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Home meter testing & Channa Dal

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Lizzie7

Well-Known Member
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52
Hi there,

This may be a daft question but bear with me - first post! I was diagnosed two weeks ago and on diet only. Was given advice from the hospital to up my intake of carbohydrate. I'm pretty much vegan (amusingly for health reasons!) and eat a lot of grains, root vegetables etc anyway. After a search on the internet for ways to change my diet, I came across David Mendosa's website and read about channa dal. I've had it for dinner three nights in a row now, basically a dal curry with tomatoes and different greens and, tonight, I added a small serving of quinoa.

I've tested before the channa dal meals, at one hour after eating and then two hours after eating. My blood glucose appears to have barely moved. Last night it was 5.1 before eating, 5.9 one hour after and 5.6 two hours after.

My question is this - does channa dal have some kind of delayed effect i.e. does it takes hours to digest and could it be causing spikes hours later? I test before going to bed and for the last 10 days the reading has been between 4.9 - 6.5. First morning reading is between 4.9 - 6.9. Could the channa dal be playing havoc during the wee small hours?

Thanks in advance for any replies! :D
 
My answer is tha Channa Dahl or Bengal gram dhal Its an excellent example of a low GI carbohydrate. It is a legume and most legumes are low GI but this one is extremely low. A test portion of 150g had 36g of carbs yet a GI of just 11.
This means that the carbs are digested extremely slowly, giving your system (assuming it has some insulin of its own) time to digest and absorb it. I haven't read the Mendoza article but you might like to look at some of the information (particularly the graph of the impact of low GI compared to high GI on the GI website
http://www.glycemicindex.com/
By all means test later ( we are all a bit different) but it is not like a pizza where the absorbtion of the fast carb is delayed by the fat. and often causes a rise later on.

Edit to say, 'Hello and welcome!'
 
Thanks Phoenix - that's really helpful. It's great having a forum to ask these questions - seems like every day is an experiment with what to eat at the moment.
 
Just seen your post, I have been away :D

I have started a couple of threads about being vegetarian and diabetic as I have had some fairly conflicting advice and comments about these things together. There was a thread about a chap called Gabriel Couzens in the food forum before I went away - he appears to be advocating a pretty much vegan diet, although I have not read the book... The inital tone of the thread is that he is a bit of a crank, but then lots of people think vegans and vegetarians are a bit odd anyway :roll: :D

http://www.diabetes.co.uk/diabetes-forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=9837

I think I will give the channa dal a go too :D

If you want to see what your blood sugar is doing during the night you could always get up and test then. However, if you are eating the dal with a starchy carb, a spike later may be due to that hitting your bloodstream, you could try testing with and without the rice. Although those numbers look pretty good to me.

I low carb (no rice, bread, potato, pasta or flour products). I have found that a lot of pulses don't actually make me spike particularly high, even tho they appear much higher in carbohydrate than a low carber would be happy with. I think a lot of the carbs in pulses are pretty indigestible to me.

I have found a few foods that usually have very little impact on my post meal BS, including tofu and avocado.

Welcome to the forums.
 
Thanks Spiral.

The channa dal is working out well for me, when you look at the carb content it's higher than chick peas etc. You must be right - indigestible carbs! Curiously, it seems to lower the effect of other foods eaten at the same time or shortly after.

On holiday next week so will give the middle of the night test a go and report back.

I haven't experimented with avocado yet.
 
I was interested to read your post because I have my bg reading higher 4 hours after eating than 1 hour sometimes. When I queried it on this forum I was told it was the pizza effect ie the fat was slowing down the digestion of my carbs, but I am low carbing and this would happen after a dinner of say roasted vegetables (no root veg) and a chicken breast. I think the only thing we can do is test through the night. I do think portion control is paramount, if I eat too much even of low carb my readings go up. However it is a very fine line because I had problems losing too much weight when first low carbing. The other thing is some days with the same foods I can have different results.
Have a good holiday and keep us posted.
 
Lizzie
increasing your carbs will put your BG UP. Why they can't see that eating more of the stuff that turns to glucose in he blood, won't bring the blood glucose down beats me. I think they select the brightest students for medical training and then give them a "Commonsensectomy".
Certainly low Gi puts the blood sugar up slower.
Where in David's website did you find the recipe?
are you aware that David has changed from Low GI diet to Bernstein style Low carb and is off all medication as a result?
Hana
 
Hi Hana,

There's a whole section on chana dal on the Mendosa site - they're under articles-food-channa dal.

http://mendosa.com/chanadal.html

I did some internet searches to find out if Dr Bernstein had tried out chana dal, couldn't find anything but I don't have a copy of his book - yet!

I've been impressed with the chana dal results but going to try testing in the middle of the night. I'm a natural sceptic!

The obvious carbs I eat are Bergen bread (2 slices max every other day) and I currently have cereal for breakfast (10g special k, 10g all bran & almonds with soya milk). I eat green veg and salad leaves, quorn, small amounts of pulses, nuts, berries and very small amounts of other fruits (pear, apple, tomato). I also eat quiona, barley, bulger wheat and yoghurt and cocoa nib raw chocolate. I've found most things are ok for me blood sugar wise in small portions. I eat out a lot and obviously few restaurants cater to this kind of diet! I tend to order just a starter and side dish, no-one seems to mind.

Not too sure how to count carbs so don't know how many I eat per day - I would estimate that a medium carber!

The expection is the breakfast cereal. I'm keen to find a low carb replacement for cereal at breakfast but laziness currently preventing this. I eat my cereal then walk to work and my blood sugar is ok - between 6 and 7. If I don't walk the mile up-hill to work it spikes up to 8 - 9 :oops:

I've had two A1C results - the first on diagnosis 10% and the second three weeks later 6.7% (see my post querying this result!)

Happy to post finger prick test results and diet info if anyone would find it interesting.
 
Hi guys,

As promised, I got up in the middle of the night to check out whether the channa dal had a really long processing time.

I had a fairly good portion of channa dal cooked with spices and tinned tomatoes and a cup of broccoli.

BG readings were:

Pre-meal (7.20pm) 4.8
1 hour post meal 5.0
2 hours post meal 5.2
Before bed (11pm) 5.3
Night (2.30am) 5.0

Before breakfast (fasting) glucose at 9.30am today (well I am on holiday :lol: ) was 5.3.

Looks like the channa dal works well for me. As a comparison, a Burgen bread sandwhich (2 slices) with houmous and salad sends my 1 hour post meal up to between 7 and 8! Although it does drop back again to pre meal level after another hour.

I'm on diet only at the mo (though told progression to insulin is a certaintity) so pleased I can at least eat channa without testing.

Hope this helps x
 
Hi Lizze7!

Did you eat split channa dal or the whole one - commonly called kala channa?
 
Asrar said:
Hi Lizze7!

Did you eat split channa dal or the whole one - commonly called kala channa?
Click to expand...

@Asrar just so you’re aware, you’ve commented on a very old post, so you may not get a reply from the OP.
 
Hi @Asrar, you may not get a reply but thanks for the post as otherwise I would not have seen this old thread and it has interested me in experimenting with channa dhal.
 
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