Does eating chocolate = sugar in urine

[JamieJay]

I'm 22 weeks and must confess that I am indulging in daily chocolate .

Have today been told (by someone who admittedly has no medical training!) that I should avoid eating any in the days running up to my next ante antal appointment as it will cause a peak in my urine sugar levels and lead to the midwife wanting me to have a GTT test.

Is it really that simple, eat chocolate = high sugar in urine, abstain from chocolate = normal sugar in urine??

I know I should be avoiding the refined sugar but it's just proving so damn hard

Im not an expert! but whenever I had my wee tested in my first pregnancy if it was an early morning appointment and the sample showed a slight increase in sugar levels then my midwife would ask if Id had sugary cereal for breakfast (which I usually had) and would put it down to that?

This only happened when I had appointments not long after breakfast time, so I guess yes food does have an effect but I think with GD it is quite an increased level of sugar in the urine?
HTH

It's not that simple, no and I'm non-medical but

1. my last MW did say that a lot of false positives are due to wobby pregnant women snarfing a Mars bar to make them feel better

and

2. After 2 GTTs for previous pregnancies, I avoided sugary stuff for the 2-3 days leading up to my MW appointments and had no problems in my 3rd pregnancy.

I eat an awful amount of chocolate and continued to in pregnancy and never had sugar in urine

You shouldn't ordinarily have sugar in your urine at all, I thought? Unless your blood glucose level is high enough to suggest possible diabetes.

Can't remember the exact details but I had to have that test where they make you drink Lucozade and tast your pee because I ate an entire bar of Green and Blacks during the night before an antenatal appointment. And had golden syrup on my toast. All was fine.

Don't about = sugar in urine but it deffo = tasty in mouth

Singularly unhelpful post from me there, sorry.

Sugar is broken down in the body by insulin, when someone has diabetes then the pancreas does not produce sufficient insulin or stops producing it all together. In a person wo does not have diabetes the amount of insulin produced is the same as the amount of sugar ingested, if you eat little sugar then little insulin is produced, if you eat alot of sugar then alot of insulin is produced. It does take a little time for your body to register how much sugar there is for it to break down and how much insulin it needs to make, this is why you feel a little high when you have had sugar. It shouldn't make any effect to medical tests. HTH

I've been a complete chocaholic with both pregnancies and I've never had sugar in my urine. But, someone in our NCT group the other day said she had to have her 28 week blood tests re-done because she had chocolate before she had the tests and it skewed the blood sugar result - and someone else said the same had happened to her with sugar in her urine. Maybe the sugar gets through some people's systems quicker than others?!

Your kidneys can't process glucose as efficiently when you are pregnant, and in some cases if you consistently eat too much sugar it can lead to gestational diabetes.

If you've got sugar in your sample it can be an indicator of GD, which needs to be controlled, but the glucose tolerance test will confirm this. I had sugar in my urine from about 26 weeks but my GTT was negative - I just got told to cut down on sugary stuff.

So basically, it's only doing you harm if the glucose tolerance test is positive. A small amount of sugar in urine is normal for most pregnant women.

It did for me in late pregnancy.

Repeat after me:

Your kidneys doesn't have anything to do with glucose, insulin from your pancreas breaks glucose down!!

Excuse my grammar

I was very very naughty regarding chocolate during my last pregnancy and did once eat a load of rubbish (i.e. a substantial amount of biscuits and chocolate) before a blood test which did result in a very high blood sugar reading which in turn meant I was sent off to be checked for pregnancy induced diabetes! I had to go to the hospital for the tests and of course had to endure the starvation beforehand - and was absolutely fine. So, in order to get an accurate result I would try and avoid binging on food with lots of sugar added & eat a good, but fairly normal / healthy breakfast!

I have eaten a ton of chocolate/sweet rubbish this pregnancy and have never had sugar in my urine

Thanks for all the posts - can't read probably now as 101 things goign on but will come back a bit later

Sorry for misinformation then Belle, as I said I'm not a HCP, but my MW dismissed my worries about my urine samples by telling me the kidney thing!

If there's too much sugar and no insulin then the kidneys do excrete it as the body wants to stop the sugar from turning into acid and attacking the organs so she was kind of right.

Insulin produced by the pancreas controls the level of sugar in the blood. In a healthy person the blood sugar level should remain normal even if they eat a lot of sugary foods. If the person is diabetic or has gestational diabetes then eating lots of sugary foods will cause the blood sugar levels to rise above a normal level.

The kidneys filter the blood to produce urine. In a healthy person there should be no sugar in the urine as it would all be reabsorbed by the kidneys. But in someone with elevated blood sugar levels (ie diabetic or gestational diabetes) not all the sugar is reabsorbed by the kidneys and so ends up in the urine.

Some pregnant women will have sugar in their urine even though their blood sugar levels are normal. This is because their kidneys reabsorb less sugar when they are pregnant. So you can have sugar in your urine without having gestational diabetes but may well end up getting tested for it.

I've never worried about eating sugar before an appointment and I eat a lot. It's never been an issue.

I have had suger in my urine in last pregnancy. MW said yes it probably was due to the 2 pints of orange juice I had that morning. Oooops.

Ninthwave Snap! Negative GTT at 27 weeks and negative result for an additional blood sugar test at 32 weeks but still glucose traces in urine from the start of the third trimester. As both blood tests were negative, MW and GP both told me it was the result of my kidneys working less sufficiently from the demands of pregnancy

Thanks everyone - have decided that I'm going to try and cut back on the refined sugar anyhow (is taking the place of healthy stuff a little too often!)

But the problem is CaptainPicardsPineapple (cool name btw) has hit the nail on the head - t'is too lovely