Do YOU Know How Many Carbs Are In This Bowl of Pasta? I Do!!!
It’s 87 carbs, to be exact.
How close was your guess? Even after three years of counting and estimating carbs, I’m not as accurate as I’d like. Our endo would say that I tend to underestimate, resulting in higher blood sugar for my kiddo with Type 1 diabetes.
And have you noticed that the nutritional information for pasta is shown as dried, uncooked pasta? I eat my pasta that way. Don’t you???
I mean, I guess it’s fine it you want to weigh and measure you dried pasta BEFORE cooking and then stick to eating that exact amount...but it doesn’t seem to work very well with my kiddo. Sometimes he wants more. Sometimes (rarely) he wants less. (Yes, I’ve also been told I should pen a book entitled, “Mom, I’m Hungry!”)
One of the first pieces of advice I got in the hospital was to buy a food scale to weigh food. Then I was given a book of standard carb counts, as well as the names of websites for looking things up. In passing, someone mentioned a scale that counts carbs. In my true sleuthing style, I scoured the internet looking for the best scale I could find. I wanted accuracy, accuracy, accuracy...and ease of use. At one point in time, my son’s insulin to carb (I:C) ratio was 1:2.5. Yes, one unit of diluted insulin for every two and a half carbs. So every little detail mattered. A lot.
My favorite scale came from Mackie Scientific, a small, US based company. That scale is amazing, but made with a glass top and not easily portable – so over time I bought several other scales. I found them cumbersome to use, and they are now buried in the depths of my diabetes supply closet.
A few months ago I called Mackie Scientific with a technical question and learned they have created a new scale. They sent me one to try out and I’m quite impressed. Their scales are precise and easy to keep clean, but this one is lightweight and portable! I’ve weighed cucumbers. Carrots. Apples. But pasta. Pasta became the bane of my existence. Worthy of note is that because of food allergies, my son basically eats one brand of pasta. One day I actually cooked an entire bag of pasta and weighed it. It weighed 1000 grams. And there were eight servings at 40 carbs apiece, which meant that the entire package had 320 carbs. After that, each time he wanted pasta I’d weigh it and use a calculator to figure out the carbs. The equation was:
320 (carbs) / 1000 (grams) = carbs per gram
carbs per gram x the weight of his pasta (grams) = carbs
I’ve done this more times than I can count. But during a conversation with the folks at Mackie Scientific, I realized I wasn’t using my scale to it’s fullest potential. (I tend to learn by doing, rather than reading the manual… and let’s face it...the mom of a newly diagnosed kiddo with Type 1 isn’t reading the manual for her scale!) Introducing the custom code feature. It allowed me to put in the carbs per gram for pasta so I can simply place his bowl on the scale and weigh it! The scale tells me the carb count of cooked pasta. Seriously, isn’t that AMAZING?
There is a small learning curve with this scale – the first thing I realized is that I can’t put a big dinner plate on it that hangs over the edges. It works better with a bowl or something with a small base that fits on the scale itself. And there is a trick to programming and recalling custom foods that wasn’t intuitive to me…so in this case, it is worth reading (that part of) the manual. I’ve also found that the Mackie Scientific team is responsive to questions… in fact, that’s how I’ve gotten to know them over the years. So if you’re looking for a truly helpful scale, check the this one out here.