8th October 2012 Dear Mr Jeremy Hunt, We are proud parents of beautiful twins, Amelie and Albie, both

have Type 1 Diabetes. Amelie was diagnosed aged 2 years old, in September 2011 and Albie was diagnosed 6 months later at the age of 3. As a family we are learning to cope with this daily, life affecting disease, and some days are wonderful and some are awful. The NHS has done a fabulous job in helping us, for which we are most grateful. There is one thing that I really wanted to highlight and which if it was changed would make my life so much easier and for every other person with Diabetes, and that is food labelling. I know that Diabetes UK have worked with you on this, and that Tesco has now introduced a traffic light system on their packaging, but my main area of concern is pasta/rice/cous cous etc. As a person with Type 1 Diabetes you count every carbohydrate that you eat, and from there you can calculate how much insulin to inject. This is not an exact science as you have to take other factors into account stress, illness, exercise, time of day etc. Also, for tiny bodies like Amelie and Albie one can never be exact anyway. I never imagined that I would need electronic scales, a calculator and a notebook for every meal. What would really help all of us living with, or caring for people with Diabetes is for packaging to be much more user friendly. Let me give you an example of the linguine I cooked for the twins last night. The package labelling read like this: 75g weighs approximately 170g when cooked As sold (uncooked): Each serving (75g) contains 53g carbohydrate 100g contains 70.6g carbohydrate It really makes life complicated when trying to feed hungry 3 yr olds if you have to stop and calculate and decipher packaging that could be so much easier. One must assume that as we never eat pasta raw, we dont need to know the carbohydrate value of it uncooked! Wouldnt it be more logical to have a column for cooked pasta? Rice and cous cous are exactly the same again we dont eat them uncooked so label them with the cooked column. My point is that I am an intelligent person and still find the numbers very confusing. Why does it not simply give me a nutritional value for 100g of cooked pasta? I have cooked enough meals for them now to know that if they eat 100g of penne or fusili that the carbohydrate amount if 22g, but they wanted something new last night, linguine. I thought I had calculated it correctly, only to find after a tense and tantrum filled bath time both Amelie and Albie were having a hypo, a term I am sure you are familiar with, where their blood glucose readings were below 4. Albie was only 3.2, but Amelie was 1.8, which is the lowest she has ever been and is dangerously low. Please read this and take on the board the concerns of two loving parents of beautiful, diabetic twins. Kind regards Jude and Luke Sutton