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  #1   ^
Old Sun, Jul-24-05, 13:46
wholper wholper is offline
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Posts: 4
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 269/247/200
BF:
Progress: 32%
Location: Cali
Default Adding oat fiber to breads and glycemic index

I have a question I have not seen addressed elsewhere. I am wondering what, if any, effect adding oat fiber and wheat glutens to flour has on the flour’s overall glycemic index when digested.

Details:
I have discovered the joy of pure oat fiber as a carbohydrate lowering tool. When added to flour (especially whole wheat) for breads, pastas, ETC. its fine texture makes for a VERY soft and tasty bread/pasta while significantly lowering the carb level. It also has the added benefit of cholesterol control, as it is the fiber in oats that is beneficial.

I generally use the formula of 2 units real whole wheat flour to 1 unit of wheat gluten and 1 unit of soluble oat fiber (100 fiber, no digestible carb.) This makes for really GOOD bread, and great pastas. The total carb level is cut by almost half.

Although it lowers the overall carb level eaten (about 18g carbs for a hamburger bun, as opposed to 32 with straight whole wheat) I am not sure if it increases the digestion time for the actual flour component (thus lowering the gycemic index.)

Anyone seen, or have, any info on this?

Many thanks!
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  #2   ^
Old Sun, Jul-24-05, 19:11
mcsblues mcsblues is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 690
 
Plan: Protein Power
Stats: 250/190/185 Male 6' 1"
BF:30+/16/15
Progress: 92%
Location: Australia
Default

Hi wholper and welcome to the forum.

Let me preface this by saying I am not a big fan of the glycemic index system, and perhaps after looking into it a bit, as I have you will understand why.

First of all, adding fibre to anything will not reduce the carb count of a meal - but I assume that you mean that you are replacing a high carb product such as flour with fibre - in which case the resulting bread will be lower in carbs than it would have been with all flour.

Fibre? Generally speaking the amount of finely ground fibre in a product has a minimal effect on GI if it does have any at all. White bread and wholemeal bread have a similarly high GI. The only way it seems to substantially lower GI is to eat whole grain 'bread' - no, not wholemeal with a few grains scattered through it - but something with a high proportion of whole grains (70 -80%!) Now i have never tried this (in my low fat, high carb, weight gaining days, I used to eat wholemeal and whole grain breads because i thought they were healthy!) - but it sounds more like something I would feed to the birds.

One of the other big problems with GI is that even the tests that Brand Miller and others have done to set up their index - are not repeatable - in other words different test subjects give widely different results. Here is a quick example;

Bürgen ® Mixed Grain bread (Australia)
Bürgen ® Mixed Grain (Tip Top Bakeries, Chatswood, NSW, Australia) 34±4
Bürgen ® Mixed Grain 45±12
Bürgen ® Mixed Grain 69±6
mean of three studies 49±10

- yes that is 3 tests done on the same bread from the same bakery. The GI varied from 30 to 75 and Prof. Brand Miller would have you believe that her mean figure of 49 is somehow magically statistically significant!

Its not an isolated case (porridge/oatmeal has a GI of somewhere between 42 and 80!), and you can check out a list here, to see what I mean;

http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm

So different people get different results - as you would expect with differing levels of insulin resistance in the community (yes I did ask how she selected and standardised her test subjects - and strangely it was at about this time the esteemed Professor stopped replying to my emails!)

So, sorry for the long winded response, but the bottom line is that if you are a diabetic - you should conduct your own tests to see what works for YOU. There really is no other way around this - and this is the case if you adopt a more straightforward reduced carb WOL as well - and when its all said and done, GI means nothing without GL, and once you start looking at the glycemic load of what you eat, you are very close to the simple carb counting that Atkins or Bernstein recommend anyway.

HTH

Cheers,

Malcolm
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  #3   ^
Old Sun, Jul-24-05, 20:56
wholper wholper is offline
New Member
Posts: 4
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 269/247/200
BF:
Progress: 32%
Location: Cali
Default

Hey HTH,

Thanks for the info. I approve of long winded responses, working with scientists all day (none in nutrition unfortunately :-) I also tend to get long winded, as you will now suffer :-)

What you are saying makes sense, but let me elaborate a little and see if I can get some more info. First, I suspect GL is probably what I need to be looking at. Although I normally research pretty well, I must admit I am weak on this subject, and will need to look into it more.

Part of what prompted this is, I have been a low carber for some time, with decent success. It is already a lifestyle for me. The need for information arises from the fact that, although I not a diabetic, I have recently been diagnosed with a form of inflammatory illness which requires an extremely low sodium diet...which is almost impossible to maintain using pre-processed low carb foods. Thus, I am baking and cooking again.

The crux of the question is from the following; my understanding of Dr. Atkins program is...the “carb count” is a bit of a misnomer in the sense that it is not really the amount of carbs that instigates the negative chemical processes in the body leading to weight gain, degenerative disease, ETC...but the speed with which the carbs eaten increase your blood insulin.

Generically, if you stay below 20 grams a day, you are not eating enough carbs to trigger a potent insulin response...but to be argumentative...you could (in theory) eat 500 grams carb of green beans without triggering a substantial insulin response...however, eating 20g of carbs in the form of processed white sugar throughout the day would entirely defeat the purpose of the diet, as your insulin would be all over the place.

OK...with all that said...I understand that adding fiber to a MEAL will not result in a change of the carb count. The concept behind the fiber in the baked goods is (so I can be corrected if wrong); buns made with 4 cups white flour will produce appx. 5-6 good sized buns, with a carb count of about 35g carbs each. However, baking the same batch with (for simplicity) 2 cups white flour and 2 cups soluble oat fiber will produce the same 5-6 (very delicious) buns of the same size with only about 18g carbs each (as 100% of the oat fiber remains in the GI tract and is passed...also good for cholesterol.)

Thus, one hamburger, with one oat fiber bun, results in ½ the carb count of one with a reg white flour bun.

So, the question arises. Dr. Atkin’s method for counting carbs is total carbs minus fiber. OK, this makes sense...however, again, my understanding is the issue is really the speed of insulin increase. It makes sense that the fiber count of white flour would slow the digestion and absorption rate of the carbohydrate, as the fiber and carb are integrally part of the same construct. First they must be digestively separated, then the carbs broken into sugars, before the carb sugars get absorbed. Overall, slowing the speed with which the sugars hit the blood stream...thus slowing the insulin response.

However, as the oat fiber added to the flour before baking is, technically, not physically bound to the carbohydrates of the absorbable white flour carbohydrate...we arrive at the questions;

1. Does adding fiber to the mix reduce the overall carb count? I believe yes.
2. Does the added fiber slow the digestive process, and thus the speed of insulin rise? Unknown.

Anyway, any light you (or anyone) can shed on this would be very helpful. I appreciate all the info and really appreciate all of you who read this ridiculously long winded post :-D

W

Last edited by wholper : Sun, Jul-24-05 at 21:07.
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  #4   ^
Old Sun, Jul-24-05, 22:37
mcsblues mcsblues is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 690
 
Plan: Protein Power
Stats: 250/190/185 Male 6' 1"
BF:30+/16/15
Progress: 92%
Location: Australia
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by wholper
Part of what prompted this is, I have been a low carber for some time, with decent success. It is already a lifestyle for me. The need for information arises from the fact that, although I not a diabetic, I have recently been diagnosed with a form of inflammatory illness which requires an extremely low sodium diet...which is almost impossible to maintain using pre-processed low carb foods. Thus, I am baking and cooking again.
In my view a large part of the success of any reduced carb lifestyle is abandoning (for the most part) highly processed foods - which even if they are not high carb, contain all sorts of chemicals and damaged fats we can certainly live without - so even though i don't suffer from you illness we are in the same boat here.

Quote:
Originally Posted by wholper
The crux of the question is from the following; my understanding of Dr. Atkins program is...the “carb count” is a bit of a misnomer in the sense that it is not really the amount of carbs that instigates the negative chemical processes in the body leading to weight gain, degenerative disease, ETC...but the speed with which the carbs eaten increase your blood insulin.

Generically, if you stay below 20 grams a day, you are not eating enough carbs to trigger a potent insulin response...but to be argumentative...you could (in theory) eat 500 grams carb of green beans without triggering a substantial insulin response...however, eating 20g of carbs in the form of processed white sugar throughout the day would entirely defeat the purpose of the diet, as your insulin would be all over the place.
Personally as I implied before I think this was an unnecessary complication in a simple plan, but Atkins did in his last book start to refer to the glycemic index favourably - but only as a useful guide for selecting individual low carb foods - particularly those you might start adding at maintenance, but the overiding message is that it is the amount of carbs not what foods they come in that is important here. Most normal low carb foods are low GI anyway - and if they are not, because you are counting or keeping an eye on overall carbs - the GL will certainly be low. This is why from a carb source perspective it really doesn't matter where you get your 20 or 50 or whatever level you are on - there are no such thing as "good" or "bad" carbs in my view. There are of course more nutritious ways to get 20g of carbohydrate than eating 20g of sugar - you will be missing out on the vitamins, minerals and fibre if you do that rather than eat green beans - but the differences in glycemic response between normal low carb foods are going to be so small that I wouldn't worry about it too much. And of course you aren't really going to eat just sugar - mind you some foods score more than 100 on the index - explain that!! (By the way, one of the other big defects of the GI/GL system is that it does not measure insulin response - only blood glucose - but of course if they had looked at insulin response 'they' would have been forced to concede that this will vary widely between test subjects ... which would mean no useful index at all ....)
Quote:
Originally Posted by wholper
OK...with all that said...I understand that adding fiber to a MEAL will not result in a change of the carb count. The concept behind the fiber in the baked goods is (so I can be corrected if wrong); buns made with 4 cups white flour will produce appx. 5-6 good sized buns, with a carb count of about 35g carbs each. However, baking the same batch with (for simplicity) 2 cups white flour and 2 cups soluble oat fiber will produce the same 5-6 (very delicious) buns of the same size with only about 18g carbs
yes
Quote:
Originally Posted by wholper
It makes sense that the fiber count of white flour would slow the digestion and absorption rate of the carbohydrate, as the fiber and carb are integrally part of the same construct. First they must be digestively separated, then the carbs broken into sugars, before the carb sugars get absorbed. Overall, slowing the speed with which the sugars hit the blood stream...thus slowing the insulin response.
I don't think the data on that list that I referred you to support this - although I admit the results are so variable that it is difficult to know what they do support! You can certainly see some results from the same bakery where they have white bread and wholemeal bread about the same GI - others with fibre enriched bread which is the same or higher GI than the standard loaf! - and a few which go the other way. As you say, if the fibre and the digestible carbohydrate are already seperate - then there seems no reason for the fibre to slow digestion.

If there is a rule about fibre combining, it certainly doesn't appear clear.Oh and one more thing about the GI concept - one way you certainly can affect the the speed of absorption of nutrients is to eat them in combination with fat - this will slow the insulin response somewhat - but GI doesn't make any adjustment for food combinations ... are you getting the idea that I don't rate it too highly?

If you want my advice, do what I did - like you, I am not a diabetic, but I got hold of a blood glucose meter and did a few tests on myself - no this won't give you an insulin response figure, but if your fasting BG is in a good range, you can then start to do a few tests to see how you respond to certain higher carb foods you might be considering introducing into your diet - eg some of the resistant starch products which are coming on to the market, or low carb bread and muffin recipes that you prepare yourself.

Cheers,

Malcolm
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  #5   ^
Old Sun, Jul-24-05, 23:18
wholper wholper is offline
New Member
Posts: 4
 
Plan: Atkins
Stats: 269/247/200
BF:
Progress: 32%
Location: Cali
Default

Hey Malcolm,

Thanks again for the reply. I think I am getting the gist of things :-) Basically, as you said before, sticking with the AMOUNT of carbs...over concerns for digestive rate, GI, ETC., is probably the most effective way to go (as well as the simplest...when I was on the Zone Diet years ago, every meal was like a science lab project :-)

I also noticed, when I was first starting LC, what you have been saying about the inconsistencies in the insulin response measurements. I supplemented my Atkins research with that of the “Sugar Busters” diet (stupid name, good research) and came to many of the same conclusions. Their plan was, basically, not to mix fat and carbs...but that combination always left me starving after about an hour. Dr. Atkins always emphasized that fat and protein was necessary to satisfy the biochemical “hunger” receptors.

As a result I DO actually have a glucose meter, however packed it up as I entered my later phases of the LC diet. I guess, since I am having to revamp everything again, I need to break it out. Always leave it to life to keep things interesting :-)

Thanks, too, for the confirmation on my baking carbs theory. I would have been disappointed in myself to have made a fundamental mistake, and spent all this “experimental baking” time for nothing.

Anyway, I appreciate the info and the links. Best of continued luck!

W
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  #6   ^
Old Mon, Jul-25-05, 00:06
mcsblues mcsblues is offline
Senior Member
Posts: 690
 
Plan: Protein Power
Stats: 250/190/185 Male 6' 1"
BF:30+/16/15
Progress: 92%
Location: Australia
Default

Don't forget to get some new test strips - as these are not too accurate if they are out of date. I would like to do some more scientific tests on myself at some stage - but I hate buying new strips - you see in their infinite wisdom, 'our' goverment subsidises strips if you are a 'certified' diabetic (you need a letter from your doctor) - but for anyone else in the community who is concerned about preventing diabetes (even those in the "prediabetic' range) have to pay full price - which is more than 4 times the cost. Yes, I did write a letter to the minister responsible about how short sighted this was from both a health and a financial perspective - but strangely he hasn't replied.

Cheers,

Malcolm
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  #7   ^
Old Thu, Jul-28-05, 03:19
eevee's Avatar
eevee eevee is offline
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Posts: 1,663
 
Plan: Free-range
Stats: 161/154/140 Female 65
BF:
Progress: 33%
Location: King Country New Zealand
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a certified diabetic ... there is similar though more specific restriction here in NZ. One has to be an insulin user as far as I can ascertain. When I phoned Pharmac (responsible for the purchase of all subsidised meds) I was told the reasoning was ..."If you are using insulin, you are likely to adjust your therapy...if only on diet or meds, it is unlikely your therapy will change whatever the strip says"... ergo, no need for strips..!! Talk about blinkers..!!
IMO, anyone who goes to the trouble of asking for strips and can show (diary) they actually use them, should have them.

........Eve
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  #8   ^
Old Thu, Jul-28-05, 13:50
dina1957 dina1957 is offline
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Posts: 1,854
 
Plan: My own
Stats: 194/000/150 Female 5'5"
BF:Not sure
Progress: 441%
Location: Bay Area
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I should be thankful for getting my strips for a 1/5 of the price even I am not on meds or insulin, just diet and exercise. However, I agree that if one is consistant with diet and exercise (does not cheat with carbs), then may be Hb1C test could be enough. For me checking my Bgs 4-5 times a day does not make any difference except makes me frustrated when I see ocationally numbers higher than I've expected, mostly for my FBG.
Just my 2 cents.
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