 1 diabetes for 21 years.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |