Bananas

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Emzi

Emzi

Well-Known Member
Relationship to Diabetes
Type 1
Hi Just a quick, possibly silly question but are bananas really sugary?

Reason i ask is normally i have some ready brek for breakfast with a small teaspoon of syrup (i know but its my indulgence) anyway my lunch bloods are normally fine but last 2 mornings ive had a banana too to try and increase my fruit intake and my lunch bloods have read 10 and 11 instead of my normal below 7?

Just wondered if by adding the banana its increased the sugars - and i dont carb count so have the same dose of insulin.

am i better to cut the banana out and just stick to what i know?

Thanks
Em
 
Hello - yes bananas will increase your blood sugar. 1 medium banana has about 20g of carohydarate in it. I can not say how this would affect your blood sugar but it is roughly the same as an extra slice of bread (thick cut).

I remember one guy on my DAFNE course being horrified that if he had a banana as a snack he had to have an injection for it.
 
Bananas and grapes do the most damage to blood sugar levels. With grapes you may as well have a teaspoon of sugar for every grape.

With bananas, whilst they are good for you, us carb counters have to count every bit of banana. A small one is about 18 carbs, a large one is about 28 to 30 carbs which is the equivalent of two medium slices of bread !!!

Try a satsuma which is between 6 and 10 carbs or even strawberries or raspberries which are so much lower.

All fruit has fruit sugar in it so will affect your carbs.

Hope that helps. 🙂
 
im trying to get onto a carb counting course - dafne - through my gp but at the moment its proving difficult but i live in hope.

Thanks for your replies think ill just cut the banana out and go back to what i know is safe 🙂 Thanks again
 
Ah i've gone back and read your previous posts and see you are having trouble getting on DAFNE. Seems like you have done really well from when you first joined this forum and started trying to control your diabetes.
Have you met with your DSN recently to talk about adjusting your doses?

edit: we cross posted! I think it would be a shame to be stuck to your diet and not be able to mix things up and have a banana if you want one.
 
Fruit in general is naturally sweet anyway, and bananas have more sugar than most. As a general rule of thumb the riper a banana is the more sugar it will have.

As part of a meal and if you are having it with slower release carbs, it wont have any serious effects. Part of it is to experiment and see what happens. As we are all different, different things will produce different spikes. I would suggest have either the banana or the syrup and see what happens. Don't give them both up but think about having them on different days and see how that works out for you.
 
Emzi said:
im trying to get onto a carb counting course - dafne - through my gp but at the moment its proving difficult but i live in hope.

Thanks for your replies think ill just cut the banana out and go back to what i know is safe 🙂 Thanks again
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Hiya

I wouldn't wait for the course. Try and teach yourself. All us parents are self taught, we don't get sent on or qualify for these courses.

We armed ourselves with a couple of books ie the Collins Gem carb counter (from Amazon) and any others and off we go. There is a general rule of thumb as a starting place.

Bearing in mind I am only talking about children here but most of us started with 1 unit to 15 carbs for every meal. It soon changes and you find you need a hell of a lot more at breakie than you do at tea.

My daughter for example is now on 1 unit to 7 carbs at breakfast, 1 unit to 9 carbs at lunch and 1 unit to 13 carbs at tea time.

There are also ways to roughly work out a starting point for your correction factor as well, its on thread here somewhere. It is not an exact science but somewhere to start.

You have to remember that it is daunting to start carb counting, we all felt the same. Give yourself two weeks of eating easy stuff to count, even if its packets which say it on it, you will have sorted it in no time.

You can still go on the course to refine what you are doing but why not give it a try. We are all here to help in any way we can.
 
Emzi said:
im trying to get onto a carb counting course - dafne - through my gp but at the moment its proving difficult but i live in hope.

Thanks for your replies think ill just cut the banana out and go back to what i know is safe 🙂 Thanks again
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They also run a one-day carb counting course at my clinic, which I found really useful, maybe you could get on this. Otherwise I agree with Adrienne - it is not rocket science - try and teach yourself, with help from everyone on here
 
Emzi said:
Hi Just a quick, possibly silly question but are bananas really sugary?
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Hi

I meant to say that no question is ever a silly question, we will all have asked them at some point and are all good questions. Ask anything.

🙂
 
Vanessa said:
Enzi, I was looking on the Diabetes UK site yesterday at their recipe section and was reminded about this link to an on line course for Type 1's who want to learn to carb count. Might be worth a look for you?

http://www.diabetes.org.uk/Guide-to-diabetes/Food_and_recipes/Carbohydrate-Counter/
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This Bournemouth stuff is really good. When my DSN suggested I try carb conting (and before she had managed to get me on a course), I used this site to begin to get in a bit of practice. I didn't change my insulin at the time, but simply started beginning to try to work out the carbs in the food I was eating. I think this made the course easier when I did get on it as I had a notion what it was all about. 🙂

Good luck with whatever you decide to do.
 
Banana ripening techniques

As Adrienne has said, no such thing as a daft question, and as Caroline had said, sugar content of bananas depends on both their ripeness and their size. Overall carbohydrate content of a given banana doesn't change, but starch changes to sugar as it ripens. If you're like me, you only like bananas at a specific ripeness, so to stop them all ripening at once, we leave some in the plastic wrapper or paper bag (which will ripen more quickly - and will help to ripen any other fruit eg tomatoes or avocadoes placed in the same bag as bananas give off ethylene [I think, but haven't checked just now] gas as they ripen) and place the rest in an open bowl (which will ripen later). Fortunately, my partner is slightly less selective about the ripeness of the bananas he will eat, so we never waste any... But we only buy Fair Trade bananas.
 
Copepod said:
As Adrienne has said, no such thing as a daft question, and as Caroline had said, sugar content of bananas depends on both their ripeness and their size. Overall carbohydrate content of a given banana doesn't change, but starch changes to sugar as it ripens. If you're like me, you only like bananas at a specific ripeness, so to stop them all ripening at once, we leave some in the plastic wrapper or paper bag (which will ripen more quickly - and will help to ripen any other fruit eg tomatoes or avocadoes placed in the same bag as bananas give off ethylene [I think, but haven't checked just now] gas as they ripen) and place the rest in an open bowl (which will ripen later). Fortunately, my partner is slightly less selective about the ripeness of the bananas he will eat, so we never waste any... But we only buy Fair Trade bananas.
Click to expand...

That's a thought I suppose that depending on the ripeness, the CHO content will be different - like green and red peppers!
 
Thanks Guys you never let me down with answers to my questions 🙂
Im having a slow ponder through the website and hopefully it'll help me get my head round it so i can make a start in the new year, ive also bought a book that was recommended by a friend who's son has diabetes its by an australians womens weekly publisher and its a fat, protein and carb counter - but id just use it for the carb bit although the others would be interesting to know and it had a carb count for nearly everything you can think of - so gunna give it a try too :D

Thanks again

oh i have to have my banana's when they have just left the green stage and turned yellow, one slightest bit of brown and its in the bin 🙄
 
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