Pinky ) wrote:
>I must say that it was only a "qualified" apology and my reason for making
>my first post still stands. And the original poster has still failed to
>make any response.

>--
>Trevor A Panther


Hi Trevor,

For what it's worth, as a former chemist and continuing diabetic and
winemaker, I think that clinitabs, as opposed to clinistix, are very
useful for winemaking.

They're not nearly so useful for monitoring diabetic control of
blood sugar, but not, I don't think, for the reasons you give. They
actually do a fairly reasonable job of telling you how much reducing
sugar you have in any given solution, be it wine or urine, espcially
when used in conjunction with the modified color charts that you can
get over here (U.S.) for wine analysis.

The reason that they're not so useful for gauging diabetic control
is not they they don't acurately reflect the amount of reducing
sugar in solution, but that the amount of sugar in urine doesn't
tell you all that much about the amount of sugar in the bloodstream,
and THAT'S the number that tells you about diabetic control. This
is true for two reasons:

1. the amount of sugar in urine tells you what was going on with
sugar in the bloodstream about 2-3 hours ago. The amount of time is
variable, which is a problem, and knowing what was going on in the
past isn't nearly so useful as knowing what's going on NOW, and

2. the bloodsugar level at which people "spill" sugar into the
urine differs from person to person, so that even if urine sugar
told you what was going on at a given moment in the bloodstream,
which it can't and doesn't, it still wouldn't be well correlated
with absolute levels of sugar in the blood. That is, the normal
threshold for any sugar to appear in the urine is said to be about
180 mg/dL in the blood, but can be much lower for some people.

So anyway, clinitabs are useful for winemakers, but not so useful
for diabetics.

Dave
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Dave Breeden