
Why the Glycemic Index Fails for Many People with Diabetes
As simple as it seems, most doctors and dietitians still don't tell people with diabetes that the carbohydrate content of the food they eat is what raises their blood sugar and that lowering their carbohydrate intake will lower their blood sugar.
Instead, they recommend the so called "good carbs" which are those which are low on the "Glycemic Index," chief of which are what they call "Healthy whole grains," like whole wheat bread, brown rice, pasta, and oatmeal.
If you look any of these foods up in your handy carb counter--you DO have a carb counter, I hope!--you will see they all contain a lot of carbohydrate. Two ounces of whole wheat bread--one thin slice--generally contain around 29 grams of carbohydrate and how many people only eat one slice?
A single ounce of dry oatmeal contains 18 grams, but what most people consider a full serving is at least twice that size. Two ounces of low glycemic pasta contain around 56 grams of carb, but again, two ounces is a very small amount--about 1/3 of what most people consider a normal portion of pasta.
If you measure your blood sugar for several hours after eating a normal serving of whole wheat bread or oatmeal you will see a spike, possibly a very high spike well over 200 mg/dl. You may have to measure your blood sugar 4 hours after eating pasta to see the spike it causes because of how slowly it digests, but eventually it does digest, and if you keep testing you will see it cause a spike, too.
So what's going on here?
The answer is that the glycemic index only works for people who have a normal second phase insulin response. If yo
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