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Can someone please explain....

DavideB

DavideB

Well-Known Member
Messages
149
Location
Peterborough
Type of diabetes
Treatment type
Tablets (oral)
Dislikes
Diabetes
.....In simple terms;

On a packet it says Cabs xxx of which sugar xxx What does it mean, less carbs more carbs more sugar less sugar...I am so lost when I read these packets...What is good and what is bad....

PS...I so miss Honey Nut Crunch in the Mornings...Just wanted to put that in
 
Hi Davide

Sugar is just a kind of carb. You should ignore the "of which sugar number entirely". The total carbs are what count for a diabetic.

I suppose you could use the "of which sugar" number as some kind of indicator of how quickly its going to hit your levels as high sugar things are generally fast acting.

Use to have the Honey Nut Crunch too seems so long ago now.
 
xyzzy said:
Hi Davide



I suppose you could use the "of which sugar" number as some kind of indicator of how quickly its going to hit your levels as high sugar things are generally fast acting.
Click to expand...

This is true, as a general rule of thumb the lower the % of sugars the lower the glycemic index (GI) of a food, and the lower the GI of a food the less effect it will have on your bg levels as the carbs will not be digested as quickly as in foods with a higher sugar level. I seem to remember being told by my SDN at diagnosis that I should look for foods with less than 10% sugars.

Of course this is like everything else with diabetes wholly dependant on the individual so the same old advice as always would be to test every food you eat and find out what they do to your levels in what portions, ie foods with a lower % sugars you may find you can eat in a slightly larger amount than a similar product that has a higher % sugars.

All carbohydrates are sugars and are converted to glucose in the stomach and absorbed into the blood stream in the large intestine, so the total carb content is very important. There are a number of things that can help to slow down digestion though such as fat and vinegar so eating something fatty with something carby will help to slow down digestion and keep bg levels down as will adding vinegar to a small portion of chips. Similar to vinegar is red wine and many find a glass of red wine with a meal can help to keep levels down a bit, note 'a glass' not a couple of bottles :lol:

The key is to test every food you eat before eating and 2 hours after you finish the meal, if your levels are more than 1.5 to 2 mmol/L higher after eating than before the meal then you will need to reduce the carb content of that meal, the next time you eat that same meal, test again before and after eating but this time with a smaller portion of carbs and if the level is still not returning to close to your pre meal level then reduce the carbs again and repeat the experiment. Make a note of the meter readings you get and the portion size of the carbs you have eaten with that meal and you will soon build up a food diary telling you the portion sizes of all carbs that are OK for you to eat, once this is achieved the need to test so regularly is no longer necessary :thumbup:
 
Not all carbohydrate are sugars but all sugars are carbohydrates. That is a very common mistake that is made (and sugars are NOT converted in the stomach to glucose but rather in the small intestine) . To understand the difference some basic chemistry is required. Sugars are relative simple molecules that can be viewed , in essence, as a five or six sided ring with hydroxyl (OH) groups stuck at at the apexes. There are a whole bunch of one ring sugars around but the two diabetics will commonly come across are glucose (of course) and fructose. Note that the suffix -ose is used for sugars. (As an aside biochemists actually prefer to use the term "saccharide" rather than sugar and that is what I will use from here). These simple sugars are known as monosaccharides.

Stick two monosaccharide units together and you get a disaccharide. (imagine like a pair of handcuffs)

For example: lactose (milk sugar) is made up of a glucose and a galactose unit; sucrose (table sugar) is a glucose plus a fructose molecule, maltose - two glucose units

These simple(ish) compounds are all soluble in water .... (very very important !)

Trisaccharides are not common but I will mention one: raffinose. Now raffinose consists of three separate monosaccharides: glucose, fructose and galactose.

The thing about raffinose (very common in beans, sprouts etc etc) is that humans don't possess a particular enzyme that cracks the link to galactose, so the molecule passes down the GI tract to the lower intestine where it is fermented by bacteria ... producing gas! That is the reason why those veggies make you fart!

Beyond tri, saccharides are classified as "oligo" and "poly".

An oligo saccharide consists of a few monosaccharides (typically up to 10) linked together and a "poly" is above 10.

Going to ignore oligo's and move to polysaccharides which are less and less soluble in water and are used as storage materials in living systems . There are two which are important in diabetes: starch and glycogen. These are NOT sugars but consist of multiple monosaccharide units (typically glucose) linked together in a complex branch structure.

Starch consists of two polysachharides: amylose and amylopectin. Amylose is linear (imagine a railway freight train) where as amylopectin is branched. The proportion of amylose to amylopectin is critically important when we discuss the GI Index in a mo ...

Simple saccharides (mono and di) are very quickly absorbed into the body (very soluble) whereas polysaccharides need to be processed (broken down) first.

This brings us onto the GI Index which is a measurement of how quickly a particular food can raise blood glucose levels

It is the rate/ease of conversion of a saccharide to glucose that gives rise to the GI Index.... If a substance requires a fair amount of processing to form glucose then it will have a low GI index; if not a high.

It is this that explains some anomalies of which the fact that fructose has a low GI index is the most obvious. Fructose must be absorbed into the body, sent to the liver and only then converted into glucose, whereas maltose has a sky high one! Sucrose (glucose + fructose) intermediate.

Back to starch.

Although I said that amylose is linear, that is not the whole story. It is curled up (imagine a worm) and, resists breakdown by enzymes and also by boiling, hence has a low GI. Amylopectin is much more more easily broken down in such a mannerand will have a high GI ... Additionally anything which slows down the attack of starch by enzymes, boiling etc will cause a GI to be lowered - that is why wholefoods have a lower GI than processed.

So to sum up:

A food that has a high proportion on amylose to amylopectin will have a low GI index. Anything which protects the starch from breakdown such as fibre, husk etc will also cause the GI index to be lowered.....
 
Hi. Did you mean what you said on this or the reverse?
Additionally anything which slows down the attach of starch by enzymes, boiling etc will cause a GI to be lowered - that is why wholefoods have a lower GI than processed.
Click to expand...
. Surely boiling will cause the GI to be raised not lowered?
 
Daibell said:
Hi. Did you mean what you said on this or the reverse?
Additionally anything which slows down the attach of starch by enzymes, boiling etc will cause a GI to be lowered - that is why wholefoods have a lower GI than processed.
Click to expand...
. Surely boiling will cause the GI to be raised not lowered?
Click to expand...

There was a typo. The word "attach" should have been "attack". That will now make sense.

And edited to fix.

"
 
xyzzy said:
Hi Davide

Sugar is just a kind of carb. You should ignore the "of which sugar number entirely". The total carbs are what count for a diabetic.

I suppose you could use the "of which sugar" number as some kind of indicator of how quickly its going to hit your levels as high sugar things are generally fast acting.

Use to have the Honey Nut Crunch too seems so long ago now.
Click to expand...

To say "Sugar is just a kind of carb. You should ignore the "of which sugar number entirely". The total carbs are what count for a diabetic." is not true - and rather dodgily so.

The key point for diabetics is:

"How fast can a saccharide be converted to glucose?" This gives the idea of slow release and high release carbs (low and fast GI in effect). Not all carbohydrates are the same.
 
That's very nicely put Bonzo, but your last point "how fast can a saccharide be converted to glucose" is not something that's detailed on the side of a packet, or is it and I'm missing something.

Is there some way you can apply your explanation to the real world situation of standing in a supermarket aisle, because in the past we've suggested people ignore the "of which sugars" line and focus on total carbs.

S
 
swimmer2 said:
That's very nicely put Bonzo, but your last point "how fast can a saccharide be converted to glucose" is not something that's detailed on the side of a packet, or is it and I'm missing something.

Is there some way you can apply your explanation to the real world situation of standing in a supermarket aisle, because in the past we've suggested people ignore the "of which sugars" line and focus on total carbs.

S
Click to expand...

Fair comment. The labeling of foodstuffs for diabetics is frankly ****. My wife has just come in with a pile of shopping and l am looking at a packet of Tesco Finest Stoneground Wholemeal Farmhouse Batch.

OK let look at the labelling:

Carb (per 100g) 36.1g
of which sugars 3.0g

Now lets compare with a packet of Warburton's Soft White Slice:

Carb (per 100g) 43.4g
of which sugars 1.7g

BUT that doesn't help not a jot. What you MUST do is look at the ingredients and make the decision from there. White bread contains processed flour (first ingredient: wheat flour) when compared with the brown (first ingredient stoneground wholemeal wheat flour).


Get a table of GI indexes and look there....

http://www.weightlossresources.co.uk/di ... tables.htm

I wish the GI index of foodstuffs was on the label!

For what its worth the former has a gI index of 53, the latter 70 .....

Also consider the glycemic load (GL).

This is a measure of the available carbohydrates together with how much each gram of food raises the GI index. To take the example in wiki, a melon has a high GI but since the total amount of carbohydrate is low, the GL is also low .....
 
Davide.
All sugars and starches are carbohydrates, however, in the tightest form of the definition, so is cellulose [dietary fibre]
American food labels include Fibre in the "Total carbs" and you need to subtract the fibre to get the {biochemically active effective carbs.]
Hana
 
hanadr said:
Davide.
All sugars and starches are carbohydrates, however, in the tightest form of the definition, so is cellulose [dietary fibre]
American food labels include Fibre in the "Total carbs" and you need to subtract the fibre to get the {biochemically active effective carbs.]
Hana
Click to expand...

Absolutely. Cellulose is a carbohydrate but has a GI index of a flat round zero ...... In mammals it cannot be digested directly - in herbivores it is the the presence of intestinal symbiotic bacteria that does the job .....
 
I'm intrigued because this implies that wholemeal flour is lower GI than white flour. This should mean that for EVERYBODY the effects of wholemeal flour on the blood sugar will be less dramatic than white bread, but a read of this and other diabetes forums will reveal that for many of us it matters not one jot whether we eat wholemeal or white bread, the effects on our blood sugar are equally dramatic and unwanted.

Others can tolerate bread.

What is the explanation for the accepted truth among diabetes that what works for some doesn't work for others? While I realise that people have differing levels of insulin production, and therefore bread will affect us in different ways, it should be the case for all that wholemeal is better than white, but this seems not to be the case.
 
Daibell wrote:Hi. Did you mean what you said on this or the reverse?

Additionally anything which slows down the attach of starch by enzymes, boiling etc will cause a GI to be lowered - that is why wholefoods have a lower GI than processed.

. Surely boiling will cause the GI to be raised not lowered?

Having read the change of attach to attack I still cannot understand the statement. Boiling may well destroy the enzymes such as ptaylin, but the act of boiling hydrolyses starch to a lower molecular weight product and eventually glucose.
The effect can easily be seen by the fact that boiling starch in water causes the insoluble starch to dissolve and form a viscous solution. Examples are making gravy and the old flour and water paste. Typical for a high molecular weight polymer in solution. Starch is insoluble in water.
 
mrawfell said:
Daibell wrote:Hi. Did you mean what you said on this or the reverse?

Additionally anything which slows down the attach of starch by enzymes, boiling etc will cause a GI to be lowered - that is why wholefoods have a lower GI than processed.

. Surely boiling will cause the GI to be raised not lowered?

Having read the change of attach to attack I still cannot understand the statement. Boiling may well destroy the enzymes such as ptaylin, but the act of boiling hydrolyses starch to a lower molecular weight product and eventually glucose.
The effect can easily be seen by the fact that boiling starch in water causes the insoluble starch to dissolve and form a viscous solution. Examples are making gravy and the old flour and water paste. Typical for a high molecular weight polymer in solution. Starch is insoluble in water.
Click to expand...

Its the physical protection that husks, seed coatings etc confer which is important . These prevent the digestive enzymes from reaching the starch - and of course allowing any glucose formed from being absorbed.

Good article here: http://www.drweil.com/drw/u/QAA400579/C ... Index.html
 
This is all fine, and of course correct, but DavideB wanted a simple answer and I can't help thinking this thread will now have confused him even more. He has to work with the labelling there is.
In extremely simple terms, I would suggest DavideB that you look at the total carbs figure. If two comparable products have the same (or very similar) total carbs, then go for the one which has the lowest "of which sugars" figure. Then test 2 hours after eating to see if it was OK (below say 7.8). If not, don't eat it again.
 
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