Carbohydrates are a bit like life itself: sweet but complicated, and occasionally disastrous. I first encountered a strategy for dealing with carbohydrates in Peg Bracken’s I Didn’t Come Here To Argue. To avoid gaining weight on cruises, she and her companions chose to “skip the starch and scorn the sweets.” When I was heading off to college and fearing the “freshman fifteen,” I remembered and applied that — and lost fifteen pounds as a freshman.
It was during my second pregnancy that I found out I carry the predisposition to type II diabetes, a dubious gift from my mother who developed diabetes herself. That information motivated me all the more to learn to manage carbohydrates and blood glucose. This life hack diary will have rather more background than my others — if you want to, feel free to skip directly to the hacks.
Some foods raise your serum glucose (blood sugar) more than others. This tendency can be measured by feeding people a meal of just that food that contains 50 grams of glucose and following blood sugar for a while afterwards. This tendency is called the glycemic index.
Obviously, food that doesn’t contain sugar won’t raise blood glucose. But just knowing the carbohydrate content doesn’t entirely predict the glycemic index. The structure of the sugar (pure glucose, starch, variety of starch) makes a difference, as does the method of preparing a food. On top of that, the glycemic index uses a serving that contains 50 grams of sugar — what if a typical serving contains more or less than that? The glycemic load takes that into account, and turns spaghetti into a higher glycemic food, and watermelon into a lower one.
Does eating lower on the glycemic scale matter? Anecdotally, though I am not slim, I weigh a hundred pounds less than my mother did at my age. Looking over the data, we find:
Prospective cohort studies found high-GI or -GL diets to be associated with a higher risk of adverse health outcomes, including type 2 diabetes mellitus and cardiovascular disease. (More information)
There is more, much more, that can be said about carbohydrates, glycemic index and load, and the role of them in our lives. Here are the International Tables of glycemic and load, and here are 55 pages of GI and GL. Here's a more compact table for a hundred foods from Harvard. And here’s someone with a cautionary note on glycemic index.
On to the life hacks!
- Crunchy is usually lower glycemic: raw carrots are lower than boiled ones, al dente is lower than softer. French fries are lower glycemic than instant mashed potatoes! Don’t go overboard.
- Dark is usually lower glycemic: toast is lower than bread, whole grains lower than white ones.
- High protein foods are all low glycemic: meat, eggs, cheese, unflavored milk.
- Plant “milks” often have added sugar; read the labels.
- When you read a label for carbohydrates, subtract the fiber — its whole point is that it is not digested.
- Fermented foods are lower glycemic than you might guess from the label — the fermented products also measure as sugar on the assay usually used on food.
- Green foods are low glycemic — spinach, lettuce, kale, even avocados
- Watermelon has a low glycemic load, even though it has a fairly high glycemic index — because no one eats enough watermelon at a sitting to eat 50 grams of sugar.
- Dark chocolate with almonds has enough iron per calorie to be a reasonable food when you’re recovering from anemia. M&M chocolate covered peanuts score fairly well, too.
- Handful of nuts? Low glycemic!
- The sugar alcohols — xylitol, sorbitol, etc. — are now available generally. In moderation they make nice sweeteners, but too much will lead to GI upset.
- Maltitol on the other hand is a fraud. Our bodies are surprisingly good at converting it to glucose.
- Celery, raw carrots, cucumbers — also low glycemic.
- A low glycemic, satiating breakfast can ward off midmorning munchies. My go-to breakfasts: cheese on oat crackers, eggs over easy, or uncooked oatmeal with boiling water, pecans, and sugar-free maple syrup.
Do you have life hacks? Feel free to share~
The diaries in this series: