Sweets, Festivals and Saying Yes

Families often respond to a Type 1 diagnosis by removing every sweet thing from the house. It is well meant and it usually causes problems.

The general guidance for diabetes is that favourite foods can stay, sometimes in smaller portions and sometimes less often. In Type 1 there is an additional reason this holds: you are dosing insulin to match carbohydrate anyway. A laddoo has a carbohydrate value like anything else, and it can be counted and covered.

That is not a licence for unlimited sweets — a large quantity of fast sugar is genuinely hard to match, and festival food often comes with fat that drags the effect out for hours. But planned, counted, and eaten with a meal rather than alone, it is manageable.

The reason total prohibition backfires, particularly with children and teenagers, is that it makes food secretive. A child who eats sweets at a friend's house and hides it takes no insulin for them, which is far worse than a counted sweet at home.

So for a festival: decide in advance what will be eaten, count it, dose for it, and check afterwards to learn what it did. Then treat that as information for next year.

The Type 2 guidance on weddings and buffets applies here too, with dosing added on top.