How to Avoid the Scary “carbohydrate Coma”
Foods high in carbohydrates are known to make you feel hungry and irritable throughout the day, not to mention gaining weight. But if you really want to eat pasta and potatoes, you can make food easier for your body by adding other foods to it. Bacon pancakes are better than pancakes alone.
First, let’s talk about what carbohydrates really are:
- Sugar mainly includes glucose, fructose, and sucrose, as well as table sugar (which is made up of glucose and fructose combined in pairs). There are a few other sugars, like lactose, that you may have heard of.
- The starch found in bread, potatoes, and rice is actually made up of sugar: just glucose molecules bound together. After digestion, it turns into a pile of glucose (but more on that in a minute).
- Fiber is also made up of sugars, but they are tied together in such a way that it is difficult for our bodies to break down into pieces. This is why there are so many bacteria in our large intestine : they digest fiber that we cannot.
Carbohydrates include all three components, but we often use this word to refer to starch. The term ” complex carbohydrates ” is even more misunderstood and is often used to refer to fiber, but for a biochemist or nutritionist, both starch and fiber are “complex” because they are made up of many sugar molecules glued together.
What Happens to Carbohydrates After You Have Eaten Them
The starch is not digested until the food leaves the stomach and into the small intestine. There, the starch is broken down into its constituent sugars, and the sugars (along with other components of your food, such as amino acids from protein) can be absorbed into your bloodstream.
Here’s the problem: if everything you ate was sugar and starch – say, you have toast with jelly and juice, or pancakes and syrup – that means a lot of sugar is absorbed right away, rather quickly after you eat it. This leads to a fairly high rise in blood sugar (which is especially bad if you have diabetes), and your pancreas must use a lot of insulin to send signals to other cells in your body, including fat, muscle, and liver, to absorb sugar already. and get it out of the bloodstream. Sometimes this reaction is overreact and your blood sugar can drop too low , causing you to experience a “carbohydrate coma” or daytime slump shortly after a meal: you may be tired, moody, or hungry.
If your symptoms are mild, your body can tolerate high-carb foods just fine. But if your “carbohydrate coma” is too strong or annoying, or if you and your doctor are worried about your blood sugar levels for health reasons, you can add something to these carbohydrate-rich foods .
How to reduce the effects of carbohydrates on your body
If you eat these bacon pancakes instead, or swap the juice for milk and jelly for peanut butter, you’ll be eating a mixture of carbs with other ingredients. Protein and fat slow down how quickly intestinal cells can pump sugar into the bloodstream.
As a result, even if the same amount of sugar is absorbed, it happens over a longer period of time, and your blood sugar level will be lower at the moment than the spike you got from a breakfast of pancakes only. Your blood sugar is more likely to drop rather than plummet.
We say these foods have a lower glycemic load , a number that reflects how high blood sugar levels can rise after you eat them. A related concept is theglycemic index , but it is less useful because the numbers you can find on charts like this are based on grams of carbs, not actual serving sizes. So, the graphs compare, say, a piece of bread to a bucket of watermelon.
If you’re looking for a glycemic load, remember that you are digesting food , not food. Sweet potatoes have a lower glycemic load than , for example, white potatoes , but the carbohydrates from baked potatoes are absorbed more slowly than from sweet potatoes with brown sugar and marshmallows.
Rather than obeying glycemic load calculations, it’s best to remember a few rules of thumb:
- Starch and sugar are digested quickly, but
- Fat , protein and fiber slow down digestion.
Therefore, if you want to avoid spikes and drops in blood sugar, add a lot of foods from the second category – fat, protein, and fiber – to meals that already contain carbohydrates. For example, when making a smoothie , add peanut butter or protein powder and make a light juice. If ordering dinner, slow down the pasta with creamy sauce and salad. And if you do eat pancakes, don’t forget the bacon.
Vitals is a new blog from Lifehacker dedicated to health and fitness. Follow us on Twitter here .