Last Christmas my kids asked if we could put sprinkles on our cookies. We went to the store and looked at the ingredients... pure sugar...so my answer was "No". I didn't really look at amounts, I answered based on the ingredients. I searched online to see if I could make sugar-free sprinkles and sure enough you can, but it's pretty labor intensive and expensive. I thought again about the sprinkles I could buy. Then I thought about lunchmeat, meat sticks and a few other things Samuel can eat perfectly fine with small amounts of sugar.
1 serving of sprinkles (1 tsp) is 3 carbs. I was standing in the store a second time trying to visualize 1 tsp of sprinkles... it seemed like a lot to me. So I bought a jar and went home and started measuring. Here's what various amounts of sprinkles look like weighed out...
So, 1/4 tsp of sprinkles is only 0.75 carbs. Yes, it's pure sugar, but I thought I'd test it. Keep in mind, my objective was to add sprinkles for fun, not to add sweetness. It turned out 1/4 tsp is WAY too many sprinkles for 1 cookie. The "right" number for us is about 15 sprinkles per cookie, which means a 1/4 tsp is divided between 4 cookies, so we're adding not quite 0.2 carbs per cookie.
I still carefully tested with Samuel and lo and behold, I don't have to bolus for the sprinkles at all. I bolus for how many low carb cookies he'll be eating, but that's it.
Could I make sugar-free sprinkles? Yes.
But in a world of 40-60 hour work weeks, homeschool, baseball practice, dance class, housework, and being a wife (etc...) a shortcut that causes no extra insulin is a win in my book.
Each person has to do what is right for them. At the end of the day, its normal blood sugar with as tight of a standard deviation as we can get that decides whether a food "works" for us. If it doesn't work, we don't force it. It just so happens this works for us.
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