I've been messing around with this for most of last year as I was diagnosed with type one in early 2013. I made this account just now to post about this but I saw your thread so I'm just gonna put down everything I've learned here.
I guess I should mention I'm 20 years old, male 5'8" using Novorapid and Levemir just in case it matters to anyone. So I got really into lowering my Hba1c for obvious reasons, when I was diagnosed it was something like 16 in the old conversion which is roughly 151 in the units you're familar with. I tried going low carb I was eating less than 70 carbs a day not really sure how well that went but my blood sugars rarely went above 9mmol post meal and sat around 4-5 most of the day. My most recent Hba1c was 5.1 or a 32. So I'm sticking with that kind of diet.
Things I've found through my own trial and error and research (currently doing Bachelors in Applied chemistry and have easy access to and poured through scores of peer reviewed studies,). Hopefully this helps you out a bit so you don't have to start from scratch
- The GI index is lousy at best. It can be a decent guideline but for the most part it sucks, not accurate and there is far too much error varying from individual to individual. Not to mention it does not apply at all when you start to mix foods. Some countries have removed the GIycemic index from food labels as it was evaluated as being too misleading.
(
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/98/2/269.abstract)
- Wholegrain is mostly a gimmick when it comes to slow releasing sugars and using the lousy GI index that most companies do makes it even more misleading; I tracked my blood sugars every half an hour after eating various foods and found that my sugars would peak at 13-14 with all wholegrain breads and cereals. They just don't work. Even with the high amount of fibre(possibly due to most of the fibre being insolube as opposed to soluble fibre?).
If you've ever studied metabolic biochemical reactions you know that a high surface area to volume ration like a powder reacts quite quickly and readily as opposed to larger volume solid pieces and when we really get down to it bread and other wholegrains are ground into fine powders and once in your stomach they disperse very quickly and you get the sugar spike. I have however found some success with whole oats but anything less than that such as quick oats or cut oats seem to behave more or less terribly.
- When I was first diagnosed my cholesterol was dangerously high even though I never ate high fat foods etc. Most people have the misconception that saturated fat causes heart disease when in fact having a higher on average blood sugar causes cardiovascular disease, anyhow I eat a high fat diet now and my cholesterol levels have been fantastic better than average in fact. So that heart foundation tick you see on many food products is pretty much bogus.
(
http://ajcn.nutrition.org/content/early/2010/01/13/ajcn.2009.27725.abstract)
(
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1445-5994.1994.tb04444.x/abstract)
(
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11584104)
- There have only really been a couple of carbohydrate sources that I've had that have ever kept my postmeal levels fairly even and they include only blueberries, black berries, uncut rolled oats and legumes. Lentils are far superior than all of them. I usually sit at 4.1-5.5 before meals after eating about 300g of lentils as I do everyday for dinner my BS levels go from 4.1->5.0->6.0->5.5->4.x over four hours. The other foods go as high as 7-8 at around 2 hrs post meal and come back down.
I've just realised how much I've written so i guess I should stop here! Sorry for the poor formatting I just kind of dumped thoughts out as they came to me, I've tried to cite a few journals but I'm not familiar with this forums formatting options so they're just printed links.
EDIT: If anyone wants to know what my meals typically look like during the day or any other info I'd be happy to keep posting here.
, I went with the spike of 14 because of either the portion size required to eat 250g of carbs in one sitting or simply the quality of carbohydrate that would allow you to eat that much in one meal.
