The Chinese Food Effect
Thought I'd share a story....
Ate Chinese buffet last night: egg rolls, s&s chicken balls, fried rice, Singapore noodles, garlic spare ribs and 1/2 a fortune
cookie. Can't remember the last time I ate this kind of food but, it's been years nonetheless.
As many of you know, I'm a Type 1, insulin-dependant diabetic. I count my carbs and inject NovoRapid when I eat. (There's is a belief that Type 1s can eat anything they like as long as the carb count is accurate and insulin injected accordingly - LOL). I had to guess the carb count but I thought I was pretty accurate. Here's what happened:
- Pre-meal BGL = 10.0/180, (yes, on the high side but, not too high considering the day I had).
- Injected 8 units of insulin to cover 56 grams of carbs (1:8, I:C ratio), plus one extra unit to bring me down a peg (a correction unit).
- Tested 2 hours after eating; BGL = 10.2/185. Great! A 2-hour post-prandial that's around the same as the pre-meal reading indicates that my "counting" was on-track. Didn't do any exercise, just watched TV. Then I fell asleep (all that hard work sitting on my butt
.
- When I awoke 2 hours later, feeling like I'd taken sleeping pills or something, I knew I was in trouble.
- Tested (which would be about
the 4 hour mark post-prandial and about
the time my insulin wears off), and just about
fell off my chair to see a BGL of 30.0/540!!
- NovoRapid of 10 units to bring me down.
- Tested 2 hours later and BGL was at 9.0/162. Wow! 20 points in 2 hours, with about
2-3 hours left of insulin still "on-board".
- It's 1:30 in the morning now and at the rate I'm dropping, I don't want to fall asleep and wake up suddenly low (or not wake up at all). I drink 10 grams of juice carbs and eat 14 grams of sugar carbs (erring on the side of caution, especially at this hour).
- Awoke this morning to 11.0/196 (and feeling like I'd run a marathon - wonder why, LOL).
Morale of the story (for me anyway)? Certain combinations of foods (high carb, high fat), that particularly take a LOOOONG time to metabolize, can affect the body for many hours. These combinations (chinese buffet, pizza, etc.), require testing at the 2, 3, & 4-hour marks to really see how it's metabolized. Had I done that, I certainly would have caught my blood sugar rising before it hit the ridiculous levels :-( Hopefully I'll have everything back under control by lunch. Sigh.
Cheers,
Kris