Sweetened soy milk is bad for diabetics … right? Wrong! Probably!

diabetes sweet soy milk

Ok, a little caveat is needed here. I’ve only done this experiment with ONE type of soy milk, and it’s a brand of soy milk that’s probably only sold in Korea.

So will you get the same results with something like Silk? I have no idea! All I can tell you is what I got here.

Blood sugar reading before drinking: 103

This was late at night, so probably on an empty stomach.

diabetes sweet soy milk
The soy milk on the left is sweetened soy milk. The one on the right is unsweetened.

Blood sugar reading after drinking: 130

I was pleasantly surprised by this. I drank basically an entire pint (1.7 cups) of the sweetened soy milk, and my blood sugar only moved a pretty small amount.

I should probably do this experiment again. I like soy milk, especially the sweetened kind, and I’ve started drinking it pretty regularly since I did this test.

I’ll update this later when I do this test again.

Update (Feb. 22, 2020): I did the test again!

diabetes sweetened soy milk

Blood sugar reading before eating: 98

This reading of 98 was late at night, so I hadn’t eaten anything in several hours.

Blood sugar reading after eating: 161

This reading was about an hour after I finished the soy milk.

98 → 161 is a pretty big jump, but to be fair, I drank a lot of soy milk. This was over two cups of sweetened soy milk.

And a while back, I also drank about two cups of UNsweetened soy milk.

Blood sugar reading before eating: 128

This reading of 128 was late at night, so I hadn’t eaten anything in several hours.

Blood sugar reading after eating: 142

This reading was about an hour after I finished the soy milk.

So roughly the same amounts of sweetened vs. unsweetened soy milk makes it pretty clear that unsweetened milk results in less of a blood sugar hit. That’s to be expected, but unsweetened soy milk also kind of sucks. I mean, I’ll drink it but … meh.

diabetes sweet soy milk
If you really want to know what this nutrition info says, ask a Korean!