100 grams: diabetic in Europe

It must be harder to be diabetic in Europe. If anyone knows if this is true or not, I would like to hear from them.

 You see, here in the US our food and nutrition labels, with which I am alarmingly familiar, identify what a serving size is. Then the information on the label is based on the serving size.

People here complain  about the "everyday American" not being able to understand our system of labeling, and have been messing around with what constitutes a "real" serving size. There have been, in the past, ways for companies to insist that their product is low in calories. They would say: "Less than 100 calories per serving!" on the package. Careful reading of the label, however, might reveal that a small candy bar was to be considered 3 servings.

Such misleading labels don't matter much to a diabetic, however, as carefully reading the label is part and parcel of the relationship with your malfunctioning pancreas.

One bag of King-sized M&Ms for example, has two servings per package(who are we kidding? this is America!), meaning that a serving is about 47 M&Ms (you can thank me for my dedication to research on this one)  Each serving has 32 carbs, which means that if M eats a whole bag of King Sized M&Ms, then she had better bolus for 64 carbs, (more than a typical meal at our house).

Even though this requires a lot of math, it's pretty straightforward.

Eat this serving, calculate for this many carbs.

In Europe, I visited supermarkets and duty-free shops in Spain, Paris and Amsterdam (just the airports for the last two).

The nutrition labels there are probably "simplified" from one perspective. They use the same unit of measurement for every "serving": 100 grams.

In other words, if you buy crackers, the label will tell you how many carbs are in 100 grams of crackers. If you buy peanuts, it will tell you how many carbs are in 100 grams of peanuts.

This is probably great if you are trying to compare how many carbs are in different items (thus learning what actually is low in carbs), but what about for calculating your insulin doses?

Do people in Europe weigh out their food and calculate how many carbs are in it, and then bolus?

Let's say I want to eat a pork chop, some mashed potatoes, and some asparagus (not very European, is it?)

100 grams of pork chop = 0 carbs. Easy.
100 grams of mashed potatoes is 21 carbs
100 grams of asparagus is 4 carbs.

Now here is the problem. After you weigh your food, you eat one pork chop at 150 grams, 138 grams of potatoes, and 68 grams of asparagus. So you have to do this:

grams of food
divided by 100 grams
times the number of carbs per 100 grams

So for this meal:

(150/100 x 0) +(138/100 x 21) + (68/100 x 4) = your carb amount.

So reducing this problem becomes:

0 + 28.98 + 2.72 = 31.7 carbs

Maybe, like with calculating for carbs at all, doing this becomes easier with practice. Maybe you get to know what 100 grams of Marmite looks like compared to 100 grams of chorizo,  and you just sort of calculate it all in your head. Or maybe you only eat in 100 gram increments.

I don't know. But I am pretty sure that I won't be complaining about our nutrition labels in the US any time soon.

Phew! 100 grams for easy calculation!