Transcription
Bread, rice, potatoes. These are the foods that people with diabetes are often told to avoid. But these foods are major staples in most people's cuisines. So, good luck with that because it's not realistic to cut those things out long term.
But the truth is, you can eat them safely if you know how. I'm Dr. Leitkim, and I want to show you how to enjoy eating carbohydrates without sending your blood sugar on a roller coaster. So, I want to cover practical and science-based strategies that you can start today to flatten those glucose spikes after meals and in the process improve your insulin resistance.
And a quick note, even though I'm a physician, I'm not your physician. So, please talk to your doctor before you make any changes to your diet or your medical regimen.
So, let's start with one of the most powerful but probably least known tools that we have for this, and that is resistant starch. Now, most starches, which would be things like bread and pasta, things made out of flour, well, they break down into glucose, and this is what raises your blood sugar pretty quickly. And those repeated blood sugar spikes is what drives worsening insulin resistance, and it leads to pancreas dysfunction, which ultimately is what makes your diabetes worse.
But resistant starch digests and behaves very differently. Your enzymes are just not good at digesting resistant starch. So instead of being broken down quickly and spiking your blood glucose, resistant starch travels to the large intestine where your gut bacteria fermented and that fermentation is what produces things like your short chain fatty acids like butyrate which actually improve your insulin sensitivity and it helps reduce your inflammation and it even feeds the lining of your colon cells.
So how do you get resistant starch? Well, one good trick is you can take your typical starchy foods that would normally raise your blood sugar and you just cool them and then heat them back up before you eat it. And by doing that, that will increase the food's resistant starch content. So, you can take bread and pasta and rice. And when you cool it, part of the starch crystallizes into this resistant form. And it's a process called starch retrogradation where gelatinized starch molecules like amalos, they realign and form crystalline structures that basically resist digestion in your small intestine. So you can still eat your favorite foods, but just cool them and heat them up later and enjoy the metabolic benefits.
And there's multiple studies that show that just cooling cooked rice or potatoes down to 39° F for 24 hours significantly increase resistant starch content compared to freshly cooked starches. And clinically, eating cooled and then reheated rice or potatoes does lead to reduced postprandial glucose and reduce insulin spikes. So if you're eating at home, you do not have to give up bread or rice or potatoes. Just cool it or freeze it first and then reheat it. It may not taste the same, but it's going to be pretty close, and the benefits are very hard to ignore.
Plus, there's many other foods that are just naturally high resistant starch that you can just add to your regimen. So, those would be things like beans and lentils and peas, and you can add whole grains like oats and barley.
Okay. The next principle is food pairing. So, with carbs, we rarely eat them in isolation. And what you eat alongside your carbs can dramatically change the glucose response. And there are studies like this meta analysis of 154 trials that show that just adding protein to a carbohydrate meal can reduce the glucose area under the curve by up to 50% in healthy adults. And then we also have evidence that fat can also blunt early glucose spikes because fat helps with delaying gastric emptying and it can help with insulin clearance and all of this eventually improves your beta cell function of the pancreas.
So that's why ideally we do not want to eat starchy or processed carbohydrates in isolation. Some people call this avoiding naked carbs. And that's why rice and beans is usually better than just rice alone. Um or potatoes with butter or potatoes with olive oil. Usually produces a gentler glucose spike compared to just eating potatoes alone.
And another thing we can do is we can add acid to our meals. So it would be things like vinegar or lemon or lime. Um many fermented foods can help with that. So what they do is they lower the rate at which starch is broken down. And vinegar can also help with insulin sensitivity in your muscles and it can actually blunt glucose spikes all on its own by working on your liver gluconneogenesis. And I actually made a separate video on all the benefits of apple cider vinegar and how to use it. And I'm going to post a link to the video in the description below.
And by the way, another way you can supercharge your food pairing is by eating your carbohydrates last. Because food order actually matters here. If you start your meal with bread or juice, well, you just get a sharp glucose peak. But if you eat your protein and your vegetables first and then finish with carbs, well, the stomach releases a slower mix of glucose into the intestines. So, we end up absorbing that glucose much slower. And the beauty is it's exact same food, but if you eat it in a different order, that will give you a completely different glucose curve.
So, this is especially important in restaurants where they like to give you bread or nachos before bring out your salad or your main entree. So, eat your salad and your protein first and then go for the bread or the nachos. It's a very small behavioral change, but it pays off huge metabolic dividends. And there's multiple clinical studies that show exactly that, like this randomized control crossover trial that showed that people with type 2 diabetes that ate their protein and their vegetables before their carbohydrates had a 40% lower glucose area under the curve and 31% lower insulin area under the curve. And then there was a recent study in Japan. They use continuous glucose monitors in healthy Japanese adults. And that study showed that eating rice last significantly reduce postpranial glycemic excursions.
Now another thing that can make a big difference is walking right after a meal. And we have studies like this randomized control trial that show that just a 10-minute walk immediately after a meal can lower your postprandial glucose. And it doesn't have to be walking. Any kind of light activity like cleaning up in the kitchen or climbing stairs can make a difference. But walking has just been the most studied and it's probably the easiest for most people to do. And you just got to remember that the best time to walk or exercise would be as soon as possible after a meal.
And the reason walking after eating is so powerful is because walking activates your solio muscles. Solius is that muscle in your calf that runs just below the knee to the heel. And the solio muscle is a metabolic powerhouse because it can soak up a lot of glucose very quickly. And another thing that makes this muscle so special is the fact that it's composed of slow twitch fibers, which is what allows it to sustain contractions for long periods of time without fatiguing. So, you're burning lots of glucose for a long period of time before your muscle gets tired.
Okay. Next, a lot of people will tell you just cut out all carbs and this is going to help you to reverse your diabetes and fix your insulin resistance. But it's really not the carbs per se. It's the type of carbs that cause the issues with insulin resistance and diabetes because not all carbs are created equal. The way these carbs are processed is what determines how fast they're absorbed and how fast they hit your bloodstream. So flour milt into a fine powder like white bread or instant oats digest extremely quickly. But whole grains or coarser grains digest much slower and they just don't cause the same issues as processed carbohydrates.
So, think of it like kindling versus logs in a fire. Fine flour, which is what you see in white bread or cereal or pastries or chips. Well, that's like throwing sawdust into the fire. It burns fast and it burns hot. And then on the flip side, you have your steel cut oats or intact grains or high fiber carbohydrates. Now, they burn more like logs, so they burn slower and more evenly. And for your body, that just means smaller and steadier glucose curves instead of these sharp spikes and crashes.
So, just like with resistant starches, choose carbohydrates that are made from whole foods, foods that are minimally processed and high in fiber. Fiber is probably the most important carbohydrate that you do not want to miss if you choose to do a low carb diet. Because for most people, the benefits of extra fiber are huge and just too hard to ignore.
And one last tip, do not eat late at night. The later you eat, the worse your glucose response. And we have numerous studies that show that eating close to bedtime worsens your ability to process glucose even if you do not eat a carb heavy meal. And that's because physiologically our insulin sensitivity, um, our ability for the pancreas to secrete insulin, all of that follows a circadian rhythm to where we just can't process glucose as well in the evening as we do earlier in the day. And what makes us worse is late night is when we get elevated levels of endogenous melatonin which actually further reduces insulin secretion. So less insulin means more glucose in our bloodstream. So the earlier you eat your dinner the better. And I would recommend eating your last meal for the day, ideally at least 3 hours before bedtime.
All right, I hope this is helpful. Stay healthy and I'll see you in the next.