The Great Pizza and Diabetes Experiment - butlertworks1957

I hate pizza. Sure, information technology has that great smell. Yeah, it has an amazing look, as steam rises up over a landscape painting of melted cheeses patterned with cooked veggies and crisp meats. Oh, and the taste is wonderful, a molten fusion of flavors that rocks the penchant buds.

But I still hate pizza.

Because no matter what I do, IT effs up my blood sugar. Big time.

And I'm non uncomparable.

The job is that all pizza pie is two glucose highs ready and waiting to happen. There are imperviable sugars in the crust and in the sauce, and on that point are slow carbs in the cheeses and meats. And pizza's challenges for the pancreatically-challenged are everywhere.

Pan, hand-tossed, or thin crust?
What toppings?
How generous or penurious is the cook?
Does unmatchable mar have more sugar in their sauce than other?
And what about the slices? A "slice" of pizza has a publicised carb count in some cases, only rarely are pizzas dilute uniformly. It's a incubus.

In wondering how happening earth we'rhenium supposed to softwood with all of this, my solution has been to avoid pizza pie altogether.

Then you can imagine how I mat up when the 'Mine team asked Pine Tree State to take on pizza as the next in our line of "great food experiments" that have included cetchup, coffee, and craftsmanship beer so right. Given that March is People Nutrition Month, it seemed like a perfect clock time for the so-called Great Diabetes and Pizza Experiment.

I started by studying the enemy. And on that point's a good deal of information out there, despite the fact that pizza pie sales are actually along the reject with only $38,504,164,116 in sales last year. For those of you WHO can't count your commas, that's $38 billion!

There are more than a twelve brands of pizza pie out there and they ingest a pretty great carb range. Oregon so it would appear ab initio glance. But something exciting is lurking in the maths. As I compared products, I noticed that the serving sizes varied a raft, too, ranging from 85 grams busy 152 grams.

Digging deeper into the mathematics, I divided the carbs into the serving sizes to find out the carb impact of each rather pizza pie happening a per-gram basis. And when I did, I was stunned. Pizza — regardless of impudence or topping operating theatre steel — has a carb impact very just about 0.23 carbs per gram.

Could it Be true? Was there, lurking in all the confusion of size up and style and brand, a cosmopolitan pizza bolus? Practice we just motivation to weigh any piece of pizza and multiply the results by 0.23 to get the carb count? Could it really be that simple?

Time to find come out…

I ran a slender-scale technological experiment. And to gain the most data beyond precisely myself, I recruited a second lab rat: a fellow T1D baby who is a pizza-lover and didn't need a great deal arm-twisting to join in along this experiment offering free pizza pie dinners.

Similar me, she's on insulin pens and CGM. We agreed we'd both make out a fingerstick calibration as a service line earlier the meal, then record the CGM readings at two and four hours.

In a perfect reality, acme glucose would live in deuce hours, and at cardinal hours we should be back to our sane fast blood sugar levels.

Of course, a perfect world wouldn't include a diabolical food care pizza.

Each of the pizza meals would be restricted to two pieces of pizza, with no sides. I wanted my data to be as pure as Parmesan. But to drink I designated low-carb dry chromatic wine-colored, because I love wine more than science.

Here's my lab journal:

Experiment 1: Pizza Field hut

We opened the cardboard corner and beheld the pizza pie. "You have a in truth tough Book of Job," aforesaid my D-sister, "Having to eat pizza and all…" Then she pointed to a slice on the left, and then one across the pizza from it. "I'll read this one, and that one."

I transferred her choices to the wait paper plate connected my digital Salter kitchen scale. We had used the "Lolium temulentum" function to score out the weight of the scale before adding the pizza pie. Her cardinal slices clocked in at 207 grams. I multiplied that by our supposed universal constant of 0.23 and came up with a carb numerate of 47.61. "Beat it adequate 48," I suggested, and she entered the figure into her RapidCalc app, along with her (grossly) above-target blood clams, and took a combined pizza and correction bolus.

She aforementioned the carb matter sounded waaaaaaay too low to her. I did the math along my deuce slices after weighing them, and the count sounded waaaaaaay too high to me.

What happened? Surprisingly, non practically. I went up a little, just not too badly. D-sis came push down, but not as far as she would have likable. Present, discipline it out:

Theme 2 HR 4 HR

Wil 137 193 235

D-sis 342 242 201

The glucose reaction to the pizza was better than either of United States of America usually see with tralatitious carb counting, and we were amazed by how incommunicative our final sugars were, especially granted how out-of-the-way separated they were at the start.

Experiment Two: Little Caesars

Much like KFC has fried chicken cooked and waiting, Little Caesars has cheese and pepperoni pizzas waiting for tidal bore eaters at all hours. During the dinner rush, a wider array of options is available. Price-wise, they are about half the toll of Pizza pie Army hut, and the season was great. How'd it mould KO'd origin bread-wise?

I'm happy to report that, victimization the universal constant of 0.23 carbs per g, the Teeny Caesars hand-tossed 3 Meat Handle baked my blood sugar similarly to the way that the Pizza pie Hut Pan Meat Buff's did. Which is to allege, hardly perfect, only better than I've e'er experienced in the past.

Both of the test subjects started with respectable Book of Numbers this clock time. I stayed flat with a slight rise towards the end, but had zero excursion whatsoever. My D-sister dropped a bit in the halfway, and rose Sir Thomas More sharply towards the end, but nothing to write internal about — especially since this is pizza pie we'Re talking about.

Here are our numbers:

Base 2 60 minutes 4 HR

Wil 146 151 161

D-sis 134 106 186

Despite the fact that Little Caesars and Pizza pie Shack pizzas have radically dissimilar insolence styles, the "world-wide" constant delivered similar results: Essentially a fairly dull response, termination above target, merely not hideously so.

Experiment Threesome: Totino's Frozen Pizza

Scientific discipline is a lot of work: Beat the frozen pizzas out of the oven, cut them, weigh the servings for me and my D-sister on the scale, multiply the grams of weight by the universal bolus figure of 0.23 to receive the carbs, enter the carb count and modern blood sugar into RapidCalc, and record all the figures in my notes for this article—all in front the blasted pizza pie got cold!

Meanwhile my D-sis quickly reversed her iPhone upside polish later on entry her blood glucose. I sighed. "How bad is it?" I asked her.

400 and cardinal-five fricken' mg/dL. "What on earth did you DO?" I asked, whereupon she admitted to eating "yummy" coat and forgetting to bolus for it. Course I learn her the riot act about being an irresponsible D-person. Past I sat down to run through my pizza pie.

When the deuce-hour alarm went off I checked my CGM. I was at 276 with a quartering arrow heavenward. What the f—?! How could that be?! That sharp… And calm down ascending!

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We put our heads unneurotic to work out what went wrong. One estimation was that the "universal bolus" didn't wreak for frozen pizzas, as they have a higher Earth's crust-to-topping ratio than restaurant-type pizzas. While I could steal that, I just couldn't resign it with an excursion that imitative. "It near looks like I didn't take some insulin the least bit…" I started to say.

"That would be being an unaccountable D-person," said my D-sis with a triumphant twinkle in her eye.

I activated my Echo pen and looked at the base. The net bolus was many, many, many hours earlier. Well, shit. I was so busy figuring out the bolus, that I had forgotten to take it.

Base 2 60 minutes 4 HR

Wil 155 276 —

D-sis 435 — —

I finished the experiment at two hours. So I took a fury bolus, and ate the leftovers.

Experiment Four: Local Fare

Course, none of this science does us any healthy if it only works for range of mountains pizza pie. The real prize is having a method for fetching on local mystery pizza. The concluding phase of our experiment was to go for the universal faithful to local pizza and see if the numbers came out similar to the numbers we saw on the brand-name pizzas.

I crowded my scale of measurement and we headed to J.C's New York Pizza pie Department, a combination eatery and multilane bowling alley on the Plaza in the meat of my town of Las Vegas, New Mexico — the Las Vegas you can't see from space.

Did it "oeuvre"? Did we get readings similar to our primary 2 experiments?

No. Damn it.

Base 2 HR 4 HR

Wil 127 128 263

D-sister 188 317 359

D-sis shot up crazy-high before the two-hour check and continued to drift up. Eight minutes discourteous of the final check she bailed and took insulin. I stayed flat for the first 2 hours, then began a sharp ascend.

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Sol much for science.

What did I prove finally?

Well, even if there may cost a universal carb-count for pizza, navigating this victimisation traditionalistic insulin may not allow for steady numbers unless you can plan ahead and battery-acid accurately each and every time.

In other row, Your Pizza May Vary (YPMV), even as Your Diabetes May Vary and everything under the sun plays into the Blood glucose Effect you'll undergo when consuming this kind of pie.

For me in the destruction, the Enthusiastic Pizza pie Experiment established nothing… on the far side the fact that I'm justified in real hating pizza.