Finding the chase and cutting to it

It’s been both a productive and exhausting week, gaining some valuable inches in making things a bit better for those in the work place, well my work place, for those in the minorities.

I got the chance of 30 minutes away from my desk in a comfy environment thinking about all the things in our buildings that would make things accessible. Things like information about whether the lifts are working, information about nutrition so those with allergies, intolerances, and those having to cover metabolic functions have the information they need to make good decisions.

Being type 1, I get very frustrated when companies are giving our caloric values but not carbohydrate (CHO) values. Longer term, the former is vital to living a long and productive life – over the four hours after consumption, the CHO is life impacting for those covering their food intake with insulin.

We are in the minority, but CHO is useful for all those with diabetes mellitus and type 2 diabetics number about 5 million in the UK, about 8% of the population – and that’s despite the sugar tax which has limited many people’s choices due to PKU and type 1 diabetes.

Most artificial sweeteners are not CHO free, many are complex sugars like fructose, which are an absolute bugger to bolus for, the rest are protein based, which are recombined by the body to make, well, sugar. So rather than have something that tells your brain you’ve had a source of energy that is going to act now, they train the body to delay insulin release until later in the day. Not useful.

Basically, if the sweetener has a trailing “ol”, “ame” or “ose”, (e.g. sorbitol, aspartame, or fructose), it is one of those catagories. Saccharine is the only “real” artifical sweetener and, after cancer scares in the 1980s has not been widely used.

Back to the point!

I passed my list to someone else in the disabled community who thought it covered most bases, but of course, nothing is comprehensive.

For some reason, I am being bothered by something that happened to me five years ago. It was a traumatic event and, for some reason, I keep reliving it. It happens on the odd occassion, but this is nearly a daily occurance. My husband feels I should have been compensated a bit more than just getting my back pay for three months, but I’m not sure this is something you can chuck money at.

I’m trying to figure out the best thing to do. Not an easy thing to solve, that’s for sure.