Travelling, Low-Carb, and Normal Blood Glucose - Part 3
Sep 20, 2023Welcome to another post related to our family’s Aussie visit!
In case you missed my last post, our family recently visited Australia. While we now live in Canada, because my husband is Australian, our family has lived in both countries, and we decided to come back to Australia to visit our oldest child – our daughter, who just started university in Australia this past February.
While in Australia, we want to maintain our family’s low-carb lifestyle to help support stable blood sugars for our son living with Type 1 diabetes.
In this post, I will share how we explored grocery store shopping for low-carb in Australia, so you can see how I look at different food products in a new country.
I’ll share how I look for low-carb foods in a grocery store I’ve never been to before!
Now going to a brand-new grocery store, especially one on the other side of the world, for me as a clinical nutritionist is very exciting! I’m weird that way, but I know I’m not the only one! As my dietitian friend recently shared, when her family travels, her husband and daughter have to wait a while for her when she visits grocery stores and checks out ALL the foods, just like I love to do! Even our two sons got in on the action, checking nutrition labels and seeing what Australia had on offer!
Once you know what to buy, it’s pretty easy to choose foods in the grocery store when eating low-carb because you simply choose your protein – meat, chicken, seafood, fish – plus some veggies. Although the majority of our family’s foods will include these type of real foods, it’s fun to see what sorts of low-carb food products are available in different places.
It’s especially fun in countries like the United States where there are many low-carb products available. In places like Canada and Australia, there are not as many, but there are some that can work well for school lunches and occasional treats.
And I really wanted to do this as I am having families from Australia in my Nutrition Effect program that want guidance on what to buy in the grocery stores that fits a low-carb lifestyle for Type 1 diabetes. So, away I went!
I thought you might find it helpful to see what I look at when deciding whether a food product may work for a low-carb lifestyle.
The first thing I do with a food product that looks like it might be low-carb and that I think my kids would like to eat, is to read the nutrition label. I do this ONLY as a starting point! That’s important to know.
And I had to familiarize myself with nutrition labels in Australia, because they are different to those in North America. Most of the nutrients listed are similar, but fibre doesn’t have to be listed on what Australian or New Zealand refer to as a “nutrition information panel”. Unless a food product makes a claim related to fibre, such as “a good source of fibre”, you won’t find fiber on an Australian nutrition label.
So at first, when I looked at foods in the Australian grocery stores, I couldn’t figure out whether I was looking at total or net carbs. Regardless, I saw quite a few products in Aussie grocery stores with a “low-carb” marketing claim and just by looking at the carb count on the nutrition label, which was sometimes as high as 20-some grams of carb (!!!), I knew to put it back on the shelf. Just because it says “keto” or “low-carb” doesn’t mean it is! Doesn’t mean it won’t spike blood glucose immediately after eating!
So, back to me looking at the nutrition label…
As a mom, because my family has a very low carbohydrate lifestyle, I generally never look at a food product that has a total carb count of more than about 8 grams of total carb. That’s the way I approach this for my family. For my clients, it’s different. It depends on which personalized Therapeutic Carbohydrate Reduction approach they follow. But I start by looking at a food product’s nutrition label for the carbohydrate.
Next, I read the ingredients. This is more important in my opinion!
The ingredients list of a food product can tell you something about how a food may potentially affect blood glucose. A nutrition label could have a low amount of carbohydrate, but if it contains enough of a certain ingredient, a blood glucose spike can result and make it hard to manage diabetes.
I have a list I use at the grocery store, which is one of our hand-outs in The Nutrition Effect program, which I provide to parents, so they know which ingredients to look out for, which may spike blood glucose. The list includes “hidden names for sugar”, other ingredients to avoid, and ingredients that should be okay for people with diabetes.
I look for commonly used ingredients that spike blood glucose, such as: rice starch or tapioca starch.
When you read a food product’s ingredient list, it is helpful to know that:
The food product contains more of the ingredients found at the beginning of the list, and less of the ingredients at the end of the list.
If there is an ingredient list with an ingredient known to spike blood glucose and it is listed as one of the first ingredients listed, I put it back on the shelf.
I found many low-carb breads, wraps and English muffins here in Australia. Many varieties in fact! I completely understand that this is something people want to try, especially if you ate bread prior to adopting a low-carb lifestyle, but I found only one bread that wasn’t made from wheat, and although no one has been diagnosed with Celiac Disease in our family, with more than one autoimmune disease in our family, we avoid gluten, and in my experience, wheat products tend to spike blood glucose.
I also watch for products that may work for a low-carb lifestyle but have different flavours. Check the nutrition labels and the ingredients for all flavours! I messed up on this this trip. We like a coconut yogurt in Australia called CoYo, and we used to enjoy this when we lived in Australia seven years ago and were excited to have it again. We tried the vanilla bean flavour when we first landed, and the next time we went to the grocery store, we grabbed the Mango flavour, which is almost double the carb count and it even has sugar added to it(!), which I didn’t realize until Lachlan’s glucose started to spike after eating it. While one flavour of a food product may work for a low-carb lifestyle, another one may not!
So, that’s my process in the grocery store.
1. Check the nutrition label for the amount of carbohydrate in the product.
2. Read the ingredients to see what the food product contains.
3. Decide if this is likely to have minimal effect on blood glucose levels.
If we buy a new low-carb food product, our son tests it, and we track the results, by writing down the pre-snack glucose level and the CGM results that follow. For most low-carb food products, if there is no exercise coming up, Lachlan will need a pre-dose of a half or 1 unit of rapid-acting insulin to cover that low-carb snack. If there was no blood sugar spike after eating, this could be a safe food option from a stable blood glucose perspective. It is important to keep in mind that it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s an option that provides a child with the nutrients they need. So we keep in mind that these packaged low-carb food products make up a small portion of our family’s diet.
Which low-carb food products does your family enjoy with minimal impact on blood glucose? I’d love to hear your family’s favourites!
If you are a parent committed to transforming your child's T1D management, help them get off the blood sugar rollercoaster, safely achieve normal blood glucose levels, relieve your stress and anxiety, and lead them to a brighter, healthier future, visit T1D Nutrition: Get the latest on how to successfully manage T1D via a Therapeutic Carbohydrate Reduction/Low-carb Nutrition strategy, follow T1D Nutrition via: