21 ms·

An Insulin Index of Foods (1994)

186 points by micaeloliveira 8y ago

estsauver 8y ago
The really crazy effect of insulin is how it interacts with aging. The link between insulin and aging is super well understood. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2906894/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2906894/ If you're interested in the Ted talk version: https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_kenyon_experiments_that_hint_of_longer_lives?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_kenyon_experiments_that_hi... She now works at Calico, Google's longevity play. If there was one area I was going to do something besides agriculture this is what I would work on.
- wdewind 8y ago
  > The link between insulin and aging is super well understood. This is really overstated. The paper is a paper on round worms, which is really one step above basic cellular science (which is important but only a building block of the whole picture). We do not have large scale, epidemiological studies about sugar, and the ones that we do don't point to sugar behaving differently than other calories with regards to health outcomes. The problem is blood sugar not dietary sugar, and it turns out high blood sugar can come from many places that are not dietary sugar, and a calorically controlled diet that is high in sugar does not result in high average blood sugar levels.
  - estsauver 8y ago
    * Agreed on blood sugar vs. dietary sugar. * This paper launched a whole series of mouse studies.
    - wdewind 8y ago
      If you have any that disambiguate between average and peak blood glucose levels I would be really interested in reading them! To my knowledge no one is really studying this because it is hard and if you are successful proving that knowledge we came up with in the 50s still holds isn't very attractive for most research institutes :(
MrBuddyCasino 8y ago
2015 study finds that the glycemic index varies widely depending on the individual: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/11/20/the-diet-study-that-upends-everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-healthy-food/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/1...
- tracker1 8y ago
  Particularly on the level of insulin resistance/diabetes.
- SilasX 8y ago
  I don't see where that link says that? All I find is a remark about how GI isn't the be-all-end-all of weight loss. Also, the GI would still be relevant even if it varies, because what you really want to know is the relative GI, and the ordering should at least be preserved across individuals, right? Like if watermelons have a much higher GI than nuts in the table, you're probably not going to find someone whose personal GI is higher for nuts than watermelon?
IdontRememberIt 8y ago
My wife had gestational diabetes. She had to mesure and log the values and her food. She is from the north of europe and I am from the south europe. Actually, her body gave permutated values between potatoes and pasta. In a same condition (starting G level, same plate, same quantities, same level of activity, same hour, etc), she could eat potatoes without issue, pasta (even whole wheat) was systematically making her GI skyrocket. It was the opposite for me. A tool to mesure your G level is very instructive.
- ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
  So many people don't realize this. There is a lot more to it than just this sandwich has 200 carbs. Each person is processing things differently. I'm hoping someday for a startup that makes it easy for me to track my insulin response for all my favorite foods so I can make better choices. After testing on my own I found that the "sugar free Worthers candy" I was eating on my failing low carb diet, actually triggered the same change in my blood sugar as the non "sugar free" version of the candy. I guess this is because some artificial sweeteners act like REAL sugar for some people.
  - johnkpaul 8y ago
    I found the same with the amount of sugar that's in a Splenda packet. Some of us are just very very sensitive to carbohydrates and live our whole lives without realizing.
- LockNess0 8y ago
  If she was Northern European, she evolved with potatoes, and you, a Southern European, evolved with Pasta, clearly /s
- yaronhadad 8y ago
  You can use the Nutrino FoodPrint app to measure it
micaeloliveira 8y ago
"Why should you read this paper? Glucose and insulin are two of the most important elements of metabolism. In an oversimplified nutshell - when we consume food our blood glucose usually increases. Consequently, the pancreas secretes insulin which lowers the glucose levels back to normal. Insulin is a hormone and is often considered to be the principal regulator of fat storage in the body (this is a bit controversial, but is mostly considered correct. Read the book "Why we get fat" by Gary Taubes for more info). Therefore knowing how the foods we eat spike our insulin levels can be helpful in determining what should be eaten for weight loss."
keymone 8y ago
> However, some proteinand fat-rich foods (eggs, beef, fish, lentils, cheese, cake, anddoughnuts) induced as much insulin secretion as did some carbohydrate-rich foods (eg, beef was equal to brown rice andfish was equal to grain bread). what? that makes zero sense, at least in case with fat. anybody got quick explanation for this? Edit: found the TLDR explanation in another part of the paper > postprandial insulin responses are not always proportional to blood glucose concentrations or to a meal's totalcarbohydrate content. Several insulinotropic factors are knownto potentiate the stimulatory effect of glucose and mediatepostprandial insulin secretion. These include fructose, certainamino acids and fatty acids, and gastrointestinal hormones suchas gastric inhibitory peptide, glucagon, and cholecystokiin(25, 26). Thus, protein- and fat-rich foods may induce substantial insulin secretion despite producing relatively small bloodglucose responses.
- wdewind 8y ago
  This actually makes a ton of sense and is what people on the sidelines of the insulin debate have been screaming since Gary Taubes starting publishing his work about dietary sugar. Unfortunately it's given people a very non-nuanced view of the science. The problem is not dietary sugar, it is blood sugar levels, which are elevated by many things (including protein and fat), but more than anything by excess calories. The problem is not peak blood sugar levels, it is average blood sugar levels. Edit: to quickly reply to your TLDR edit: > Thus, protein- and fat-rich foods may induce substantial insulin secretion despite producing relatively small bloodglucose responses. This is only true if you completely ignore everything else going on in the body. Gluconeogenesis is a thing, and just because dietary fat or protein doesn't immediately increase blood sugar levels does not mean long term they don't. This stuff can't just be looked at as "input/output" you have to take into consideration the existing state of the person before the input. /edit You can reason about this fairly easily: take a caloric intake of 2000 calories consumed all at once vs in 10 meals over the day. The all at once crowd gets a huge insulin spike. Oh no! Fat storage, right? Sure, but what happens the rest of the day when there is no dietary input? Fat burn! The 10 meals/day crowd probably never gets as high blood sugar levels, but also has much higher throughout the day, and accesses fat stores less. But guess what? Net the body is really pretty good at smoothing this stuff out, it's sort of the entire point of fat storage. Where this gets tricky is that high insulin can eventually lead to low blood sugar dips. People without diabetes can simply wait this out, and the body will start burning fat again and raise the blood sugar. But this also makes many people feel hungry, and so they eat more, which raises their average blood sugar levels, and the cycle continues. Some people have a hard time with this, others do not, but it's really important to understand that the insulin is causing people to consume more calories which is causing damage, not the insulin itself.
jwr 8y ago
Link to the page with the article downloadable as a PDF: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/66/5/1264/4655967 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/66/5/1264/4655967 (I really really hate web pages that take over a PDF, present a poorly-implemented crappy PDF reader experience and do not offer an easily-accessible "Download and read in a sane reader app" button)
- miguelrochefort 8y ago
  Their PDF reader actually freezes Chrome on my phone. I was forced to kill it.
  - DavideNL 8y ago
    ...and Firefox on macOS
joduplessis 8y ago
By far the biggest contribution I've made to my health has been being aware of insulin responses, so this is awesome. People don't realise how optional that mid-afternoon slump is or how un-necessary erratic energy levels are.
- gibsjose 8y ago
  I'd love to hear more about this. Could you expand on how you measure your insulin response and as a result how you avoid erratic energy levels?
  - yaronhadad 8y ago
    There isn't an easy way to measure insulin levels today. For glucose one can use CGMs
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
sleepysysadmin 8y ago
Carbs cause diabetes. https://www.diabetes.co.uk/reversing-diabetes.html https://www.diabetes.co.uk/reversing-diabetes.html
- sodosopa 8y ago
  That's Type 2 diabetes, which is misnamed since it's a completely different than Type 1 which honestly affects more people.
  - sleepysysadmin 8y ago
    https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet-for-type1-diabetes.html https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet-for-type1-diabetes.html You cant reverse type1 but if you cut carbs from your diet with type1 your diabetes stops being a problem. Plus, type 1 is fairly rare. >90% of diabetes is type2.
    - sodosopa 8y ago
      > if you cut carbs from your diet with type1 your diabetes stops being a problem. Look up "dawn syndrome". Your body sometimes works against this idea.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bad_user 8y ago
The glicemic index is basically a hoax that has nothing to do with reality simply because the glycemic response differs widely from person to person or even from one day to the next. Even more problematic is that it’s getting used on food packages as a marketing gimmick. I don’t see how an insulin index could be very different. If you care about the glycemic load, then stop eating refined carbs and sugar, it’s that simple. Note that fruits have insoluble fiber that delay digestion and feed your gut bacteria so fruits in their raw form are very different from sweets or even from fruit juice. So unless you’re metabolically deranged, you shouldn’t fear fruits, but you should fear fruit juice.
- sickrumbear 8y ago
  hmmm even if the response differs widely, wouldn't the index give an indication of the relative impact something would have? I've been reducing carbs and sugars, which aligns with lower GI foods, I don't really agree that its a hoax, it's helped me sustain energy levels throughout the day better.
  - bad_user 8y ago
    No, it wouldn't be, because that relative impact also differs from person to person. And it is more useful to just look at the carbs, sugars and fiber content. Do you know how the glycemic index came to be? They used just 10 healthy people for the experiments. It's a hoax on the same level as homeopathy.
- yaronhadad 8y ago
  Glycemic and insulin index are averages and should be interpreted as such. But that being said, it doesn't mean that they are not interesting. If you don't have a way to measure them yourself (=most people) then it's better to know average values than not to know anything at all...
  - bad_user 8y ago
    It isn't true that you don't know anything at all. You simply look at the carbs and the sugars, which are required to be shown for package foods. Glucose in the bloodstream comes directly from carbs. So here are 3 simple rules: 1. if a food is high in carbs and low on fiber, then your blood glucose is going to spike 2. if it's prepackaged / processed food and high in carbs, it doesn't matter what else they claim on the package, your blood glucose is going to spike 3. if a food is low on carbs, then your blood glucose is going to stay low The reason for why the glycemic index is a hoax is because it gives a free pass to _fructose_, because fructose leads to a somewhat lower glucose circulating in the blood stream after your meal, because fructose needs to be metabolized in the liver first. However this mentality is a trap because as a mater of fact fructose is more toxic than glucose.
EamonnMR 8y ago
While we're recommending food books, check this one out: Why Calories Count by Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim https://www.amazon.com/Why-Calories-Count-Politics-California/dp/0520280059 https://www.amazon.com/Why-Calories-Count-Politics-Californi...
riemannzeta 8y ago
Fascinated to see that both white AND brown rice are more insulinogenic than white pasta. That's one for the Mediterranean diet.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
JonesWilly 8y ago
From a physicians standpoint I am very impressed with the accuracy of the comments on this article. There are a few sticking points/arguable conjectures being made but overall an excellent discourse on a multifaceted topic such as insulin/glucose metabolism....
INTPenis 8y ago
I need to give this a good read. My dad is diabetic and his doctor told him that cinnamon is good for blood sugar levels. It's not in this study though. He was also told to avoid rice and potatoes. He manages quite well and the doctors are astonished at his low blood sugar measurements every day.
- m0zg 8y ago
  >> cinnamon is good for blood sugar levels Medical errors are the third most common cause of death in the US. Let's just say this is strong evidence that not all doctors know how to do all that doctor-related stuff. Some of them just charge you through the nose and hope that you won't die.
- GordonS 8y ago
  I have reactive hypoglycemia, so I need to keep my carb intake really low, or I have a hypo. The absolute worst thing I can eat is potatoes - their GI is higher than that of pure glucose, and sure enough I'll hypo only 30 minutes after eating them! I spent a lot of time reading about and testing various things to see if they could allow me to eat carbs while keeping my blood sugar down. I tried cinnamon, but found no difference in my blood sugar readings (but cinnamon tea is quite delicious!). The only thing I found that reduced my blood sugar was turmeric. Problem is that when it reduces your blood sugar is quite unpredictable, and actually caused me to hypo quite badly (I presume it depends on what else you eat).

The really crazy effect of insulin is how it interacts with aging. The link between insulin and aging is super well understood. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2906894/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2906894/ If you're interested in the Ted talk version: https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_kenyon_experiments_that_hint_of_longer_lives?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/cynthia_kenyon_experiments_that_hi... She now works at Calico, Google's longevity play. If there was one area I was going to do something besides agriculture this is what I would work on.

wdewind 8y ago
> The link between insulin and aging is super well understood. This is really overstated. The paper is a paper on round worms, which is really one step above basic cellular science (which is important but only a building block of the whole picture). We do not have large scale, epidemiological studies about sugar, and the ones that we do don't point to sugar behaving differently than other calories with regards to health outcomes. The problem is blood sugar not dietary sugar, and it turns out high blood sugar can come from many places that are not dietary sugar, and a calorically controlled diet that is high in sugar does not result in high average blood sugar levels.
- estsauver 8y ago
  * Agreed on blood sugar vs. dietary sugar. * This paper launched a whole series of mouse studies.
  - wdewind 8y ago
    If you have any that disambiguate between average and peak blood glucose levels I would be really interested in reading them! To my knowledge no one is really studying this because it is hard and if you are successful proving that knowledge we came up with in the 50s still holds isn't very attractive for most research institutes :(

MrBuddyCasino 8y ago

2015 study finds that the glycemic index varies widely depending on the individual: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/11/20/the-diet-study-that-upends-everything-we-thought-we-knew-about-healthy-food/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/1...

tracker1 8y ago
Particularly on the level of insulin resistance/diabetes.
SilasX 8y ago
I don't see where that link says that? All I find is a remark about how GI isn't the be-all-end-all of weight loss. Also, the GI would still be relevant even if it varies, because what you really want to know is the relative GI, and the ordering should at least be preserved across individuals, right? Like if watermelons have a much higher GI than nuts in the table, you're probably not going to find someone whose personal GI is higher for nuts than watermelon?

IdontRememberIt 8y ago

My wife had gestational diabetes. She had to mesure and log the values and her food. She is from the north of europe and I am from the south europe. Actually, her body gave permutated values between potatoes and pasta. In a same condition (starting G level, same plate, same quantities, same level of activity, same hour, etc), she could eat potatoes without issue, pasta (even whole wheat) was systematically making her GI skyrocket. It was the opposite for me. A tool to mesure your G level is very instructive.

ghostbrainalpha 8y ago
So many people don't realize this. There is a lot more to it than just this sandwich has 200 carbs. Each person is processing things differently. I'm hoping someday for a startup that makes it easy for me to track my insulin response for all my favorite foods so I can make better choices. After testing on my own I found that the "sugar free Worthers candy" I was eating on my failing low carb diet, actually triggered the same change in my blood sugar as the non "sugar free" version of the candy. I guess this is because some artificial sweeteners act like REAL sugar for some people.
- johnkpaul 8y ago
  I found the same with the amount of sugar that's in a Splenda packet. Some of us are just very very sensitive to carbohydrates and live our whole lives without realizing.
LockNess0 8y ago
If she was Northern European, she evolved with potatoes, and you, a Southern European, evolved with Pasta, clearly /s
yaronhadad 8y ago
You can use the Nutrino FoodPrint app to measure it

micaeloliveira 8y ago

"Why should you read this paper? Glucose and insulin are two of the most important elements of metabolism. In an oversimplified nutshell - when we consume food our blood glucose usually increases. Consequently, the pancreas secretes insulin which lowers the glucose levels back to normal. Insulin is a hormone and is often considered to be the principal regulator of fat storage in the body (this is a bit controversial, but is mostly considered correct. Read the book "Why we get fat" by Gary Taubes for more info). Therefore knowing how the foods we eat spike our insulin levels can be helpful in determining what should be eaten for weight loss."

keymone 8y ago

> However, some proteinand fat-rich foods (eggs, beef, fish, lentils, cheese, cake, anddoughnuts) induced as much insulin secretion as did some carbohydrate-rich foods (eg, beef was equal to brown rice andfish was equal to grain bread). what? that makes zero sense, at least in case with fat. anybody got quick explanation for this? Edit: found the TLDR explanation in another part of the paper > postprandial insulin responses are not always proportional to blood glucose concentrations or to a meal's totalcarbohydrate content. Several insulinotropic factors are knownto potentiate the stimulatory effect of glucose and mediatepostprandial insulin secretion. These include fructose, certainamino acids and fatty acids, and gastrointestinal hormones suchas gastric inhibitory peptide, glucagon, and cholecystokiin(25, 26). Thus, protein- and fat-rich foods may induce substantial insulin secretion despite producing relatively small bloodglucose responses.

wdewind 8y ago
This actually makes a ton of sense and is what people on the sidelines of the insulin debate have been screaming since Gary Taubes starting publishing his work about dietary sugar. Unfortunately it's given people a very non-nuanced view of the science. The problem is not dietary sugar, it is blood sugar levels, which are elevated by many things (including protein and fat), but more than anything by excess calories. The problem is not peak blood sugar levels, it is average blood sugar levels. Edit: to quickly reply to your TLDR edit: > Thus, protein- and fat-rich foods may induce substantial insulin secretion despite producing relatively small bloodglucose responses. This is only true if you completely ignore everything else going on in the body. Gluconeogenesis is a thing, and just because dietary fat or protein doesn't immediately increase blood sugar levels does not mean long term they don't. This stuff can't just be looked at as "input/output" you have to take into consideration the existing state of the person before the input. /edit You can reason about this fairly easily: take a caloric intake of 2000 calories consumed all at once vs in 10 meals over the day. The all at once crowd gets a huge insulin spike. Oh no! Fat storage, right? Sure, but what happens the rest of the day when there is no dietary input? Fat burn! The 10 meals/day crowd probably never gets as high blood sugar levels, but also has much higher throughout the day, and accesses fat stores less. But guess what? Net the body is really pretty good at smoothing this stuff out, it's sort of the entire point of fat storage. Where this gets tricky is that high insulin can eventually lead to low blood sugar dips. People without diabetes can simply wait this out, and the body will start burning fat again and raise the blood sugar. But this also makes many people feel hungry, and so they eat more, which raises their average blood sugar levels, and the cycle continues. Some people have a hard time with this, others do not, but it's really important to understand that the insulin is causing people to consume more calories which is causing damage, not the insulin itself.

jwr 8y ago

Link to the page with the article downloadable as a PDF: https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/66/5/1264/4655967 https://academic.oup.com/ajcn/article/66/5/1264/4655967 (I really really hate web pages that take over a PDF, present a poorly-implemented crappy PDF reader experience and do not offer an easily-accessible "Download and read in a sane reader app" button)

miguelrochefort 8y ago
Their PDF reader actually freezes Chrome on my phone. I was forced to kill it.
- DavideNL 8y ago
  ...and Firefox on macOS

joduplessis 8y ago

By far the biggest contribution I've made to my health has been being aware of insulin responses, so this is awesome. People don't realise how optional that mid-afternoon slump is or how un-necessary erratic energy levels are.

gibsjose 8y ago
I'd love to hear more about this. Could you expand on how you measure your insulin response and as a result how you avoid erratic energy levels?
- yaronhadad 8y ago
  There isn't an easy way to measure insulin levels today. For glucose one can use CGMs

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

sleepysysadmin 8y ago

Carbs cause diabetes. https://www.diabetes.co.uk/reversing-diabetes.html https://www.diabetes.co.uk/reversing-diabetes.html

sodosopa 8y ago
That's Type 2 diabetes, which is misnamed since it's a completely different than Type 1 which honestly affects more people.
- sleepysysadmin 8y ago
  https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet-for-type1-diabetes.html https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet-for-type1-diabetes.html You cant reverse type1 but if you cut carbs from your diet with type1 your diabetes stops being a problem. Plus, type 1 is fairly rare. >90% of diabetes is type2.
  - sodosopa 8y ago
    > if you cut carbs from your diet with type1 your diabetes stops being a problem. Look up "dawn syndrome". Your body sometimes works against this idea.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

bad_user 8y ago

The glicemic index is basically a hoax that has nothing to do with reality simply because the glycemic response differs widely from person to person or even from one day to the next. Even more problematic is that it’s getting used on food packages as a marketing gimmick. I don’t see how an insulin index could be very different. If you care about the glycemic load, then stop eating refined carbs and sugar, it’s that simple. Note that fruits have insoluble fiber that delay digestion and feed your gut bacteria so fruits in their raw form are very different from sweets or even from fruit juice. So unless you’re metabolically deranged, you shouldn’t fear fruits, but you should fear fruit juice.

sickrumbear 8y ago
hmmm even if the response differs widely, wouldn't the index give an indication of the relative impact something would have? I've been reducing carbs and sugars, which aligns with lower GI foods, I don't really agree that its a hoax, it's helped me sustain energy levels throughout the day better.
- bad_user 8y ago
  No, it wouldn't be, because that relative impact also differs from person to person. And it is more useful to just look at the carbs, sugars and fiber content. Do you know how the glycemic index came to be? They used just 10 healthy people for the experiments. It's a hoax on the same level as homeopathy.
yaronhadad 8y ago
Glycemic and insulin index are averages and should be interpreted as such. But that being said, it doesn't mean that they are not interesting. If you don't have a way to measure them yourself (=most people) then it's better to know average values than not to know anything at all...
- bad_user 8y ago
  It isn't true that you don't know anything at all. You simply look at the carbs and the sugars, which are required to be shown for package foods. Glucose in the bloodstream comes directly from carbs. So here are 3 simple rules: 1. if a food is high in carbs and low on fiber, then your blood glucose is going to spike 2. if it's prepackaged / processed food and high in carbs, it doesn't matter what else they claim on the package, your blood glucose is going to spike 3. if a food is low on carbs, then your blood glucose is going to stay low The reason for why the glycemic index is a hoax is because it gives a free pass to _fructose_, because fructose leads to a somewhat lower glucose circulating in the blood stream after your meal, because fructose needs to be metabolized in the liver first. However this mentality is a trap because as a mater of fact fructose is more toxic than glucose.

EamonnMR 8y ago

While we're recommending food books, check this one out: Why Calories Count by Marion Nestle and Malden Nesheim https://www.amazon.com/Why-Calories-Count-Politics-California/dp/0520280059 https://www.amazon.com/Why-Calories-Count-Politics-Californi...

riemannzeta 8y ago

Fascinated to see that both white AND brown rice are more insulinogenic than white pasta. That's one for the Mediterranean diet.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

JonesWilly 8y ago

From a physicians standpoint I am very impressed with the accuracy of the comments on this article. There are a few sticking points/arguable conjectures being made but overall an excellent discourse on a multifaceted topic such as insulin/glucose metabolism....

INTPenis 8y ago

I need to give this a good read. My dad is diabetic and his doctor told him that cinnamon is good for blood sugar levels. It's not in this study though. He was also told to avoid rice and potatoes. He manages quite well and the doctors are astonished at his low blood sugar measurements every day.

m0zg 8y ago
>> cinnamon is good for blood sugar levels Medical errors are the third most common cause of death in the US. Let's just say this is strong evidence that not all doctors know how to do all that doctor-related stuff. Some of them just charge you through the nose and hope that you won't die.
GordonS 8y ago
I have reactive hypoglycemia, so I need to keep my carb intake really low, or I have a hypo. The absolute worst thing I can eat is potatoes - their GI is higher than that of pure glucose, and sure enough I'll hypo only 30 minutes after eating them! I spent a lot of time reading about and testing various things to see if they could allow me to eat carbs while keeping my blood sugar down. I tried cinnamon, but found no difference in my blood sugar readings (but cinnamon tea is quite delicious!). The only thing I found that reduced my blood sugar was turmeric. Problem is that when it reduces your blood sugar is quite unpredictable, and actually caused me to hypo quite badly (I presume it depends on what else you eat).