dear fellow type 1s

I am wondering what you eat on a regular basis? what have you found gives you the best results with your blood sugar? I have followed a kind of low carb raw for a few weeks (a few pieces of fruit a day, lots of greens, oils, nuts/seeds, avocados, some non raw like tofu) and it was good for my blood sugar but all the fat started to nauseate me. I fell off the wagon pretty badly for a week due to not being able to face another avocado :0 and now all I want is FRUIT and salads!!! So this week I have tried eating a lot more fruit and less fats (together with the usual green juices and salads and odd cooked vegan thing) and....it tastes great but my blood sugar has been spiking MASSIVELY between meals.

Do you think if I continue in a high carb, low fat way my cells will "unclog" from the (junk food and natural) fats and the blood sugar will even out?

Or would you stick with a low carb diet?

Also what are your opinions on mixing fat and carbs at the same meal in terms of blood sugar?

thank you!

Ah! whoah, Freak!

Back up, back up. Please consider this from another perspective. Isn't it fun trying to find your way out of the ruins of "human knowledge?!"

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Fruit juice does not contain REFINED (or processed) sugar. It would be considered simple sugar (no fiber) though and has many of the same negative effects of refined sugar. My understanding is that the difference between the two is that simple sugars (such as honey) can still contain nutrients where refined sugar is just carbohydrate. Probably not that big of a difference in terms of its effects on the body but worth noting.

Paul
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The term "simple sugar" has been redefined in recent times, so let's ignore the term and use the more stable technical terminology of chemistry. The sugars in fruits are glucose and fructose, assuming the fruits are ripe. These are monosaccharides, single-molecule sugars. Our body can directly absorb glucose into the blood as fuel, and fructose nearly so.

In contrast, refined sugar is sucrose, a disaccharide, or sugar molecule consisting of two smaller sugar molecules -- in fact, one glucose and one fructose. So the digestive effort, or biochemistry, required to render refined sugar useful is greater than that required to process fruit sugars.

But this explanation having been given, the primary issue here is not really one of sugar at all. Any form of sugar by itself is not a food for our species, nor for any large animal species of which I am aware.

Rather, the real issues involve fiber and fat.

FIBER
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When we juice, we remove the fiber and many other nutrients. In other words, we get a concentrated dose of a fractional food and a zero dose of whole food. When we eat sugar as a constituent in WHOLE fruits, we are fine, because the fiber (e.g., guar, pectin) in the fruit moderates the rate of sugar absorption, which is the transport of sugar from the small intestine into the blood stream. Whole fruits are THE primary source of sugar our species is designed to eat and process; such a source, in and of itself, is simply not a source of problems except in rather rare circumstances.

FAT
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When we eat sugar (and/or starch, if you still eat starch) with or after (even hours after) we eat fat (avocado, nuts, seeds, oils, coconut meat, etc.), we cause our body's blood fat to elevate for an extended period of time. When this occurs, sugar uptake is impaired. Sugar uptake (not absorption, two different terms), refers to movement, in the "company" of insulin, of sugar FROM the blood stream and INTO individual cells, where the sugar is actually metabolized -- the fuel is converted into thermomechanical energy.

Our body is not designed to consume nor process such a food combination. Instead, our body perceives elevated blood sugar, which can rapidly become fatal if the body does not respond. So the body creates a "fight or flight" response. The adrenals fire, the pancreas goes into overdrive producing insulin, and eventually the blood sugar is "brought down to normal." But there is nothing at all normal about this sequence of physiological events.

When we continue to consume even modest quantities of fats on a daily basis, year after year, we create a chronic cycle of elevated blood sugar followed by massive physiological response. Eventually, over time, the adrenals and/or the pancreas become exhausted. At this point, we may be diagnosed with "chronic fatigue," "hyper/hypoglycemia" (now renamed "insulin resistance", and in the "care" of the right "provider," we might even manage to pick up a diagnosis of "Candida." The solution, of course, is to limit fat consumption, to less than 10% of total calories, hopefully even less.

Excess Candida is nothing more than the natural response of an opportunistic organism to a large jump in its natural food supply, which is sugar. But the Candida do not create their own food supply, we do, and we would surely starve ourselves before we can ever starve out the Candida, they are simply too nimble (biologically speaking) and too numerous, and they reproduce too quickly. Again, if we limit fat consumption, the body reasserts its own natural processes for sugar management, the excess sugar disappears from the blood, and the Candida move on to another more lucrative location.

In almost all circumstances, all of these "blood sugar problems" are quite directly caused by excessive consumption of fats. ANY consumption of animal proteins, and excessive consumption of plant proteins, exacerbates the situation, and the body's blood sugar levels and insulin production jump and plunge, until the aforementioned exhaustion occurs.

Hope this is constructive for some!
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thanks...

no type 1s out there???

I'm a 1 type and I was diagnosed in april 2009 and after 2 weeks I switched to raw diet. I still have very small amount of my own insulin though (honeymoon doctor said My usual meal is: 1 avocado + nuts or seeds, simple salad (tomatos,cucumbers, some another veggies) + 1 apple. Sometime I add blueberries, strawberries and things like that.. To keep my glucose level in normal range I don't eat a lot of fruits at one time.. Two apples would be too much, so I'd rather wait hour or two to eat the second one.

Why do you worry about fat that comes with avocado? Is it can make us fat? I eat 3-4 avocado per day, will see how it will work out for me

yankoff

Quote

Why do you worry about fat

I have heard that dietary fat can plug the receptors and insulate the insulin.

hi yankoff

thanks for replying, sorry to hear about your diagnosis

I had been eating similar to you, wth lots of avocados and seeds and a little fruit with each meal but to be honest I just feel sick at the thought of another avo or oily salad now, it's like I'm totally nauseated by all the fat! I'm not worried about getting fat myself, it's just that a) my body seems to have had enough of the fat and b) my diet was getting really monotonous so I wondered how other raw type 1s ate long term and how raw worked best for them.

When I read diabetes forums, everyone is low carbing, so that's why I went for the high fat low fruit approach like you're doing at the moment. It certainly does stop spikes in the blood sugar and I felt more "even" so that is one positive thing.

but like EZ said, I have been starting to think that fat does block the receptors. I did low carb raw soon after diagnosis for a bit and used hardly any insulin, some days just a few units of my basal, but in hindsight I must have been honeymooning as trying this time round, two years on, I am finding that I am having to use quite a lot of insulin, say 2-3 units of fast acting for a meal that is raw and low carb. I realised I can eat 6 pieces of fruit on 3 units!!! In between the low carb meals I experimented with very high fruit low fat. this was not good for me in the sense that I was hungry all the time and jut didn't feel that good, but I have to say that my insulin needs went crashing down and I was using FAR less than on the low carb. In fact with every other raw approach I took, my insulin needs reduced massively after about a week, but with this high fat way they have only reduced slightly. I couldn't figure out why! But then I read somewhere about fat causing insulin resistance and it started to make sense. My hospital tells me I am very very sensitive to insulin, certainly not insulin resistant, so it made sense to me that switching to a very high fat diet where basically all my calories were coming from nuts, seeds, avocados, olives and oils together with some tofu and some fruit had somehow caused some blocking up of my cells.

hope this isn't too garbled! just confused...

I'm eating more fruit at the moment together with a much smaller amount of fat, maybe around 20%. It is more palatable to me, but I am spiking higher after meals, although the more I keep records and experiment with my insulin dosage the more I have been able to reduce the spikes. Still nowhere as even as low carb though. I wonder if I hang on in there with the raw lowish fat if the spikes will naturally lessen...

CONFUSED!!!

Hello freak,

After eating avocados all these months I gonna feel the same way as you soon Last month I've been trying to make new dishes, reading raw recipes: gazpacho, raw burgers, simple cakes. Sometime I'm buying cakes from raw-food restaurant in San Francisco. By the way, what's interesting, I've found out that they don't increase glucose level too much although they have very sweet taste.

Now, I do only 1 injection of basal insulin (5 points), but for the first 3 months of being raw-vegan I didn't take insulin at all (after diagnosis and before I went raw I had taken 4 insulin injections per day). After 3 months without insulin injections my glucose level started to increase slightly and that's why I started to use basal insulin.. now you gave me an idea what can cause this increasing.. maybe because I've been eating so much fat. Anyway I will try to reduce fat intake and add more fruits just like you do. All we can do is experimenting And of course to learn raw-vegan cooking, otherwise monotonous diet can make us mad

I hope my English is clear, it's not my native, I'm just learning it in US.

Eating high fat will increase insulin resistance, resulting in a need for more insulin to get the same job done.

If eating low fat high fruit leaves you hungry, eat more fruit until you are no longer hungry. Ripe bananas are excellent at producing a full feeling, as they are pretty high in calorie for a smaller volume of food as they have a lower water content than other sweet fruit.

What also helps fight insulin resistance is to exercise before eating. This will reduce the glucose content of the cells in your body, so that when you eat, the cells will give preference to glucose over fat.

Losing weight also helps reduce insulin resistance, but for most raw foodists, this is not a problem.

thanks Bryan for the advice!

Yankoff, it is so nice talking to another type 1 so you are sick of avos as well lol i think it's a great type of diet for preventing blood sugar spikes but i just can't sustain it. the fat thing and needing more insulin is just a hunch, so go by your own instinct with your body, and with you it's likely to be that you are needing more insulin because you are gradually finishing with the honeymooning. you're right about having to experiment! I'm wondering when I'll be done with that as I've been "experimenting" for 2 years lol!!! at the moment what is helping me is to keep a food diary with exactly what I ate for each meal, how much insulin i thought I needed, blood sugar two hours after eating it and then four/five hours after eating when the fast-acting insulin is done. i found something interesting yesterday - breakfast was a green smoothie with 3 peaches, spinach and quite a lot of walnuts, maybe close on 2 oz. My levels before eating were 84, 2hrs after 183 4 hrs after STILL 183, then all the sudden at 5 hrs back to 111. So in other words a VERY long high spike. that's by far the worst spike i've had in my experimenting, worse than when I ate 6 pieces of fruit in a smoothie, so i have a hunch that the fat in the nuts delayed the sugar from getting out of the bloodstream. I'm trying a breakfast right now of cherries, grapes and spinach, no fat, as much as I want. I'll let you know the result! (although I have to say i fell off the wagon last night and ate a very fatty meal so that will probably still be in my body interfering with things


good luck! and your English is fine

2oz of walnuts is nearly 40 grams of fat .. so its not suprising you had an intense lengthy high spike

...Jodi, the banana eating buddhist

I really liked Bryan's advice about exercising. That makes so much sense, if we develop a greater need for glucose during exercise. Or at least, that's how I interpret it (I'm just beginning to learn about diabetes).

Seems to me that it might be best to go with low fat consistently rather than no fat sometimes, and then high fat other times (if eating no fat leads to eating high fat later!)

I thought the following from "The China Study", by Dr. Colin Campbell was interesting and to the point:

"James Anderson, M.D., is one of the most prominent scientists studying diet and diabetes today, garnering dramatic results using dietary means alone. One of his studies examined the effects of a high-fiber, high carbohydrate, low-fat diet on twenty-five Type 1 diabetics and twenty-five Type 2 diabetics in a hospital setting. None of hiis fifty patients were overweight and all of them were taking insulin shots to control their blood sugar levels.

"His experimental diet consisted mostly of whole plant foods and the equivalent of only a cold cut or two of meat a day. he put his patients on the conservative, American-style diet recommmended by the American Diabetes Association for one week and then switched them over to the experimental "veggie" diet for three weeks. He measured their blood sugar levels, cholesterol levels, weight and medication requirements. The results were impressive.

"...after just three weeks, the Type 1 diabetic patients were able to lower their insulin medication by an average of 40%!. Their blood sugar profiles improved dramatiically. Just as importantly, their cholesterol levels dropped by 30%!. Remember, one of the dangers of being diabetic is the secondary outcomes, heart disease and stroke. Lowering risk factors for those secondary outcomes by improving the cholesterol profile is almost as important as treating high blood sugar."

The author goes on to cite even more amazing results for the Type 2 diabetics, with all but one person being "able to discontinue their insulin medication in a matter of weeks!" .

I'm not a doctor, and have absolutely no training or experience with diabetes, but it seems that, although the subjects did consume a small amount of meat, lowering their fat and increasing their carbs helped them, rather than hurt them. Maybe on a raw food vegan diet, the results might be even more dramatic.

The author also links Type 1 diabetes with bottle feeding. Babies who are not breastfed long enough and are fed cow's milk protein may become Type 1 diabetics because their bodies developed an immune system response, destroying cow's milk protein fragments along with their own pancreatic cells, thereby eliminating the ability to produce insulin. If only the mother's had known!

freak, yes, it's nice talking to another 1 type, I agree I'd been trying to find somebody on raw-food diet and with 1 type diabetes for last months. It seems that there're not much 1 type persons on this diet. Many 2 type people trying this diet and get their success but there're not enough information about 1 type.. Did somebody get off insulin injections completely after being raw-vegan? May be we should find more people to get more information and for more experimenting Btw, what does your doctor say about this diet? Can he explain reducing of insulin intake? And as I understand you inject small doses of fast-acting insulin.. so I wonder, do you have hypos with such doses?

I wonder if different types of fat are more or less problematic for the body to deal with ? For example I have heard of some fats referred to as "sticky" fats. Here's an article that refers to bad fats: [www.healthrecipes.com] What do you think ?

Trans fats and saturated fats are definitely worse than unsaturated fats. This is because some of the saturated fatty acids are solid in the body, as is the trans fat.

suncloud, thanks for that interesting article! Diabetics eating high-carb? If you go to a diabetes forum, you'd think a carb was the devil or something! Refreshing to hear a different approach.

Well, here's the results of my experimenting yesterday...pretty good

breakfast: lots of cherries and grapes, some greens approx 60g carb

starting bg 122, gave 3 units insulin plus 0.5 unit correction for slightly high bg...2hrs after bg 88, 4hrs after 67.

so...I didn't need the 0.5u correction and also there was no prolonged spike! I think I did spike as I felt tired about 30-60 mins in, but hey, as I diabetic I am going to spike whenever I eat so I might as well pick something with as short a spike as possible!

lunch

1 small avocado (didn't fancy any more fruit!), tomatoes, wrapped in cabbage leaves, some mac nuts

gave 0.5u insulin, bg at 2hrs 104, bg at 5 hrs 94

didn't feel much of a spike with this meal at all - I can understand why low carbing is popular with diabetics but if you're not prepared to eat meat and dairy then I don't think it is sustainable due to lack of variety.

dinner

70g (raw weight) quinoa, cooked, handful of cooked beans and salad (not 100& raw yet!!!) approx 55g carb, gave 4.5units

bg 2hrs 241!!!! was not surprised as has fallen asleep on the couch. thought I had not given enough insulin but waited to let the insulin run its course...and 5hrs after was back down to 88. So the insulin was right, but the food caused a massive spike. Cooked starch effect?

ate half a medjool date before bed to prevent overnight hypo, gave 6units basal insulin and woke up this morning at 76.

So I have learnt from yesterday that an all-fruit meal is not too bad at all for my blood sugar - once the initial spike has cleared the glucose is quickly back down to normal! But that cooked quinoa did some damage...

Yankoff, I too struggle to find any type 1s! I definitely use less insulin when I'm eating a lot of raw food and exercising moderately. I don't tend to hypo that much using the fast acting insulin and when I do, it's usually when I miscalculate the dose or when I'm exercising which kind of screws things up anyway! I don't talk to my doctor about my diet at all. He always praises me highly when I see him so I don't see any need to upset him )

have you been taught about carbohydrate counting yet? I use 0.5units of fast acting insulin per 10g carbs, although interestingly I have noticed that if I'm eating grains (cooked), I need 1 unit to 10g carbs i.e. twice the amount!!!

anyway, must get to work now

I am also type I and eat a high raw diet.
What type of fruit are you eating? They are not all equal. Grapefruit and berries are low glycemic and I do well on them if I do not gorge. I also do ok with small portions of slightly tart apples (braebrun). What kind of oil do you use? Try an organic olive oil. Unless you are losing to much weight, cut back on the avacodos but not out. I eat a lot of seeds, pumpkin, seasamy, sunflower, and flax. You donot get the value out of them whole, and I don't like to soak them so I grind them in a coffee grinder and put them in my salads. I aslo eat a lot of sprouts, mostly mung beans and some wheat. And buck wheat is good buy you have to be on top of it rinse wise. When I stay on the raw diet, my insulin intake is 4 units of N and 3 units of R morning and night. If you are developing a library take a look at Robert Youngs "The pH Miracle for Diabetes"

freak, don't you want to try a full raw vegan diet (without any exceptions) for some limited period? Just to see what will happen with your doses.

hi yankoff

I might at some stage

at the moment I'm happy being vegan and very high raw. I have a tendency to eating issues when I try to restrict too much so I'm just taking things slowly. I'm sure it is the best thing for the body to be 100%, but I'm not sure it's for me, although I can imagine going 95%+

I know what I've noticed with my experimenting lately - and that's that, raw or cooked, it seems to be better for blood sugar to mainly separate carbs and fats..so either high carb meal with v little overt fat/no overt fat or high fat meal with v little fruit/grain. that way, blood sugar generally is fine at 2 hours after eating!