It has been far too long since I wrote about how various food compositions affect my blood sugar so I thought I'd get back on the d-blogging wagon and talk about something relevant. Armed with my trust Dexcom again I've been able to analyze how all sorts of foods impact my blood sugar levels. The really cool thing about a CGM is that you can see the time series trend of how the glycemic index of a food will impact the amount of time your blood sugar spends "out of range."
Normally for lunch I have a turkey sandwich on sprouted grain bread or a salad, I know exciting. Today I was beyond hungry when lunch rolled around so I opted for lamb shwarma and falafel. Not the epitome of health but my diet has been super rigid lately so I felt the need to splurge a bit and get in some fats. The shwarma was covered in hummus and babaganoush while the 6 falafel balls were gigantic. Since this wasn't a very carb dense meal (although high fat) I assumed there were about 90 grams of carbohydrates. I took in the approriate amount of insulin and 20 minutes after eating began to see my blood sugar climb. My blood sugar plateaud at about 290 and remained there for about 3 hours before it precipitously came down to range.
This got me to thinking about the relationship of different nutrition compositions and diabetes. It is alot easier to understand what a high carbohydrate/ high sugar food is versus a high glycemic food. Ice cream for example has much fewer carbohydrates than you would first assume but the high fat content of ice cream makes it incredible difficult to manage with artificial insulin. Understanding the glycemic index takes time and its not the most widely discussed nutrition metric but probably should be. Counting carbohydrates is important to determine the appropriate amount of insulin but understanding how the nutritional composition is what can really lead to an awesome a1c.
Oh and since I didn't post last week, Happy Thanksgiving everyone!
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