Monday 20 October 2008

Carbohydrate measurement in other units

The carbohydrate units (CU) or bread units (BU) are just units. You can interpret these units as any number of carbohydrates. This means it is fine to choose CU as scale even if 1CU are 15g of carbohydrates for you. Just enter the right carbohydrate factors (insulin factors) in your settings according to one of your units.

This also means that we can not tell how many carbohydrates in weight units are actually consumed by you. But you will know that one CU means a certain amount of carbohydrates.

Wednesday 8 October 2008

Carbohydrate measurement in USA

In the USA diabetics will log their carbohydrates in gram or another weight unit. It is not common unlike in Germany to log the carbohydrates in bread units or carbohydrate units. Therefore we decided to adapt Glucosurfer.org to support this approach.

Now you can choose to log your carbohydrates in gram or other weight units. Simply enter your amount of carbs in your weight unit. This number is multiplied with the carbohydrate factor which is calculated according to one weight unit. This means that the carbohydrate factor will be very small like 1/18 = 0.0555 but most diabetics in USA are used to this scheme.

Another difference of measuring in weight units is that you have to redefine the carbohydrate effect. In Germany one carbohydrate unit (10g=1CU) will normally increase the blood glucose by 30 mg/dL. This value has to be divided by 10 to get the increase of blood glucose per gram. For other weight units this has to be calculated accordingly.

With weight units the Glucosurfer will just ask for 'Carbs' as an abbrevation for carbohydrates that are measured in weight units.

TuDiabetes.com

I just wanted to share with you that I am now member of the growing community of TuDiabetes.com. You will find very experienced diabetics, book authors and bloggers there.


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