Simplify Mealtimes with Omnipod® 5’s Custom Food Feature—whether or not your patients are carb counting

February 6, 2025

Diabetes impacts your patients’ daily lives in countless ways, adding complexity and additional considerations to all daily decisions, including at mealtimes. Counting carbohydrates (carbs) or calculating how much insulin to give at mealtimes can be challenging. Over- or underestimating mealtime insulin results in hypo- or hyperglycemia.

To help simplify the challenge of mealtime dosing, we’ve developed the Custom Foods feature in the Omnipod 5 Automated Insulin Delivery (AID) System.

Custom Foods is a personalized list of foods, meals, or snacks, ready to use every time your patients use the SmartBolus Calculator to give mealtime insulin.

Assessing Whether the Custom Foods Feature Would Be Helpful for Your Patient

The Omnipod 5 SmartBolus Calculator already simplifies mealtime math for your patients by integrating their sensor glucose value and trend, so they don’t have to. The Custom Foods feature was designed to further simplify mealtime math and can be used with patients who:

Find carb counting challenging
Have caregiver or school nurse support with meals
Eat the same foods often
Skip doses because of complex calculations
Want to spend less time thinking about diabetes

To see if your patient could benefit, ask your patient what they currently do for mealtime insulin dosing. Consider how you advise your patients how to take mealtime insulin when they do not count carbs.

Consider:

For someone who doses the same amount of insulin with every meal
- Convert this number of units of insulin into grams of carbohydrates
- Create a custom foods with the name “Meals” with that number of grams of carbohydrates.
  - Example: Meals: 70 grams¹
For someone who has some knowledge of carbohydrates and distinguishes how much insulin to take based on size of meal (small, medium, large), or type of meal (breakfast, lunch or dinner)
- Use diet recall to assess their typical carb intake
- Convert the number of units of insulin to grams of carbohydrates
- Create a custom foods list with those meals
  - Example Small: 36 grams; Medium 64 grams; Large 80 grams¹
For someone who is carb counting, Custom Foods can still be helpful.
- For children, adding common foods, snacks to the Custom Foods list can help when they bolus at school, after-school care or camp. Simplifies bolus entry for school staff.
- For those who have figured out a complicated restaurant meal or family recipe, add it to make it easier next time it's eaten. Example: “Slice of pizza from Tony’s: 35 grams”¹ or “beef and bean burrito: 45 grams”¹
- For those who eat the same foods often. Example: “Greek Yogurt with granola 27grams”¹ Adding these foods to the Custom Foods list enables them to spend less time thinking about carbs and diabetes

How to Set Up Custom Foods

For iPhone

This video walks your patient and/or you through Custom Foods on a compatible² iPhone:

For Android or Controller

To create or edit Custom Foods in the Omnipod 5 Controller or a compatible Android phone, please do the following:

_{Note: all screens are for educational purposes only.}

Step 1:

From the Home screen, tap Menu

Tap Custom Foods

Tap ADD.
Enter a name and tap Done.
Enter a carb count and tap Done.
Tap SAVE. You will then see a green badge that reads NEW next to your new entry.

Step 2

Tap EDIT to edit your list. You can drag to reorder items, delete items or tap them to edit.

How to Bolus Using the Custom Foods Feature

To use Custom Foods for a bolus, your patients should tap Custom Foods on the SmartBolus Calculator screen. During a bolus, they can sort foods using the up-down arrow button and after they can choose which food(s) they want to add to their calculation by tapping ADD. When you select multiple foods the SmartBolus Calculator will add the grams of carbs of all the foods selected, reducing the math done by your patient.

Additionally, please note that the Omnipod 5 Custom Foods feature your patients can:

Store up to 50 custom foods
Enter a custom food item that represents an entire meal
Arranged and rearrange the entered foods in order of preference

Ultimately, this feature offers patients an easy way to bolus for meals, in a manner similar to their current method. Discover more ways Omnipod 5 can help your patients.

*Brenda Ferris is an employee of Insulet

1. The numbers provided here are examples only and may not reflect carb content in your meals.
2. For a full list of compatible phones, visit omnipod.com/compatibility.