This weekend we went to Lake Tahoe to take the kids skiing. It was a great trip and the boys had a blast. But of course, with the altitude, the skiing, the snow play and the erratic meals, Samson was running LOW (and high) the whole trip.
We picked up a bag of Starburst Minis for low treatments on the way out on Friday, and by the end of the weekend on Monday he had gone through all of them. I looked at the bag and realized he’d gone through 900 calories (!!!) of sugar over the course of four days. That’s certainly more than normal, and at least some of those Starburst were consumed by his brother (and by me and his Dad ) – but it still really shook me, thinking just how much of his caloric intake during the trip was basically sugar.
We recently got a 5-lb bag of smarties packets. It’s truly huge – more than you’d go through on Halloween, and I can’t imagine ever getting through it in ordinary life. And yet, I know for sure it will be gone sooner than we think, just like the jumbo container of Jelly Bellies we used to have.
So I’m wondering – just how much sugar do you guys go through in a week, a month, a year? Can be either glucose tabs, candy, or whatever you use for low treatments…
I was looking into buying sweet tarts as a replacement for our Dex4 Tablets, but when I saw how few carbs each one was, I reconsidered. The ones we looked at (the normal sized ones) are only like 1.5g each. When he is sleeping, we like to only have to give Liam 1 or 2 tablets at most for him to “chew in his sleep”. With Sweet tarts, we’d have to get him chewing up 5 to 10 tablets to get him the carbs he needs during the night when he’s dropping. So, we reconsidered the sweet tarts for now. I believe they sell the “big” sweet tarts and these would probably be more in line with the 4 or 5 carbs each Dex4 tablet is.
As to how much we use…as you know, this swings very widely for us. We can go a week not needing but maybe 1 per day, and other weeks where it seems like it’s all he’s eating is sugar tablets. The nighttime is worse for us. Some nights we go through zero…like last night, he literally flatlined between 120 and 130 all night, which we are very OK with. But there are other nights where I have to feed him 5 to 10 sugar tablets. It really just varies very widely in our family, with Liam.
As for “candies” in general to treat, we had to stop this because 1) his brothers were stealing them (and denying it, naturally), 2) Liam WANTED to go low so that he could have more and 3) we were just going through them too quickly (as it seems you are currently.) I even caught my 3rd oldest son (10 yo) stealing and eating one of Liam’s Dex4 tablets and he knows better than to ever do that again.
As for how much we use over a period of time…let’s see, I purchased 2 bags of Dex4 tablets (100 tablets in each) and received them on January 19th. We emptied those around the 19th of this month. So 200 tablets lasted us the month.
I like correcting with Gatorade best because I don’t overdo it. I have a harder time reining myself in if I’m carrying around candy or glucose tabs. I can also carry around an opened bottle for a few days without it going bad.
I use 1-3 bottles a week depending on how active I am and how well I dose for meals. I walk a lot in my everyday life, and that can cause short-acting insulin to absorb faster and better. This has been a little easier to manage with Afrezza though.
Each bottle has 140 calories and 36 carbs, so I could have as much as 420 calories and 108 carbs/week for lows. I’d say I probably average more around 2 bottles though. It might be more appropriate to say that I use Gatorade to treat for lows and avoid them because I’ll use it if I’m headed in that direction too.
Heavy full-day exercise like skiing can burn lots of carbs. Exercise can burn 60g carb per hour, and 15 glucose tabs per hour all day for a few days really does add up. Rather than handling it all with glucose, I’d take glucose to correct lows and add bread or even bites of sandwich to build up some more carbs that will be available over time.
This is exactly why I like them, since I can nudge my blood sugar with them, or I can down a whole roll if I’m low and dropping more, but yeah, might not be ideal if you’re trying to feed them to a sleeping toddler. They do make the bigger rolls, usually on sale at pharmacy register candy displays, that might work better. They are pretty tart/sour though, so depends on if he likes that, not all kids will. Smarties are milder, but don’t come in large format. The other option is that I believe both come in larger heart shapes for valentines day, so if anywhere still has leftover seasonal candy, may be worth a look.
That’s a good point. There are times we could actually benefit from less than the 4 or 5 carbs that the Dex4 tablets provide. We’ll purchase some for those times we want a more fine-tuned landing. We just won’t have them out and about and he won’t know they’re real candy as he did with the skittles before these.
I have some weeks where I have very few lows. Typically, though, I treat one or two lows (or “near lows”) a day. There have been times where I’ve literally gone through a tub of 50 glucose tablets in two days.
I’m sure the quantity of glucose tablets and other candy I’ve used over the year would be huge, and over my lifetime is enormous. I think treating lows is one reason why adults with Type 1 have such a hard time losing weight.
I think it’s Terry over at TUD who cuts his in half for when he wants to go up just a tiny bit. I’ve never done it, but it sounds practical if you don’t want to feed a child candy.
Well, easily in a week in my case. But a funny thing happened. One night when I was hovering around 4.4 (or 80, my low alert) and kept getting woken up by the dang alarm, I turned it off. Then I forgot to turn it on the next morning. It took me a day or two to realize I wasn’t feeling the vibration and eating a couple of tabs a couple of times a day. Lo and behold I usually hold steady at that 4.4 mark, and often gradually drift up into a safe zone without needing to treat. Now a tub lasts several weeks.
My crazy entire-tub-in-two-days type scenarios usually happen when there’s a combination of weird factors, like travel and hormones at the same time, or increased activity and hormones at the same time, or increased activity and later on an upset stomach (not absorbing food). During those times, my pump settings can drop by 50% or more, and it usually takes me a day or two to figure out the new settings. In the meantime, it’s a constant battle to stay above 4.0 mmol/L and I can spend hours at LOW even though I’m continuously eating glucose tablets (next time this happens I’m going to try mini-dose glucagon).
But I agree that, when everything is set correctly, I can hover at around 4.5 mmol/L safely for hours. The trick there is that if I do any activity (including walking to the bus stop and work, about 30 minutes of exercise, and sometimes even just the 10-minute walk to the store), I have to pre-treat or I’ll end up low.
A lot… but it depends. On the high side 800g in 16 hours feeding the basal for an ultra race. More normally 20g to land the bottom from lunch and dinner boluses to avoid the crazy spike to 300 if i don’t overbolus. As little as zero but that’s rare. I figure it doesn’t matter as long as I run. But I am 20 lbs over my dka weight and 10over my preferred, but there are many more factors involved at the moment.
We have times when we go through almost no candy in a week, and then we have weeks (especially when new sports seasons are starting) when I swear we go through a pound or two of swedish fish and/or fruit snacks. It seems to run in streaks.
We have been having a very bad time with both highs and lows in the past 3-4 months or more. My son comes home from school, most days, with 45 carbs gone (some days 90 carbs…). Then, at night, he often goes through 6-18 ounces of milk, that is, 9 to 25 carbs. So, I would say that, right now, we must be averaging 60 carbs a day for low corrections, sometimes twice as much, sometimes somewhat less. Not pretty.
This, of course, is for a bad moment in the middle of puberty. I don’t expect in any way that this will go on forever. Before puberty, we averaged probably 12-15 carbs a day in corrections.
) – but it still really shook me, thinking just how much of his caloric intake during the trip was basically sugar.