[bistritapcv]

Maybe I am speaking off the top of my head but I think you should be cautious of "sugar free" and "diabetic friendly" candy?

I was at Target Saturday night and I found Russell Stover's sugar free candy. Yay, I thought. Then I looked at the back. Actually, I had a clerk look because I did not have my reading glasses. Anyway I asked him to see the number of carbohydrates. He said there were 24 grams in 3 pieces.

So, isn't that still high carb? Is it only bad if it is sugar? Then potatoes, rices, bread, etc. would be ok to eat since they have carbohydrates other than sugar. I think carbohydrates are carbohydrates. Needless to say I did not buy them.

On amazon I found some "diabetic friendly" fruit slice candies. It did not list the carbohydrates. Since I have prime I ordered one bag as it will be free shipping. I figure when I get them I will look and the back and decide whether it is ok to eat them, or give them away.

 

[John.in.France]

Basically you do need to consider that all carbohydrate ARE sugar. In essence the only difference is how long it takes our body to process them and feed the result into our blood circulation.

Glucose, you'll start to see its impact in minutes. Slow moving stuff like cereals will take a couple (or more) hours.

Sugar substitues are even more awkward. Some may be ok. Others not so. Perhaps you recall our mantra? Eat to the Meter

 

[mbuster]

Went to the health food store yesterday to get more fish oil and L-arginine. Was admiring the large display of protein bars, all advertising "Only 1 gram of sugar" Yep 1 gram of sugar, said so on the label, right below 22 grams carbohydrates. I knew I would never ever eat one, so I didn't write down the ingredients I'd never seen and couldn't pronounce to see what they were.

 

[VeeJay]

Sugar-free candy usually contains one or more sugar alcohols. My BG doesn't rise very much from these sweeteners, so I have them now and then as a treat. One thing that I do notice, though, is that they can cause me to want more and more. There's one kind, a SF jelly bean, that I cannot ever buy again because I'll eat the whole bag.

 

[smorgan]

Maybe I am speaking off the top of my head but I think you should be cautious of "sugar free" and "diabetic friendly" candy?

I was at Target Saturday night and I found Russell Stover's sugar free candy. Yay, I thought. Then I looked at the back. Actually, I had a clerk look because I did not have my reading glasses. Anyway I asked him to see the number of carbohydrates. He said there were 24 grams in 3 pieces.

So, isn't that still high carb? Is it only bad if it is sugar? Then potatoes, rices, bread, etc. would be ok to eat since they have carbohydrates other than sugar. I think carbohydrates are carbohydrates. Needless to say I did not buy them.

On amazon I found some "diabetic friendly" fruit slice candies. It did not list the carbohydrates. Since I have prime I ordered one bag as it will be free shipping. I figure when I get them I will look and the back and decide whether it is ok to eat them, or give them away.

It is not necessarily "high-carb" in any way which is important to us. "Carbohydrate" has a rather absurd definition and food makers are bound to stick to it. It includes things which produce glucose like some sugars and starch and other things which do not like fiber and sugar alcohols.

So, they have to report "total carbohydrates" which is a pretty useless number unless you know it's breakdown in detail. The only thing among the many things which are "carbohydrates" that they need to identify specifically on the label is fiber. So the labels show "carbohydrates" and then show "fiber" separately. So, at least you would subtract that since it produces no glucose. All other "carb" components are lumped together in spite of big differences between them.

Then there is the problem of sugar alcohols (as well as possibly exotic sugars like mannose and others which we cannot digest or metabolize) which also must be included in the "total carbs" number. (Stupid, I know!)

These all behave a little differently in the body producing only a fraction (between less than a tenth and around half) the calories of the same amount of sugar or starch. However, these calories are not glucose but rather fat (short-chain fatty acids) resulting from the fermentation of the sugar alcohols in the colon.

So, it is far from true that everything called "carbohydrates" on current food labeling results in glucose coming from your digestive tract. It could use a lot of improvements to truly be useful to diabetics.

 

[bistritapcv]

So how can you know what to check for? Dreamfields Pasta, for example, claims to be very low.

 

[John.in.France]

It lies! Diabetes Update: Study Finds Dreamfields Pasta Produces Identical Glucose Curves as Regular Dry Pasta

 

[bistritapcv]

Yeah my meter was high after dreamfields, but my cde said I could eat more of it than other pastas.

 

[VeeJay]

So how can you know what to check for? Dreamfields Pasta, for example, claims to be very low.

You can do a couple things:

Search for the product here on this forum and see what others have said about how it affects them.

Buy the stuff and test your BG 1hr, 2hr, and even 3hr after eating to see what it does to YOU. This one's costly if you end up throwing the product out, but it is tailored to how your body reacts to any particular product.

I don't use any so-called LC bread/pasta substitutes because I am gluten intolerant and they are off limits to me. But from what I have read here on the forum, they can be okay for some, but not for others. Also, they can be okay for some in the beginning but later on not okay. Boils down to testing to see what's happening.

 

[John.in.France]

Again, we have the issue that We are all different . As others have said, how our body processes that food can vary wildly.

I'm going to sound like a stuck record Eat to your meter.

 

[bistritapcv]

By the way, its sad that I am downloading twitter for my Android because it is the only way I can communicate with my insurance company.

 

[Shanny]

I am one who was distracted by both Russell Stover's SF candy and Dreamfields pasta. Both seemed okay at first, but have both since been banned from the house. As VeeJay says, I'll eat the whole bag of chocolates if they're here, and actually, it's about the same with Dreamfields - I would keep increasing the portion size. So Dreamfields lies, and your CDE doesn't know sic 'em.

And I don't remember if I posted it here, but I got a $20 check from Dreamfields a few weeks ago - they settled the lawsuit for $5 million, and though I didn't remember having submitted a claim, apparently I did, because along came this little recompense in the mail!

 

[bistritapcv]

How about "Atkins Caramel Chocolate Nut Roll"? They taste like a Baby Ruth. They say they have 3g net carbs? I bought some a while ago. We are having ice cream today and to keep me from eating the ice cream I thought about one of these? Or maybe 1/2?

 

[Shanny]

You're welcome to try it and ask your meter what it thinks. The labeling is not to be trusted. Why does it need all these ingredients? (<-- click this link) Would you eat this stuff by the spoonful? Why then would you eat it just because Atkins has rolled it up into a pretty little high-carb nut bar?

The ice cream is prob'ly healthier than this nut bar!

 

[VeeJay]

The Atkins bars never were good for my BG. Even eating 1/4 of a bar gave my BG a spike. I was very sad to have to let them go - they really did taste good.

But I have found lots of other good tasting goodies that are made from naturally low-carb ingredients that I make myself and enjoy immensely. (Check out the Recipe section of this forum and see for yourself.)

 

[RCG]

It is my understanding the food industry has lobbied to have laws and regulations enacted which define "sugar" as sucrose. (only)

So ......... no sucrose = "Sugar Free".

 

[smorgan]

So how can you know what to check for? Dreamfields Pasta, for example, claims to be very low.

There are two things which I personally try to stay far away from:

1) Eating "fake" foods which seek to imitate something I cannot eat. This causes you to eat unnatural things which invariably have other consequences. For example, sugar alcohols are found in nature but only in extremely small quantities. The amount you get from a piece of sugar-free candy could never be obtained from any real food. For things which need some of their bitterness or sourness abated like espresso or fresh-squeezed lemonade, I use the only completely natural non-caloric sweetener I know of which is pure Stevia leaf extract. Of course, things like sucralose (Splenda), aspertame and the like are man-made molecules created in a lab which never existed on earth - let alone in the human body - prior.

2) Eating foods which have been modified or "designed" so that even though they go down my throat, they cannot be metabolized normally. This includes that are ADDED to what is consumed to sabotage the normal metabolism of something else. Things like ALLY making fats slide right through, or products designed to inhibit carbohydrate absorption are example.

Dreamfields is in the second category. Allegedly, the starch has been modified in some way so it does an "ally" slide right through your small intestine and cannot be digested. It probably gets fermented in your colon which can produce some nutrients, but not glucose. It is very sensitive to exactly how it is prepared. A little too much heat can destroy whatever it is they have done to the starch and return it to being just "starch". This probably explains people having such different experiences with it.

To me, it's just stupid to want to "eat" something without "really" eating it. I just stay away.

 

[RCG]

There are two things which I personally try to stay far away from:

1) Eating "fake" foods which seek to imitate something I cannot eat. This causes you to eat unnatural things which invariably have other consequences. For example, sugar alcohols are found in nature but only in extremely small quantities. The amount you get from a piece of sugar-free candy could never be obtained from any real food. For things which need some of their bitterness or sourness abated like espresso or fresh-squeezed lemonade, I use the only completely natural non-caloric sweetener I know of which is pure Stevia leaf extract. Of course, things like sucralose (Splenda), aspertame and the like are man-made molecules created in a lab which never existed on earth - let alone in the human body - prior.

2) Eating foods which have been modified or "designed" so that even though they go down my throat, they cannot be metabolized normally. This includes that are ADDED to what is consumed to sabotage the normal metabolism of something else. Things like ALLY making fats slide right through, or products designed to inhibit carbohydrate absorption are example.

Dreamfields is in the second category. Allegedly, the starch has been modified in some way so it does an "ally" slide right through your small intestine and cannot be digested. It probably gets fermented in your colon which can produce some nutrients, but not glucose. It is very sensitive to exactly how it is prepared. A little too much heat can destroy whatever it is they have done to the starch and return it to being just "starch". This probably explains people having such different experiences with it.

To me, it's just stupid to want to "eat" something without "really" eating it. I just stay away.

Bravo!

Much better than I could have ever said it, and I have wanted to for quite a while.

 

[Rhiannon]

Sugar-free candy usually contains one or more sugar alcohols. My BG doesn't rise very much from these sweeteners, so I have them now and then as a treat. One thing that I do notice, though, is that they can cause me to want more and more. There's one kind, a SF jelly bean, that I cannot ever buy again because I'll eat the whole bag.

I occasionally will buy a small bag of sugar free Jolly Rancher hard candies. If I have one or two, they don't seem to cause a big rise in my BG. However, I still eat them sparingly, often going more than a week or two between having one or two.

 

[Seagal]

I like chocolate pecan fat bombs made with coconut oil & butter.

Since it is real food (except for the sf. torani syrup)it is quite a treat on occasion.