4 ms·

White wheat flour has a higher glycemic index than table sugar[0]. High GI foods can lead to blood sugar spikes, potentially to ”impaired insulin sensitivity” [

• EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Okay, your first link states that potatoes and white rice also have a higher GI than sucrose, which makes sense, as they'd have a more complex set of sugars when cooked as the starch chains break down. Meanwhile, pasta made from white flour has a lower GI than white bread, but also lower than sucrose. Which also makes sense, as bread has sugar added to it as part of the baking process, and also to enhance consumer uptake in certain markets. (US bread contains more added sugar than bread in my country). So, this leads me to a clarifying question or two: 1) What is the incidence of type 2 diabetes in Italy and SE Asia? Given the prevalence of pasta in the former, and rice in the latter. 2) In your country, is white bread really the main source of daily carbohydrates? I totally agree that eating huge amounts of refined carbohydrates is unhealthy, but I haven't seen anything here that shows that white flour as a part of a balanced diet will inherently make you sick.
  • adrian_b 4y ago
    I agree with you. The glycemic index from that table just shows that a certain kind of white wheat bread is digested faster than pure sucrose, but slower than boiled potatoes. The effect of any food that contains starch or sugar depends not only on the glycemic index, but also on the ingested amount. Moreover, the effect of eating bread depends on the other food that is ingested at the same time, which will slow down the digestion and lower the glycemic index in comparison with eating just bread alone, without anything else. Sweet food with high sugar content is much more likely to be eaten alone than bread. While the digestion speed for any pure sugar or for boiled potatoes or rice is about the same for any kind of sugar, potatoes or rice, there is a huge number of varieties of bread, which are digested at different rates and which have different glycemic indexes. From a table like that it is not possible to know what kind of bread has been tested. For example, I make at home a special kind of bread with very high protein content (about 40% protein, while the commercial breads have less than 10% protein). It is made using only white wheat flour and water, but the dough is washed to remove about 75% of the starch, enriching the dough in gluten. I can bet that such a white wheat bread has a glycemic index much lower than sucrose.
• Gordonjcp 4y ago
  Yeah, no. That's not a real thing. Have you any evidence for that actually being a real thing?