Nel – my experience is the same! Potatoes WITH skin and sauteéd in a little oil do much better for my blood sugar than mashed potatoes! I always thought of mashed potatoes as healthier than fried potatoes, but during my tight control in the last few months, I saw that mashed potatoes need to be treated as a special treat that I can only have occasionally!
Cold potatoes (all cold starches I think… Gretchen?) have a significantly lower GI than hot potatoes. I found one study that said hot potatoes have a GI of 121 vs 77 for cold potatoes.
Actually, the argument is that the starch in potatoes become resistant when they get cold. This happens with a number of foods such as legumes and bread. But if you read Michael Eades take on the matter, it is not technically GI. The starches simply are digested “later,” they move down the gut and are fermented by bacteria rather than being digested directly. GI measures a peak glycemic effect, not the area under the curve. Many people have found that dreamfields pasta, cold potatoes, they may not spike you but in the end, even the resistant starches need to be treated as carbs and covered.
Yes Natalie
Doctors at a hospital in quebec found that people that have as little as 50 grams of brown fat in their bodies can eat any amount of food and stay slim.
Another “strange” observation is that when I switched from a low saturated fat diet ( < 20 grams /day) to a high saturated fat diet that included eating deliberately 2 TBS of coconut oil ( Dean Ornish forgive me) and tonnes of cheese and bacon my lipids actually improved. The HDL went up from 1.0 mmol/L to 1.3, the triglycerides went down from 1.0 mmol/L to 0.75 and the LDL was unchanged at 2.5 mmol/L. At least 8 other diabetics on the DD website have reported improvements. Now this is a serious heresy. Has Ancel Keyes lied to us ?
To paraphrase Joe McCarthy : " The only good spud is a dead spud".
Anthony …hilarious, as we grow red skinned spuds in our little plot …yes, they are dead 
When I get bad leg cramps it means my potassium is low. I take the big hrsey pills prescribed by my endo and I feel better almost immediately , within 2-3 days at the most.
God Bless,
Brunetta
I’ve no doubt that some people may say they don’t test for long enough but the protocol for testing GI involves measuring the area under the curve, over a 2 hour period.
Kirsten I find using the principles of the GI very useful indeed. I choose my starches from those that should be lower GI . WIth the potato example, I choose small waxy potatoes (boiled), eating them as potato salad is also a good idea’ For rice I choose basmati (actually a mix of white, brown basmati and wild) and make sure its not overcooked, soft fluffy and particularly sticky rices can have GIs higher than glucose. For bread I choose denser varieties containing a mix of whole seeds or nuts and made in the traditional way (not the fast risen industrial stuff) I still weigh everything.
The GI index site is useful for info http://www.glycemicindex.com/
and for a simple explanation of what factors modify GI… including about why retrograding (cooling)starches lower the GI. http://www.montignac.com/en/ig_fact_modif.php
(NB the second site is the Montignac diet website, Montignac has some unconventional ideas about when to eat different food groups which I certainly don’t follow but I think his explanation of the GI is OK.
I believe they test for 3 hours in people with diabetes. Also, the fact that some researchers chose to define GI as area under the curve for 2-3 hours doesn’t mean that higher BGs at 4-6 hours doesn’t matter. The GI is just a suggestion of how you’ll react to foods. The important thing is how you react to any food.
Thank you, you are basically correct. I chose my words poorly. They do measure the AUC, but not the AUC of the glucose uptake into the blood, rather they measure the AUC of the resulting blood sugar. The problem with the way that GI is defined is that what we care about is not being measured. GI is obtained by having non-diabetics eat a sample of the food. Their “blood sugar” is measured over time. The blood sugar in these subjects is a result of the food ingested and the body’s reaction (i.e. insulin response). If the body is able to perfectly respond, then our blood sugars would always be 83 mg/dl and everything would have a GI of 0. But we are not perfect, and our bodies have a response to fast glucose changes that lags. So we basically measure the AUC of the blood sugar which is some function of the amount of glucose taken up in our blood and the ability of our body to respond to the transient glucose surge. What is Not measured is the overall amount of glucose released, which is the true AUC. And the so called “Glucose Load” is not even faintly related to the true glucose load. This is the key problem with GI and GL.
It is just plain and simple, non-diabetic bodies (and diabetics with remaining insulin production) all respond more accurately to slower moving glucose loads. The GI and GL confuses slower digesting foods with foods that actually have a lower amount of glucose taken up in the blood. While this may not be an important difference for non-diabetics and diabetics who still retain most of their insulin production, for any of us with serious insulin deficiency it makes GI and GL useless. Why? Because in the end, all the “resistant starch” is still digested and converted into glucose to be taken up in our blood.
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They’ve also measured BG in some people with diabetes.
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I’m not sure what you mean by “glucose taken up in the blood.” Are you referring to glucose uptake by the gut? A site called Mangesius (I don’t have URL at hand) would graph how quickly various foods would reach bloodstream, but he’s not maintaining site, and I don’t think it works now.
The problem in diabetes is not just food but the fact that insulin doesn’t turn off gluconeogenesis in the liver. There’s no way GI/GL will control that. And obviously the amount of insulin you can produce is also a major factor. The idea of GI/GL is that you’ll need to produce less insulin all at once with low-GI/GL foods, and early type 2s can still produce insulin, just not a lot at once (first-phase response) just as pumpers use square wave boluses or whatever with slow carbs.
Derek Paice has some graphs of effects of eating an apple and an apple plus cheese in people with type 2 and type 1. www.dapaice.com. Look under Potpourri 1 and scroll down to end. Not perfect, as a “25-gram apple” could be very different depending on apple type, ripeness, etc. But still interesting.
My question is this. If my food intake is identical but I take enough insulin to bring my numbers to 80 instead of 120 will that cause weight gain? Is it the insulin? Is it the calories? What causes the gain?
That’s a very interesting question Ressy!
That is a great question
I’d like to know the answer too. I’ve been pumping since March 30, and have amazing numbers since. My target bg is 100. I’ve lost 11 lbs… huh? My target on MDI and the first couple of pump weeks was 120. Diet is the same, about 40 carbs a day.
My point is that GI/GL confuses the measure of the amplitude of glucose impact and the slowness of digestion. A type 2 with remaining insulin production may find that GI/G gives a reasonable indication of the effect of a food on their blood sugar. On the other hand a T1 may find that GI/GL is useless, a carb is a carb and you still have count it even if it comes from a slowly digested resistant starch.
ps. I looked at the work by Derek Paice, it is interesting, but it seemed to contrast eating an apple and an apple with cheese in T1s.
My own opinion is that the glycemic index was an intellectual breakthrough. When I went to school, it was dogma that sugars were absorbed rapidly and complex carbohydrates (which at that time, meant polysaccharides, that is, starch) were absorbed slowly. Jenkins and coworkers asked whether it was really true and, of course, it wasn’t but then instead of seeing this as useful for a variation on low-carb (comes from the same general idea), they tried to make into a politically correct alternative to low-carb which is sad. Your best bet for control of BG is not taking in very many carbs. If, for some reason, you really want carbs then GI/GL may help but it’s strictly secondary.
For some perspective, if you had a slice of bread and you wanted to lower the GI, you could put a tbsp of butter on it. If you wanted to lower it further, you could put 2 tbsp of butter, etc.
… and the nutritional committee of the ADA will carry a strong indictment.
I think you have to try it and see because we all have different diets and different insulin needs.
I lost weight while taking Levemir, but I was on a LC diet and, like you, I just wanted to get fastings from slightly over 100 to between 70 and 100.
Insulin is a hormone that tells the body to store fat, as type 1 teenagers well know. They sometimes don’t take enough insulin so they’ll lose weight and sometimes end up in DKA as a result.
If you’ve been spilling sugar in your urine and start taking insulin so you’re not doing that anymore, you’ll be retaining more calories and will probably gain weight. So in that case, it’s the calories. You were eating too many calories but losing a lot of them in the urine. With your numbers, however, you’re probably not spilling sugar. Most people don’t spill until numbers are over 180.
The more insulin you take, the greater the probability of weight gain, which is one advantage of a LC diet: less carbohyrate, less insulin, less chance of weight gain.