In praise of the glycemic index

Food & Diet
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… or at least the concept behind the gylcemic index … I know some of the actual measures for specific foods can be quite variable.

As is often the case with me, my story concerns oatmeal. I just bought oat groats (whole oats) from Amazon because I can’t find it at any stores around here. I try to eat them because they have a lower glycemic index than steel cut oats or rolled oats (I think rolled oats are probably the worst in terms of glycemic index).

Anyway, I can eat a bowl of oat groats, along w brown sugar, bananas and nuts, and whole milk, and, with a bolus, have a much milder increase in blood sugar than I would get using steel cut oats.

That’s the idea behind the glycemic index - that certain foods get converted to glucose faster or slower. You can look up glycemic index numbers easily on the internet, and while they may not be 100% reliable they give you a general idea.

I hope I got the explanation more or less right.

I don’t always follow the glycemic index, but find it to be a useful explainer for blood sugar levels.

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It’s never worked for me.

Anything with carbs shoots my BG to the roof. I’ve been described as “brittle” so maybe I’m not like the rest of y’all. I avoid both root vegetables (turnips etc) and those procaryote monocot seeds (wheat, barley [except in beer where the fermentation seems to help], rice.

With the Bernstein bans; fruits, I do just fine so long as they are just fruit. So I can eat broccoli (a fruit), orange (a fruit) but I have a problem with apples and pears [except when fermented of course].

What I think is happening is that the fruits just zap me with fructose and glucose but the supposedly low glycaemic index products zap me with sucrose or more complex carbs. The former (fructose, glucose) have a rate limited adsorption by my body, the later just pile all in and send my BG through the roof.

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The glycemic index doesn’t work well for me. I do best just bolusing for grams of carbs. Nutritional labels that list fiber as dietary, I divide by 2 and subtract that from total carbs. Dietary fiber is a combination of digestible and indigestible fiber.

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Thanks @jbowler for picking this back up. Sorry it doesn’t work for you - but I expect at this point you have a very good idea of what works for you and what doesn’t w/r/t diet.

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EU and UK labels do not include “dietary fiber” [sic: fibre] in any form. The idea that somehow in someone the fibre might eventually be digested and adsorped is an American myth. It does help with our gut function and it clearly helps with our marketing…

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Curious. Then how do I interpret the sample EU label posted by Boerenkool?

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@jbowler I had to look up your “broccoli (a fruit)” claim, as I’ve always considered it a vegetable (not that makes that much difference in the grand scheme). Very interesting…it does not neatly fall into either category! Most of us eat it “before” it flowers and apparently that flowering makes all the difference as true “fruits” are the result after the flowering of plants. I think it’s in the “eye of the beholder” or, in this case, the “eater”! So…when do you eat your broccoli?! (Great! Another piece of trivia stuck in my brain…the gauge is getting close to “full”!)

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@CarlosLuis I’m not sure if the glycemic index would help or not, I’ve put it off as it seems too much work to look everything up. I’ve always wished the US labeling would require the addition of a glycemic index on products, like Austrailia and a few others do; would make interpretation and finding out infinitely easier and wouldn’t seem to be a significant cost to manufacturers. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s going to happen anytime soon.

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I’ve been a long time user of testing now with CGM, eating one food, testing again and decide if I can eat or drink that.

This may be aT2DM thing. What I know is that there’s no cut and dried list of go-no go foods. Those are a rough guideline.

A couple of personal examples, I can eat a moderate amount of corn chips, but a tablespoon of rice will send me straight up. Reheated rice is not so bad, something about increasing resistant to digest starch.

Too much trouble and since rice likes to take up heavy metals like arsenic and cadmium, maybe it’s best left in the store.

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They often do include fiber on our labels, but I just learned including fiber isn’t mandatory. It’s always listed separately from carbohydrates and we never differentiate between soluble and insoluble fiber. Other than that the definitions of dietary fiber in the EU and the US don’t differ that much if I understand this policy explanation correctly.

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Fiber is part of total carbohydrates listed. Soluble fiber is digestible, while insoluble is not.

To get net carbs subtract insoluble fiber from total carbs, but dietary carbs are a mix of both. When a product says it has x number of net carbs but only list dietary carbs, they are being disingenuous.

I found this chart listing some foods and their soluble and insoluble fiber grams, thank you Ottawa.

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Sorry, I should have stated more clearly that my reply only applies to EU food labels. Over here fiber is not considered part of carbohydrates and consensus in Europe is that the distinction between soluble and insoluble fiber isn’t meaningful. Both are considered indigestible. Therefore our nutrition labels never distinguish between those.

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The label lists the dietary fibre in the product. It does not include it in the carbohydrate or, indeed, any other item on that label. Note the two “of which” entries which break down a prior figure. The label is designed to be understood. This is a neat idea but it doesn’t help the marketing department one iota.

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I use the term, “fruiting body” when talking to a single person who I suspect might enjoy the subtle distinction, or, better, enter into an entertaining argument about it. Yes: You (@TomH) are right:

So as normally harvested the poor buds are unfertilised; not pretty plant babies (aka fruit). At this point I am not going to say whether I eat fruit. I’m sure the ones I eat, which I buy in plastic packages after checking I can microwave said package, are unfertilised. Yet when we grow our own vegetables cabbage flowers are edible and good to eat even though the leaves have turned somewhat bitter.

Eat Your Brassicas, Flowers And All | Pioneering The Simple Life.

We do grow vegetables. They are, at the end of the year, quite bitter. My wife regards the accurately named “bitter melon” as a treat, well, in the US.

The way I look at it it is a battle. The Brassicas do not want their young innocent babies to be eaten but that’s a losing battle, so they make themselves very nice to eat; I have yet to see a mammal that will not scarf down a brassica we’re growing that is within reach. Very nicely, but perhaps without any intelligence, they deposit excellent fertiliser immediately after or, even, during the ingestion!

Excellent: This should be a message to us all, cooperation; intelligence does not preempt cooperation. Neither should understanding.

So, yeah. I’m probably totally evil because I eat the unfertilised young.

For us what matters is the carbs; those fruiting bodies have a lot of them in a more accessible form. Until this web site gets cancelled you may look here:

Sometimes I have made assumptions, like more than 50% of those times, that the USDA website has shown to be wrong. Most times my foolish assumptions threatened my long term health.

Like I said, it will be cancelled.

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That’s been the FUD motto for the past 8 years…

:joy:

Michel, We're Live
Michel, We're Live1920×1484 156 KB

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