A day in the life of a Middle Manager...

Low Carbing and GI

As a diabetic I need to control my blood glucose accurately so I don't fall ill. Luckily I have the attitude needed to allow myself to finger-test multiple times per day and inject insulin to tweak a reading if necessary.

The normal recommended diet from dieticians over here seems to be 'eat lots of carbs, ensure you have starchy carbs at every meal.' This has always seemed nonsensical to me as carbohydrates cause blood glucose to rise and that rise must be tempered, as a type 1 diabetic, by either

1. injecting insulin (or an analog)
2. exercise (this causes the glucose in the blood to move into muscles naturally)

However, there is another approach, and one that appears to be gaining acceptance even though Atkins looks way too extreme for my tastes. This approach is to reduce the amount of carbs eaten and also reduce their Glycaemic Index so the rise in blood glucose is less and takes longer. This is the approach I'm trying to take, along with more exercise.

So, regulate the portions and reduce the carb or GI of the carb. For instance, mashed potato has quite a high GI so if you're having that you can lower the GI of the meal as a whole by adding protein (meat) and some fat (so you could mix cheese into the mash for example). Also, waxy potatoes such as new potatoes or charlotte are lower GI. Root vegetables such as carrot and swede etc. are also quite carby even if you think they're not.

It is quite hard to do though, especially given today's 100 mile-an-hour lifestyles and the fact that hardly anyone has time to make a meal from scratch every evening.

Still, we (well OK, Carla) make the effort to make our own meals in the evening so we can control the amount of carb and make a reasonable guess of the overall GI of the meal. This works pretty well most evenings.

As a diabetic, it is actually pretty annoying to go out to restaurants and find that pretty much everything on the menu contains enough carbohydrate to choke a horse, whether as easy-to-spot carb such as chips/mashed potato or hidden carb such as the old favourite added sugar (in sauces for example).

This previous weekend Carla and myself stayed in London for a couple of days meeting some people from a mailing list I'm on which deals with our little life project. The hotel did a breakfast but it was £6.95 per person extra so we gave it a miss. Reading the list it was all cereals etc. and very interestingly the "diet advice" contained on the flyer for the breakfast was from Kelloggs and stated...

• Eating a high carbohydrate breakfast helps keep your energy up till lunch.

Well, sorry but that is just not accurate! Eating a low-carb breakfast will keep you going till lunch. Eating a medium carb breakfast with a low GI will keep you going till lunch. Eating something like cornflakes which have a GI of around 85 (where sugar is 100) will give you a massive sugar rush then cause a 'crash' soon after. This means you'll be hungry again mid-morning.

For those of you out there who get the mid-morning munchies - look at your breakfast, is it a sugary high-carb cereal? If so, change it for a low-GI cereal such as fibre-1 or something (if its cereal you want) or spend the 3 minutes it takes to make an omelette for a few days and see what difference it makes!

It seems to be slowly permeating through the doctors that a low (or lower)-carb low-GI diet is the way forward for diabetics. I wonder how long it will take for that to come through to the mainstream and for it to start actually being taught?