My Type I diabetic friend -- her interesting experience in China.

[Nay]

My oldest friend has been diabetic for 40 years. She's on insulin since she's a Type I. She is very careful of her diet at all times (except Thanksgiving!), counts her carbs assiduously to determine how much insulin to give herself, does not eat sweets or junk, and has ALWAYS had weird blood glucose readings in the US. Her BG can crash or go very high for no reason -- she's done everything she can do to try to moderate it. One doctor even 'fired' her because he thought she was lying to him about what she ate.

A couple of years ago she went to China for a month, even though she was a bit concerned about how she could possibly manage her BG in a very carby country.

Big surprise: she had near-perfect control over her BG very easily in China, even though she ate moderate amounts of noodles, rice, etc. She has no idea why. It was as if the food she ate actually had the carbs you would estimate them to have, and those foods acted like 'normal' foods in her body. She wasn't any more active in China than she is at home, since she's a gym rat at home and in China she walked a moderate amount.

Why would this be? I can speculate, but does anyone know definitively why this happened to her? Is the adulteration of food in the US (additives, GMO, etc.) a cause? Are the carb counts on our packaging all lies? Anyone have any other ideas?

[Warpy]

1. The carb counts on packaged foods are only a guesstimate

since they vary from factory run to factory run. I wouldn't rely on them much, at all. They tend to underestimate them and multiple sugar sources are used.

I'd also shy away from them if I wanted strict diabetic control.

Food in China is prepared from fresh ingredients, very little they eat over there is packaged. People who are lousy cooks patronize street vendors serving homestyle foods. The flavor enhancers they use in Chinese cuisine are various fermented soy products plus sugar and occasionally MSG, the latter especially necessary in late spring when the previous year's stored veggies are not very good. They don't have much of a sweet tooth and sugar is used in small amounts to counteract sour and bitter flavors.

I'm not a bit surprised she had better control in China. She'd probably have good control here if she lived on hospital food, again made from fresh ingredients with few additives, or did her own cooking from 100% fresh foods.