I had a blooming onion at outback steak house a few years ago… I think my results were a lot worse than that. I ended up snorting something like 30u of afrezza to beat that spike down! WTH I thought an onion was a vegetable or something like one!
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The part you are eating is a bulb. If you want to google it try “allium”; “onion” gets you nowhere, fast.
The bit we eat is the bulb; the bit this plant uses to store energy over winter, so it’s got a whole load of sugar in it.
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Yeah onions are full of sugars—that’s why they can be caramelized. Not quite as densely so as beets I think (I mean, if you want proof that vegetables can be high sugar, there you go), but still not a low carb food. Normally you’re probably not eating enough of an onion at once though for it have a huge impact.
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I have to think all the breading/ seasoning etc that they saturated it in must have played a large role in the process as I frequently eat things with large amounts of onion in them and have never seen a reaction of anywhere near that level
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Excellent point; it’s actually something chefs (cooks, in the parlance of my day) understand and it really does get to the point (“if you can caramelize it I’m not going to eat it”);
I didn’t know that could be done. Where is the emoji for down-to-the-feet-bow? I love beets. I hate beets.
If only
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Roasted golden beets…yum…
Sure that’s a huge part of it—those things have almost 2000 calories, so clearly not just the onion by any means. Just making the point though that not all veggies are low carb, including onions. They are sneaky like that.
Mmmm beets. I don’t understand why so many people dislike what is basically candy-vegetable. My partner sometimes makes shredded raw beet to put in our veggie/grain/meat bowls for lunch, and it’s worth the carbs. My favorite beets though are sliced and grilled to the point of being a bit charred, since then that caramelization happens, and it’s amazing.
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I just looked up the carb content, and different kinds of onions ran around 8-10%, beets were 9.5%. I weighed a pretty big red onion and it was 350g, so close to 35g carb total.
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Wow, I wouldn’t have guessed that many carbs
Yeah I agree that’s what the books say but for me it wouldn’t behave anywhere near what 35g or carbs from grains or simple carbs would…
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I would suspect it’s going to depend on how it’s prepared. I suspect raw onions would behavior similar to other higher fiber carbs (like a raw apple, but again, few people eat a whole raw onion like they would an apple), caramelized ones would hit harder (a lot of the fiber has been broken down to release the sugars), and otherwise cooked ones somewhere between.
I think that number is probably high for the non-sugar varietal, the sugar varietal, developed to replace cane sugar, is much higher according to wikipedia; around 20% (I assume for the tuber). The corresponding page for the vulgar original suggests about 6.8%.
It is true the onion (the bulb) comes out at 7.4%, again according to wikipedia but much to my surprise there are only 4.24% sugars in there. I am far from 100% convinced that the two tables (beet vs onion) were prepared to a consistent standard but maybe it is reasonable that a bulb contains a lot of starch and a tuber contains none.
These are all numbers for the vegetables in question; they haven’t been cooked. Like all of us they are about 90% water so multiply up by the degree of boiling in oil used. Personally I prefer my onions, like myself, raw; spicier that way.
No rice, no grains, no potatoes. That’s just my diet. The wikipedia page for the “humble” potato does not have the nutrition table that onions or beets have. There is a nutrition section in there but it reads like marketing blurb. It claims 17% carbs (with an unstated amount of dietary fibre), Google, on the other hand, states 15%.
Probably believable all the same; potatoes are tasteless, boring, glucose tablets, beets and onions are tasty far from boring (particularly raw onions) things to eat.
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I was discussing this with the better half at dinner tonight. That’s when she looked up the numbers for the outback blooming onion…
Holy cow. I normally eat that amount of carbs for breakfast (milk, oatmeal, banana, etc), but maybe 20-30 grams of fat. That translates into 10 to 12 units of bolus for me.
For that entrée, I bet it’d take me 30 units and 6 hours to digest… I’ve learned the hard way, fat exaggerates insulin needs.
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I don’t recommend it. It’s not a good decision.
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Holy carbohydrate; so far as I can determine the Outback “*****ing onion” (avoiding the swear word, since I’ve been bounced before on this count) is actually a carb surprise; breaded carbs. So it is, indeed, the same as onion rings, but one serving is apparently one onion, with one whole wheat field wrapped round it.
It is, of course, only an appetizer so it’s shared; I look at it with a vaguely disgusted up turn to my left lip and I take a piece, I pick off the wheat field and I put some pepper on the vaguely translucent, opalescent, remains then eat half of it. Pah! T2D food.
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Wow! 35 g carb for an onion!
Onion soup also raises my BG - the onion, the bread, and the fat from the cheese which delays the BG rise. So yummy…!!
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In my thought process… I’d entirely blame the bread plus attribute any late spiking action to the cheese… but that’s just how my brain works
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Yup, the bread definitely would raise the BG.
My son wanted to try out a recipe for French onion soup and I adjusted the bread in my soup to a smaller piece. At least it wasn’t as salty as the ones typically in the restaurants.
40 g carbs was under estimating the carb content of the Wendy’s sandwich.
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35g! Oh my gosh!
Does anyone eat one whole onion? The added breading and deep frying for onion rings spells trouble.
I think I’ve eaten perhaps 2-3 onion rings in the past 5 years. They’re very filling because of all the grease.
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