Can anyone explain...

[Gwynn]

This is probably obvious but goes overy my head.

My daughter just popped over for a Fathers day visit and dropped off some Thornes sugar free pear drops.

The packaging says 'suitable for diabetics'

However, the packaging also states that for 100g of the sweets they contain 98.9g of carbohydrates !!!

How can something contain so much carbohydrate and still be suitable for diabetics.

I will not be eating them.

I have looked at the stated ingredients and I can't see where the carbohydrate count comes from, but there are some unknowns in there.

Anyone got any ideas/comments

 

[Lucyr]

Some of the carbohydrates in sugar free sweets can’t be digested and pass straight through you, by working as laxatives. If you do eat any be very careful of quantity.

 

[Gwynn]

Thank you. I have not heard of that before.

So some stuff with some carbohydrates might be ok. How could you know which? Do you know how to recognise the 'free carbohydrates' ?

Sounds like a route for confusion to me.

I will be eating none of them.

 

[Eddy Edson]

The carbs in these things are "sugar alcohols", a type of polyol. The ingredient list should make this clear.

Your bod processes them differently to other carbs, and the result in terms of calories and blood glucose can be very variable. Conventionally, they get counted as 2 kcal/g for calories instead of the 4 kcal/g used for other carbs, and some diabetes management guidelines similarly recommend that by default you should assume that they produce half as much bg as other carbs. But actually how the bod deals with these things is quite variable.

FWIW, they certainly have an impact on my BG. More importantly, I think they are nasty poxy diarrhea-inducing substances which should be left well alone.

 

[Gwynn]

Thanks for your replies

Looking on the internet it seems that some sites are saying that indigestible carbohydrates are in fact dietary fibre. Is that true.

A polyol, dietary fibre, fibre ... a bit confused by this.

The only reason I am interested now is because I have upped my daily fibre intake to closer to the NHS guidelines, not sure if that will cause problems or not. So far all good.

Ahh I get it now. Looking more closely on the packaging it does say 98.8g polyols.

Sorry for my confusion.

Thanks for you help

 

[silentsquirrel]

I am very fond of Werthers sugar-free, also some Sula, especially Rhubarb and Custard. I know I can eat one safely (both BG wise and laxative wise), 2 is risking it a bit and 3 is almost always a mistake!

But we are all different, of course! I was amazed to read of someone eating 10 or 15 of the Werthers, presumably without needing to move into the bathroom for a day or two!

 

[Gwynn]

Going a little bit further...

Nutrition information on pears (from the internet)...

A 100g pear contains 9.2g carbohydrate

It also contains 3.3g polyol

Does that mean that a diabetic, counting carbs, should subtract the polyol content from the carbohydrate value to get the true active carbohydrate content ? Or is the polyol in addition to the carhohydrate value stated, but to be ignored.

If it is to be subtracted then this could also be true for other foods, making effective carb counting a bit more difficult.

 

[everydayupsanddowns]

If it is to be subtracted then this could also be true for other foods, making effective carb counting a bit more difficult.

I‘ve been carb counting for 30 years, and very quickly discovered that as far as my body was concerned it was far more ‘art’ than ‘science’ and that rather than stressing about 1g here and 2g there, it was much more effective for me to round up or down and add a bit to account for the proportion of all the extra imponderables there might be on my plate (one carrot diced, divided by 4… one large onion… but are they distributed evenly??)

 

[Leadinglights]

The way the carb content of foods is determined is not exactly precise and the figure given is almost certainly to be +/- a percentage. Different varieties of fruit and veg will vary by a small amount so as @everydayupsanddowns says rounding up is as good as you'll get. Short of having your own bomb calorimeter to test a sample from every item you intend to eat then all you have is you best guess.

 

[Gwynn]

Yup I agree with you all.

I was very interested but as you say, it's basically tinkering at the edges.

So thanks for your replies. I will let it rest now.

 

[Becka]

How much do the individual sweets weigh? Not everything that goes in your mouth needs to be required to fulfil a utilitarian dietary purpose.

 

[trophywench]

I'm now surprised - I have always assumed that the reason I reliably visit the loo for 'big jobs' the day after eating a pear (which I enjoy eating, other than horrid hard ones) was the fibre in their skin ....... sounds like it isn't the skin now. Someone I worked with years ago (non diabetic) always ate pears to relieve being bunged up, but tinned pears did it for her so I've never done that for obvious reasons. (syrup) And, er, thought she was potty, how could tinned pears possibly have a laxative effect ....... silly moo. I apologise Gwen.