Just a spoonful of sugar.

The other day I looked up my blood test result for my first fasting glucose test. My French lab reports the results in mmol/l and in g/l . Using grams per litre rather than the milligrams per decilitre is the norm here. In the UK, they use mmol/l, in the US mg/dl; 5mmol/l in the UK would be 90mg/dl in the US. I get used to reading and using those units on the internet, but when I visit my French doctors they get really confused if I say 90 rather than 0.9.

When I reminded myself that my fasting blood glucose on diagnosis was 3.85g/l. I started thinking what exactly did that mea? Somehow grams and litres, being everyday measurements makes it clearer.

Here's a litre of blood!

Our bodies contain about 5-6 litres of blood

The teaspoon below contains just under 4 g of sugar, so about the 3.85g/l that I had in my blood the morning I was diagnosed. Not very much really, disolve it in the litre of water and it would barely sweeten it to taste. I would have had about 5-6 times that in my whole body

This spoon contains about 1.26g thats enough in a fasting test to diagnose a person with diabete

Its incredible, how such small amounts make such big differences.

Tomorrow is World Diabetes Day, I'm going to join in the 'big blue test' http://tudiabetes.com/forum/topics/the-big-blue-test-on-world : testing my blood glucose, followed by 14 minutes of exercise, I'm going to see how far I can run on the treadmill in that time.

Later if the weather's not too atrocious , we're driving to Cahors, where they're lighting the the Marie and the Pont Valentré in blue. It's about 60km and not the best of roads, but OH was easily persuaded as it's a good excuse to visit our nearest Indian curry house.

(I'll get back to the glucose variations soon, it's a hard one to write)