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Instead, eat carbohydrates that contain lots of fibre. Fibre reduces the blood sugar spike, provides protection against bowel cancer and feeds the ‘good’ bacteria that live in your guts. Examples include vegetables, legumes – chickpeas and lentils – and wholegrains such as barley, oats, buckwheat, and wholegrain and rye.
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He recommends eating plenty of blueberries, strawberries and raspberries, which are relatively low in fruit sugar
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I'm glad there's finally someone saying that a LC diet is good - but the advice about fiber making a big difference really needs to die. No matter how much you try to make it sound like all those grains and legumes won't raise your blood sugar significantly, they're still 70-80% starch, which means that raising your blood sugar is exactly what they'll do.
At least he says that the presence of fiber only "
reduces the blood sugar spike". So instead of having white toast with a bowl of frosted flakes spiking your blood sugar up to 350, substituting whole wheat toast and a bowl of oatmeal might only spike it to 250. Not exactly a win, in my book.
If you don't really have any kind of blood sugar issues -
if you show zero signs of metabolic syndrome, then this advice is probably fine... for the time being. But if you're showing any signs of metabolic syndrome, or if following this advice eventually results in showing signs of metabolic syndrome, you're a lot better off skipping the grains, legumes, and minimizing even the low sugar berries.
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One way to reduce blood-sugar spikes after you eat carbs such as pasta, potatoes or rice is to cook, cool and then reheat them. This was first shown a few years ago when Dr Denise Robertson, of the University of Surrey, asked volunteers who had fasted overnight, to eat pasta with a tomato sauce for breakfast for an experiment.
The volunteers either got the pasta hot, cold and or reheated. She discovered that cooking, cooling and reheating the pasta had a dramatic effect, cutting the average rise in their blood sugar levels by 50 per cent. That’s because it changes the structure of the starch in the pasta, making it more resistant to digestive enzymes, so you get smaller blood-sugar spikes. Less of this ‘resistant’ starch is digested, leaving more to travel down and feed the ‘good’ bacteria in the large intestine.
Since that experiment, a group in Sri Lanka have done something similar with rice. They found that if they cooked rice with coconut oil, cooled it, then reheated it in a microwave, they could increase the levels of resistant starch 15-fold. Animal experiments suggest eating rice this way halves the number of calories you absorb. At the very least it is a good excuse to use up leftover pasta or rice in the fridge.
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We've discussed resistant starch before - Except in the cases of young, healthy people who show absolutely no signs of any kind of blood sugar problems or metabolic syndrome, this effect seems to be rather pointless, since it still creates a blood sugar spike, just not as high as the freshly cooked starch. It's in the same class as filtered cigarettes being "healthier" than unfiltered cigarettes.
The jury is still out on whether or not there's really any benefit to feeding the good bacteria in the lower intestine, and whether or not we even need all that good bacteria if we're not overloading our digestive system with carbs.
Cooking rice with coconut oil will also change how quickly the starch from the rice is absorbed, whether or not it's been made resistant by cooling and reheating.
Too many variables involved in all this, and most of it is really only applicable to the young and 100% healthy, not to those who are already having problems.