Of course (in theory) they know exactly how long the damn things are good for, but we should also consider their liability, because I guarantee that they do. So, given all of that, let’s consider how a strip company might go about choosing an expiration date. So there’s a whole host of factors beyond it’s inherent life based on its design and materials that affect the lifespan of a strip that are hard to account for. Yet a third company will choose the cheapest alternative. One company might choose a less stable enzyme that gives better accuracy at the cost of shorter life while another might choose less accuracy for better long-term storage. Different makers of test strips use different enzymes and chemicals to create their propriety systems. But every brand of strip is fundamentally different. While milk is either good or bad, test strips might be fine in the “normal range” after expiring, but begin to show errors at high or low ends of the blood sugar spectrum.Īlso, milk is fundamentally milk, regardless of whose carton it’s in. Guess what? All the delivery, storage, and utilization issues that impact milk also impact blood glucose test strips, and the older they are, the more these variables stack up.īut wait. And we’re not even going to talk about the impact of people who drink directly from the carton. If you live with people who leave the carton on the table the whole time they eat their Post Toasties, I would think your milk would live a shorter life than if you live with people who return the carton to the fridge immediately after pouring it on their cereal.
#ASCENSIA CONTOUR TEST STRIPS DRIVER#
Oh, and how long did the milk sit on the loading dock at the store while the stocking clerk was texting his new girlfriend? Going farther up-stream, did the delivery truck maintain its temperature correctly between the dairy and the store? How long did the driver spend enjoying his fave bacon-cheeseburger en route? And did your milk even come to your store from the dairy, or did it hang out at a distribution center first?Īnd, of course, milk spoilage correlates to the habits of the humans who co-inhabit your domicile with you, too.
How far you need to transport the milk between buying it and getting it home to your fridge no doubt has a role to play in how long it lasts, as does the temperature in your part of the country and what time of year it is. Some brands of milk probably last longer than others. One counts down spoilage in a pristine unopened container and the other counts down spoilage in use.īut of course there are actually more clocks running than that. So there are two clocks ticking with milk. Presumably, if you opened the container eleven days before expiration date, you’d still only get the seven days. It has an expiration date, but there’s also a note saying that the product should be consumed within seven days of opening. Just now I went into my kitchen and checked out our Wal-Mart Organic 2% milk. Next it gets chunky, then it grows brown, green, or pink mold ( really) and eventually it turns into Limburger cheese (not really).
First, it gradually turns sour, then it develops a foul odor. Beyond that point, a process of decay sets in. Looking outside diabetes for a moment, I’ve been known to try to yank a carton of milk out of the back of the rack in the grocery store refrigerator in hope of getting a fresher one, because, as we all know, milk has a limited shelf life.
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