By Benjamin Bikman, PhD, and Diana Keuilian
Our simple (and memorable, we hope) rule is that if the carbs come in a bag or a box with a barcode, avoid or eat sparingly. This is, of course, a bit simplistic, but it can act as a guide.
A baked potato, for example, will be much better than chips—this has to do in part with the degree to which the carbohydrate is processed. Think of carbs as having a “degree of refinement” —how many times the item has been altered.
As another example, apple juice goes through several degrees of refinement, including crushing, pasteurizing, and filtering, so it will have a far greater glucose-insulin impact compared to an apple.
Similarly, coarse wheat will have a more modest glucose-insulin effect compared with bread because the latter has gone through several degrees of refinement (milled, bleached, fortified, baked, and so forth).
A Study On Refined Carbs
An interesting study scrutinized the effects of these kinds of refinements to food in an experiment with lab animals where all variables can be controlled. These animals were fed two diets that differed only in the degree of refinement—whole pellets versus powdered meal. Again, the diets were exactly the same in every nutrient.
In addition to being more inclined to overeat, the animals that were fed the powdered version of the diets gained over twice the amount of fat and had significantly higher insulin and glucose levels.
In general, minimal processing is ideal, but of course some processing is necessary. Let’s take a baked potato for example. When we bake a potato (a degree of refinement), we make the starch in the potato much more digestible. Of course, this starch converts into a rather large glucose load entering the blood, which elicits a robust insulin release to manage it.
However, by cooling the potato after baking it, the starches in the potato convert into soluble fibers, thereby lowering the glucose load. In fact, the insulin demand from eating a baked potato is almost forty percent lower if the baked potato has been cooled to room temperature before eating. Thankfully, this even persists after it’s been reheated.
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Well Being Journal adapted the above excerpt from How Not To Get Sick by Benjamin Bikman, MD, and Diana Keuilian. Copyright © 2024 and reprinted with permission from BenBella Books.
