Bread units are an easy-to-use carbohydrate exchange system for diabetics, anyone interested in carb control or people with sugar metabolism issues. Bread units help to assess the amount of carbohydrates which are being consumed with each meal or portion of food.

Depending on one’s specific needs, a (low-carb) diet of between 6 – 8 bread units (BU) per day is usually recommended.


* HOW IT IS DONE *

The BU table allows for a simple substitution of individual foods with each other: take for example 160 g of fresh strawberries and 25 g of French fries from a large fast food company (roughly half the size of a small portion). Both contain the same amount of carbohydrates, 12 g or exactly 1 bread unit (BU).
All of a sudden, the impact of certain foods becomes much more apparent since both deduct exactly 1 point from the daily limit.

A bread unit is defined as follows:
1 Bread Unit (BU) = 12 g of available carbohydrates


* MORE CHOICE, BETTER TASTE *

With this BU calculator, choice and variety for diabetics increases greatly without much of the usual effort at tabulating data. The app provides a vast list of food products:

1. Fresh foods like fruit, vegetables, dairy, bread and flours, etc. are the major component
2. Popular processed products like breakfast cereals, pasta, baked goods, ice cream, etc.
3. Most frequented out-of-house restaurants, snack bars, or convenience food retailers

Portions sizes for individual foods can be adjusted and the app immediately re-calculates the BU values.
Additional calorie info is provided if energy consumption is important to you.

The app comes with an additional filter system which helps to find foods with a perfect fit instantly. Simply define lower, upper or equality thresholds and it will return matching products for your definitions (for example all items with less than 0.5 BU’s if that’s all you have left for the day).

Discover new food choices you never knew you had, increase the variety of your meals on a daily basis and prepare meals depending on mood, liking and personal taste!
All foods are given for 100 g, but for an increasing number of items (like restaurant menus) exact portion sizes are already available.


If you want to know more about BU’s and the medical background, have a look at the book “Life without bread” by Christian Allan (Ph.D.) & Wolfgang Lutz (M.D.).