…and a Carb is not a Carb.
More specifically a day’s carbs is not a day’s carbs.
OK, I’ll stop talking in riddles now. I made an amazing discovery last week as I was tracking all my nutritional numbers (Calories, Carbs, Protein, Fat and Glucose).
Now this may be very obvious to some people, but it wasn’t to me.
Every evening I test my blood sugar level, then I check it again 8 hours later when I get up in the morning, so I can track my fasting glucose level. Last Tuesday, my bedtime reading was a healthy 93. Wednesday evening it was a whopping 151. What happened?
I checked my numbers from one day to the next and this is what I discovered:
Tuesday:
- Calories 3198
- Fat 159 grams
- Carbs 267 grams
- Protein 151 grams
- Glucose 93 mg/dL
Wednesday:
- Calories 3393
- Fat 200 grams
- Carbs 220 grams
- Protein 156 grams
- Glucose 151 mg/dL
This amazed me, I had a higher carbohydrate intake on Tuesday, with a bedtime reading of 93, than I had on Wednesday, with a reading of 151. How can this be?
Well when I looked at what I ate and when I ate it, I discovered that most of my daily carb intake was at dinnertime on Wednesday. And that carb source was Jasmine Rice. So three hours later, when I got ready for bed and took that last reading of the day, I was still buzzing from the high Glycemic Load of my one cup serving of rice. To test my theory that the rice was the issue, I had the same dinner on Thursday, but with asparagus instead of rice.
Thursday:
- Calories 3084
- Fat 210 grams
- Carbs 160 grams
- Protein 121 grams
- Glucose 97 mg/dL
This exercise was a wonderful reminder that statistics can lie, if you don’t pay attention to how the numbers were gathered. 3200 calories and 200 grams of carbs are very different when consumed over the course of twelve hours, versus one evening meal. Imagine what a number we do on ourselves with a traditional Thanksgiving Day dinner, where we load up on bread stuffing, sweet potatoes, pies and assorted other carb-laden treats. Is it any wonder we crash after dinner?
As we are growing more conscious of what we put into our bodies, we may also need to pay more attention to when and how frequently we consume these foods when done in a short span of time.
I would be curious if you were to measure the glucose after ANY high carb meal, evening or morning. Could be that it’s also a matter of the meal itself and not just the when. Do you see a difference if it’s a high carb meal post workout vs. a high carb meal not post workout, assuming same time of day? How quickly does glucose return to baseline? So many experiments!
Greg, I have done some experiments to test glucose before a meal to establish a baseline, then tested again 1 hour and 2 hours after a meal. It is my understanding that in theory, your blood sugar should return to the pre-meal level after about two hours. If I stated that incorrectly, I will gladly accept correction from FXG. Regarding ANY high carb meal, I suggest you revisit my post on White Rice, the issue of Glycemic Index and Glycemic load. I imagine you could consume two foods with the same amount of Carb Grams, but the GI will determine how high your blood sugar will spike.