Apparently freezing the bread does something to the structure of the starch making it a resistance starch with has a much reduced efect on blood sugar. I tried this when I used a cgm last May and for me it was a MUCH reduced response. Normal crappy supermarket white bread still gives a bad response even after freezing with me.
1 Like
Cooling other types of carbs before eating them also seems to do this. So for example if you cook things like rice or potatoes and then refrigerate them before eating them it increases the amount of resistant starch in them.
1 Like
Yes. When I suggested to my wife this is what she should do with them after cooking them I got a somewhat frosty response.
4 Likes
I’d heard about this refrigerating some starches, but am not interested in cold rice or potatoes (well, I do like potato salad and rice bars), but wasn’t clear on what happens if you reheat after the cooling step.
But, I saw a youtube vid the other day that said reheating won’t undo the beneficial changes made during that refrigeration (think it was Thomas Delauer that said it). So reheated after refrigeration should be as good as cold, in case I had too many negatives in the previous sentence, lol.
1 Like
Here’s one on rice:
Cooling for 24 hours and then reheating still led to more resistant starch than freshly cooked rice. I’m also not interested in eating cold rice. 
1 Like
What’s the response you get with white bread?
I was going to ask about the difference between sourdough, whole wheat, and white breads on blood sugar.
Everyone responds slightly differently. From what I remember because I rarely eat it now normal white bread showed a large steep rise in blood glucose with a relatively slow return to normal. Strangely wholemeal showed much the same pattern. Proper sourdough was much more muted and came down faster.
Back in the height of COVID, I was baking bread. A lot. I learned that I had close to no blood sugar impact with naturally fermented homemade sourdough bread. But swap out that sourdough starter with commercial yeast, and I’d see a spike.
I did a bunch of blind tests with a buddy over a couple days and pretty much any baked item with sourdough starter was easier on the blood sugars.
1 Like
@genefish
Late to the party here. Did you follow up with a doctor on this? Did you get a fasting insulin level? I’m in the same boat. My fasting glucose (by CGM) is always high. But even after huge carb loads I never spike above 140. My doctor wasn’t concerned - she said she actually had a few athletic patients who all seemed to run high with fasting glucose. My fasting insulin is also quite low (around 3-4 mIU/L).
I will at some point but it’s not a top priority right now.
I made a few changes based on the CGM and I will wear one again for a week or two when I’m ready. I found the whole experience wearing it to be mentally draining. I’ll do it again when I’m ready and I learned a good bit about myself and made positive changes…so i’m glad I did it.
so I kinda wanted to wait on testing myself until I made changes for a few months that I knew I was gonna make.
A fasting insulin test can give you insight into if you “should” worry though. If it is low, it is unlikely that even with your higher than ideal fasting glucose values you need to do anything. If it is high, well, then you at least know you should make some changes.
One other thing I’ve noticed for me - if I skip breakfast (my habit) my glucose stays above 100 until I eat around noon. If I eat breakfast (a constant battle to stick to), it is in the 90s (after a brief spike). Just one other thing to look at if you haven’t
1 Like
I just thought I’d try a little experiment. Yesterday on my rest day I went to the cafe and had a Flat White and a particularly sweet and carby flapjack then drove home. Today I repeated it but 2.5 hours into a 3 hr bike ride. Bottom one is on the bike ride.
2 Likes
Did you eat again when you got home after your ride? Did you sit for a while after eating or basically eat and get right back on your bike? If you did NOT eat when you came home, I feel like that glucose curve shows why some people feel like crap after food stops… if you eat and then don’t get back on your bike right away you release insulin (exercise suppresses this response). So you eat CHO–> insulin release–> glucose drops and THEN you get on your bike and start exercising again and now have contraction mediated glucose uptake AND the insulin working so you bottom out (looks like you drop to 4mmol or so - which is the low 70s in mg/dL) (quite low). Then your body says - oops, no energy around and you then break down a bunch of glycogen (or eat) and cause a secondary spike.
3 Likes
I can’t remember to be honest. The reason for the comparison was to to confirm to me the influence exercise had on the magnitude of the spike and the time it took to drop. As it happens I never feel awful after eating at food stops apart from the cafe legs everyone seems to get. I quite often fall asleep in the afternoon after longer rides which I thought might be the result of my blood sugar tanking, but looking at the graphs afterwards shows this wasn’t the case. Probably I’m just old and I get very tired from them!
Came across this study which was posted on the Level website blog.
“When the SG profiles of 10 trained, subelite athletes were analyzed over a 6 day monitoring period 4/10 athletes studied spent more than 70% of the total monitoring time above 6 mmol/L even with the 2-hour period after meals removed. FBG was also in the range of prediabetes for 3/10 athletes as defined by the ADA.”
Blood Glucose Levels of Subelite Athletes During 6 Days of Free Living - PMC.
For what it’s worth I asked ChatGPT what % of CHO comes from muscle glycogen and blood glucose for sub LT1 exercise. This was the response
Relevant
1 Like
I wish they had somebody actually look at the balance of the literature without a bias, instead of this.
2 Likes
I agree. This one sounded incredibly biased. I find it hard to believe that people should be eating what they recommended during rides. I also had some issues with some of the data they cited. I should probably review the papers, but I can’t help but wonder if the people who were only processing something like 30-45% of the sugar they took in hadn’t trained their gut for the higher amount of carbs.
1 Like