A question about post meal testing..

a cup of tea with skimmed milk is listed as between 1-2 carbs - i can't think that that would make any difference. Not an expert like some here, but I drink tea all the time and it hasn't occurred to me it would change the readings at all.

Yes I drink between meals all the time and don't see any effects.

hi,
I think Drinking tea or coffee is not advisable after meals, this will increase your sugar levels.

termlife said:

hi,
I think Drinking tea or coffee is not advisable after meals, this will increase your sugar levels.

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On what basis termlife? Assuming you don't add sugar to these drinks, the only carb content is the milk. Whole Milk is 11.3g carbs per 250ml - or half a pint roughly. I suppose it depends how milky you have your tea, but we can't be talking more than 10% of that figure. So a tea or coffee drink will give you 1-2g of carb which shouldn't be enough to spike you.

The only time that coffee gives me a spike is when I add coffee mate to my freshly brewed cuppa....as coffee mate has glucose in it,although not a great deal and only have one teaspoon. So I try very hard not to brew a pot of coffee until after my post prandial readings. Tried very hard to convince the wife to allow me fresh cream on a daily basis :lol: but she just walks off muttering about costs :?

As a point of interest here, coffee has no carbs in itself but can raise sugar levels. Read a good medical study on this from, I think, W.H.O
Strong Coffee increrases resistance to insulin. This means that whereas our BGs would have been coming down at our usual rate after eating, the coffee drunk between eating and +2 hours slows down that rate of BG decline so our +2 hour reading is higher than it would have been. My take is therefore that the coffee hasn't INCREASED our BG, but it's stopped it going down so much.
Interestingly, although green tea has caffeine in it, it REDUCES our resistance to insulin and thus has the reverse effect.
These effects aren't great, and i think the green tea effect is less than the coffee one (unfortunately!)
By the way, agree the milk shouldn't have a great effect, but if you're low carbing, that extra 2 (say) grams of carbs could be a relevant %age of the carbs you had in the previous meal.......so could have some effect I guess.

On a connected note, can anyone explain why semi-skimmed milk has a slightly higher net carb value at 11.8 per 250ml and skimmed milk is only slightly less at 11 ? Is it something to do with fat slowing absorption?

swimmer2 said:

On a connected note, can anyone explain why semi-skimmed milk has a slightly higher net carb value at 11.8 per 250ml and skimmed milk is only slightly less at 11 ? Is it something to do with fat slowing absorption?

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Everything that you eat is made of water, protein, fat and carbohydrate (and alcohol if you are Grazer).

If you take the carbs out of something, you need to either increase the water content, the protein content or the carbohydrate content. The protein content of all varieties milk is pretty constant at about 3.5%, so unless you dilute it, if you take out fat you are left with a liquid which is richer (per unit volume) in carbohydrate.

It's a pretty constant feature of almost all food. Protein stays more or less constant, so lower-fat usually means higher-carb.

I go out of my way never to eat "low-fat" anything.

swimmer2 said:

On a connected note, can anyone explain why semi-skimmed milk has a slightly higher net carb value at 11.8 per 250ml and skimmed milk is only slightly less at 11 ? Is it something to do with fat slowing absorption?

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Not that anyone is right or wrong but this is actually quite interesting as it can be used to highlight the subtle differences between us. :lol:

First I would try both and see which version spiked me the least. If there was a definite spike difference would choose the least spikey but if both were roughly the same then...

I would look at the two things side by side, lets say its plain yoghurt. If the non low fat version said 6g / 100 and calorie wise was say 120 cals / 100 but the low fat version said 7g / 100 and was only say 80 cals / 100 I would pick the LOW fat one.

It would have to be that kind of close though otherwise the "borofergie" principle gets used every time. So its quite a subjective "well they're near enough the same and that ones got a lot less calories" thing with me.

I still use semi-skimmed simply because I hate the taste of full fat.

If I had to choose between low fat Rioja or full fat St Emillion, I'd probably have to drink both. :thumbup: