Chocolate better than pastry ?

[the-noob]

Shocking title ? - ️
Popular subject ? -
Hits the ... sweet... spot ? -

Now for the serious business: I have periods of 'testing' while I wear a continuous glucose monitoring sensor (CGM) just to try and see the effects of various foods.
Obviously carbs are bad, m'kay?
But I found that normal chocolate (not advertising but giving a concrete example: Lidl's Fin Carre - with Hazelnuts) - and I'm talking about 1/3 of it, 30-40g, not 'a cube' - raises my glucose by 2-4 points (say 7 to 10 or 11mmol/L) while having a small cheese pastry (size of the palm) takes it to 14-15.

In both cases I'd say the levels go back to 'normal' in about the same time (although I think I'm exercising a bit more when doing the pastry, due to the spike panic) but the difference in spike is significant.

Anyone else experienced/tested this ?

 

[Paul_]

The key data points you're interested in here are just before you eat, then 2 hours after your first bite. Exercise will skew the result, so unless you're going to do the same type and intensity of exercise everytime you eat that food, the test may not represent its actual effect.

Ideally you want to be back to your pre-food reading after 2 hours, or 1 mmol more (allows for testing error margins), and no more than 2 mmol above it (if you're following the "official" advice).

25g of regular Cadbury Dairy Milk chocolate with no extra ingredients (e.g. flavourings, nuts, fruit etc) is 14.3g carbs. However, it's also high fat for the portion size at 7.5g, so that slows the digestion of carbs slightly. How that affects an individual depends on numerous factors, but we all have our unique levels of insulin resistance which directly influences how well or badly our bodies process carbs. It's a food that requires strict portion control in my opinion, based on my limited fingerprick testing of it, but I generally avoid milk chocolate these days and have 85% (or higher) dark chocolate instead.

Pastry is a very general term and there are a lot of variables from what I've seen. If we're talking a standard croissant, such as you'd buy in a supermarket, you're looking at 20-25g carbs for a "standard size" one. I haven't tested this, I know from other testing that 20-25g of carbs is too high for a food item that won't keep me satisfied for long. I only eat 20-30g carbs per day, so wouldn't blow all that on one croissant.

Ultimately it all comes down to our personal health factors, particularly insulin resistance, and also our goals. I may avoid the above foods because they're not right for my weight loss goals and they'd raise my BG results above where I target, but if you can portion control it and handle the carb loads involved for BG levels then that's a different matter. However, any food that raised my BG from 7 to 14/15 mmol wouldn't be on the menu for me (unless that was a very short, sharp rise before a short, sharp reduction again) or I'd only have a quarter of the portion that caused that and I'd see how that went.

 

[MrsA2]

I always find pastry raises my bg more than the equivalent carbs in sugar would.
No idea why, but it makes it easier to avoid it