Beans and lentils

Hi,
I'm vegetarian and the majority of my meals are lentils, bean and vegetables of some variety! I struggle counting the carbs as I always make a big pot of something and then find it quite tedious trying to work out how many lentils/beans are in my portion and also whether or not to half the carbs, at my clinic they said if i'm eating lentils and beans I should half the amount of carbs that are in them to work out the CP value.. sometimes if I do this it works, other times I go low and some times my sugars are sky high!
I know its all about trying and testing but its not really working.. I thought my diet should be pretty good as it is Low GI etc. but it seems i'd be safer in my blood sugars to eat things out of a packet with the carb values on!! ARGHH...
does anyone else have this problem? or does anyone have the answer for my problems?!

Hi,

I also eat these things but always usually with a much quickly absorbed carb.....

I suppose it depends on how much of it you are eating, they are released into the blood as glucose very slowly, so a background dose will ususally suffice for small amounts....

Where do you get your beans and lentils, it would be better if it came from a pack, at least at first so you know how much carbs in x amount of lentils/beans.......

I have never heard of halfing the dose, things like these were never meant to be counted, but it may work....

To conclude I would say find out the carb content of your food per x grams and weigh each time, I would say only 1 or 2 units of insulin would be required for any meal containing these, if that......

Hi. I'm veggie too and eat a lot of beans, lentils and pulses. I was told on my DAFNE course not to count these when calculating my insulin dose as the GI is too low (I haven't heard of halving the carbohydrate, that was certainly not suggested to me). I therefore don't count them (except of course baked beans because of the sweet sauce-which is included in the DAFNE carb handbook) but I do count the sauce that I cook them in. I count the carbs in the tin of tomatoes, puree etc that I use to cook them in and then divide the total by the amount that I eat (a quarter of the pot etc) plus any carbs that I eat with them (such as rice) and that seems to work really well. If you find that you are bit high afterwards you could correct for it but I would assume that you would be correcting about 1 or 2 units at most at that point. I hope that helps.

HI

I'm also vegetarian and was told at Dafne not to count these, however when I spoke to a dietician she said if you are eating them as a main meal (which I generally do, without any other carbs) to take some insulin and suggested halving whatever it says on the tin/packet. I find that if I have something like a bowl of vegetable chilli made with kidney beans I generally take 1.5 units. I would never really take any more than this or I'll end up too low. It's just trial and error - like so much with diabetes, sometimes you get it right and sometimes you get it wrong! Good luck.

Further to this, has anyone noticed that on american forums they talk about counting just about everything - so if they have a tomato salad they would count the carbs in the tomatoes and take insulin for them - this seems to be against the whole idea of "free" foods as taught in DAFNE, but I've found it really helps. For instance, if I have a meal now that's made up entirely of free foods such as veg/salad I take a unit or so to cover this and have found that it works. I suppose if you eat anything in quantity it's going to have an effect upon BG...

I'm vegetarian too, and I've had to cut out lentils and beans at dinner time. The sugars are released far too slowly to allow me to correct overnight. A meal without these will usually see me have BGs within target before bed and on waking, but if I have these for dinner, I go to bed with normal BGs and wake up with BGs above 15.

I was told on DAFNE to halve the amount of CPs that was recorded on the nutrition panel for pulses, and I do find this is necessary to avoid a hypo, but correctional doses need to be given for up to 10 hours after the meal to handle the gradual glucose release.

On weekends when I am more active than during the week I have beans for breakfast, and that has worked well in reducing the hypos I have been having on weekends. I can then correct at lunch time and dinner time where required. Possibly, I could also have beans and lentils at lunchtime with corrections at dinner time and before bed, but I haven't really experimented with that.

it is this kind of frustration which, in my opinion, really grinds you down as a diabetic. I'm lucky enough to be on the insulin pump, but only after years and years of desperately trying to control my blood sugars and getting nowhere. I never had terrible a1cs, but certainly didn't used to get results commensurate with the effort I was putting in. Things did improve after Dafne in that I felt there were more 'formulas' i could use instead of feeling my way in the dark, but with the pump came much more predictability, which i think is key.

With the pump I can do a dualwave delivery for lentil/bean dishes which will give me, say, 50% of the insulin I need for the food I have eaten immediately, but the other 50% can be set to be delivered over the next 2 hours or so which much more closely follows the absorbtion of the carbs consumed. I've found that this is also really useful if eating a higher fat meal - for instance if I have pasta with a tomato based sauce I would just do a dual wave 50/50 over 1 hour, but for a cream based sauce I would do a dual wave 50/50 over 2 hours, thereby standing a much better chance of good post meal levels, as well as much later on. I wish everyone could be given an opportunity to try the pump - there will always be some who don't take to it, but I'm sure most would find it quite a revelation. Good luck everyone.

Hello,

I have a similar query related to butter beans - I had them in quesadillas mashed up and didn't account for these, as per DAFNE guidelines.. I just accounted for the tortillas. However at nighttime my BG was sky high.. whilst I haven't been very well so my BG readings have been slightly high I don't think that it would account for this.

I suspect that mashing these up has impacted upon the way they are digested - has anyone else experienced this? I am thinking of trying half insulin dosage, unless anyone else has any ideas that have worked for them.

Thanks,

I experimented with doing two half doses, 3 hours apart which worked better than a single dose of the full amount which led to hypos. I am also experimenting with a slower-acting insulin (not basal and not QA) which has an action time of about 6-8 hours but the jury is still out on that.