
Cooking Methods for Healthy Eating
Managing diabetes doesnt mean you need to sacrifice enjoying foods you crave. Diabetes Self-Management offers over 900 diabetes friendly recipes to choose from including desserts, low-carb pasta dishes, savory main meals, grilled options and more.
When it comes to health, its not just what you eat, but the cooking methods that are used. Foods can have drastically different effects depending on how much heat is used in the cooking process.
Sweet potatoes are a classic example. Boiled sweet potatoes have a glycemic index (GI) of about 46. GI is a measure of the extent to which foods raise blood sugar levels.
The higher the GI, the faster and higher your blood sugar goes up after a meal, and the harder it will crash. Its very difficult to match a high-GI food with your medications or to walk off the spike in blood sugar, so you want lower-GI foods. At 46, boiled sweet potatoes are considered low GI.
But baked sweet potatoes have a GI of 94. Baking has effectively turned them into candy. When foods are subjected to the high heat of baking or frying, the starches break down into sugars, instead of remaining in a more complex form that takes longer to digest.
White potatoes are the same way. Boiled, their GI runs about 50. Baked, theyre around 85. You see similar variations with squash and other starchy vegetables.
GI isnt the whole story, of course. Maybe more important is the glycemic load (GL), which takes the total amount of glucose you will get from a food into account. Starchy vegetables are high in carbohydrate, no matter how you cook them. But by breaking them dow
Continue
reading