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Food Insulin Index

CherryAA

Well-Known Member
Messages
2,170
Type of diabetes
Type 2
Treatment type
Diet only
The FII is not something I've thought about before before, though no doubt there are many on here who have, so any thoughts on this would be much appreciated .

https://optimisingnutrition.com/2015/05/03/glycemic-index-load-versus-insulin-load/

http://www.mendosa.com/blog/?p=3624

Insulin load for various foods here
https://optimisingnutrition.com/201...ood-sugar-regulation-and-nutritoinal-ketosis/

it seems to help explain two things to me
a) why processed foods including fats and carbs are worse for you than an equivalent real food - because they need more insulin to process and
b) why diary foods sometimes need to be limited - because their insulin load is higher than one would predict with skimmed milk being particularly bad

Any views on the FII would be most helpful





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Can you edit the last bit of your post re 'bad o glucose...' please. I'm not quite following. Ty.
 
My understanding is the testing was done by a PhD student of Dr Jennie Brand-Miller's at Sydney Uni - so part of the same lab that has published a lot on the Glycemic Index. Can't recall the student's name though. Marty Kendall did more analysis from her results.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insulin_index
 
I followed the first link
Call me sqeamish but a site that has curried eggs with cows brains at the top of their list of the most nutritious low carb meals, rapidly loses my interest! - eggs with a side order of CJD anyone?
 
No body should be using glycemic index as it is very inaccurate as it's based on a comparison of 50 grams of carbohydrate of each food and how that amount raises blood sugar in many individuals tested. It doesn' represent a true portion size you would actually eat. Take watermelon for ecample - glycemic index of 74% of pure glucose, which is 100%. Very high. But watermellon on glycemic load is only 4, very low. Using glycemic load is much more accurate. You can get a small book on glycemic load, or a phone app for free. GL is the phone app I use and the book is The Easy GL Diet Handbook $10 on Amazon.
 
Didnt even know there was such a thing! Will definitely have a look.

Also, would just like to thank cherryaa. Her posts are aways interesting and extremely useful and thought provoking. She always provides some links to get me started on research for myself and I am impressed by her posts on her own journey.

Have learnt so much from so many people on here. I dont think its an exaggeration to say that you have probably saved my life. I am definitely 4 stone lighter because of all of you. And my bgl rarely go above 7.5 (apart from a messy incident involving nation trust scones).

Thankyou all.
 

Thanks . I'm kinda fascinated by all this ..quite apart from the fact that its helping me understand what is going on, I am completely astonished that I could have been quite so ignorant for so long.

I had a messy incident involving fish and chips this week. I decided to help correct the problem with a bike ride.
I also decided to tuust my instincts as to following a route . It turns out I have no such instincts. 90 minute, 20km later I finally arrived at my destination which was all off 4 km away . Still my blood sugar had recovered completely !
 

It would certainly be helpful. In the end its seems fairly intuitively obvious - so I will make a guess now and then go check the links in detail ....
my guess is ...
carbs higher than protein higher than fat
junk carbs higher than processed carbs higher than below ground vegetables higher than above round vegetables
Tropical fruit higher than standard fruit higher than berries
Junk mixed foods higher than real mixed foods
processed grains higher than wholefood equivalent
cheese low fats higher than high fats
milk - skimmed higher than whole

butter and olive oil - close to zero ( I know those )

in essence - the ingredients to any successful nutricious diet focused on real foods is likely to bring down levels of circulating insulin in anybody and leaving the gap between meals likely to bring down fasting insulin as is doing some exercise the more intense the better.

The less you have circulating insulin the less likely to get insulin resistance and insulin resistance then drives the rest in terms of diabetes or disease .
 
This may be interesting from an academic perspective but not much help to those trying to reduce their blood glucose by diet. What is needed, at least for new recruits, are some basic rules about diet. When I was diagnosed, I was lucky enough to get the simple message that carbs in equals blood glucose, so I stopped eating sweet things and the high carb high GI stuff like bread, potatoes, rice and pasta. That’s all I did, no calculations of the amount of carbs, no calculation of macro ratios, no worrying whether I was ketogenic and, at least at first, no measurement of blood glucose. I reduced my HbA1c from 53 to 42 and lost 15% of my body weight in 3 months. If I had been confronted with the Food Insulin Index which seems, complex, impossible to measure and doesn’t appear on food packaging, I might have been too confused to do anything.
 

I have never counted anything!
Not carbs, not calories, not how much protein, fat or portion size!
I had nothing to work on except the reasoned hypotheses that doing low carb will get my blood glucose levels in control. Which I did quite easily because I followed the reduce carbs, plate size and increase protein, full fats and exercise.

I didn't have a clue about how my overactive pancreas created excess insulin that was doing the damage until I had searched the internet, and started discovering that insulin causes so many problems to those who have an imbalance in their hormonal response to food, situations and life cycles.
The fact that insulin response and insulin resistance is so much needed to be examined and researched is paramount, but it is always the obvious blood glucose levels that is recorded.
There are some really good low carb foods, that should be eaten in small portions because of the insulin digestion triggers, (gut, brain axis!) It is higher than you think!
I have often wondered how a low insulin response diet would compare to a low carb diet! (With full fat obviously!)

But for newbies the greeting is all they need from daisy.
 
If anybody's interested, Jason Fung has a piece on YouTube discussing Insulin Index.
 
I agree with @Mr_Pot in this instance.

@CherryAA, as "interesting" as this may be - interesting is all it will really be... You even said yourself that you had a BG wobble after a chippy, and it was absolutely resolved by a decent cycle. Sometimes it's better to focus on, and implement, the basics - rather than get caught up in splitting hairs.

I hope you enjoyed your cycle Exercise is such a powerful tool and stretches well beyond helping manage BG levels.
 

Well this was my thread about the food insulin index which may well be interesting to some people one they have understood the basics, not one responding to a new person posting for the first time. Everyone is free to not read things that don't interest them or they don't find useful!
 

I'm not sure that discussing the impact that insulin has , comes quite into the category of " splitting hairs" for diabetics

Whilst it is currently only " interesting" the food insulin index is one measure that actually does appear to correlate with the effect that all types of foods will have on the human body of whatever type and the first one I've seen that seems to properly distinguish between for example whole foods and processed foods for things like grains.

It is a pity its not on food packaging, but then again its a pity that food packaging has fats in bright red too when for most of us we " know " that's wrong .

I'm not really sure why the epithet " even ". I am subject to just as many wobbles as the next person an deal with them on a daily basis just like we all do, sometimes more successfully than others and sometimes by ending up cycling five time further that anticipated because I don't know which way is Tuesday !
 

I must admit for me right now this is way over my head - but I do have a question which has been on my mind for a while.

If T2 is a cycle of insulin resistance, then eventually the pancreas stops producing insulin (or drastically reduces) then should we not mix up our diet a bit to include foods which stimulate some insulin response - because the problem now is we are not producing enough - isn't it? I genuinely don't know.

I actually found on holiday that if my BG went up - I would have a little cheese - fat protein and I had read it causes insulin and as a result my BG fell. Mistake?
 

There is nothing wrong in finding the right balance of foods, which includes carbs, fats and proteins. It is that balance that gives you, a good reduction in blood glucose levels to in or near normal levels and maintains control. Controlling your blood glucose levels is how we get to being healthier.
And perhaps even reversal!
But getting to that balance is through testing and experimentation and finding which foods are causing your blood glucose levels to be high.
 

The OGTT tests that @bluetit, @bulkbiker and myself all did, illustrate that we are all producing insulin sufficient to deal with a high carb load. For all of us our blood glucose fell to slightly lower than our start point at some stage before finally balancing out at out "normal levels" . What was abnormal was that our blood glucose rose to higher levels than it should in the intervening period presumably because the insulin we were producing didn't respond quite as quickly as someone with normal response.

I have no clue on is at what stage the pancreas " stops producing" insulin but I and @bulbiker had Hba1C at well over 80 at diagnosis. .

I seems like your response was entirely similar to mine.

I know there is certainly a stage where its not producing " enough " for it's needs - but whether that is because its not enough for normal needs or not enough for the extended needs that come from having created the insulin resistance and how long one has to be an uncontrolled diabetic for for that stage to be reached I've no idea. I have read instances of T2 people being able to come off insulin when following a successful diet strategy after as long as 14 years.

Dr Fung claims to have reduced/ removed insulin injections for many of his T2 patients via his fasting methods - clearly that wouldn't work if the pancreas had just packed up altogether.

My current thoughts on the subject as a total layman would be that it might be quite useful to stimulate the /insulin glucose response now and again and that will indeed cause insulin levels to go up and that may well be a good thing for insulin sensitivity.

The trick for me would be to make sure that either I exercise or leave a long gap between that and the next meal to enable the levels of insulin to fall back down to a fasting state before I do it again That would also accord with both the 5:2 diet theory and Dr Fung's intermittment fasting - feasting/fasting hypthesis.

From my readings so far, I don't see it as a problem that insulin spikes to deal with blood glucose, that seems entirely normal and natural. where it becomes a problem seems to be if it happens in such quantities and so often that the body never gets a chance to go back to it base level so that eventually you are starting off with high numbers then adding to them and getting insulin resistance as result.

The study showing people with an entirely normal fasting insulin of 5 whilst having a 45 BMI which I posted elsewhere does seems to suggest that some people really can eat vast quantities of food and have their insulin levels go right back to normal. Just that for many of us it doesn't.
 
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