Managing Blood Sugar with Resistant Starch

I'm going to show you how you can eat high carbohydrate foods like bread, potatoes and rice without getting a huge spike, that massive rise in your blood sugar. So let's look at how you can reduce blood sugar spikes with resistant starch. There are three main types of food you're eating in your diet. You have the carbohydrates, you have fats and you have protein. The types of food that raise your blood sugar, that's your blood glucose, the most are going to be the carbohydrates. Carbohydrate foods include potatoes, yam, rice, beans, bread, corn, bananas, mangoes, sugar and lots more. Potatoes, rice, pasta and bread contain starch. Starch is a carbohydrate that's made up of glucose. arranged like a string of beads or pearls, one joined to another, joined to another. When you eat your potatoes, for example, it goes into your stomach and your body starts breaking down and cutting up this big starch molecule to release the glucose. This glucose then goes into your blood and raises your blood glucose, that's your blood sugar. There are two main types of starch. when you're thinking about your blood sugar. You have regular starch and you have resistant starch. The great thing about resistant starch is that your body can't break it down to release the glucose. So the resistant starch stays in your gut and it behaves like fiber. It feeds the good bacteria in your gut. Foods that contain a lot of resistant starch include fiber. Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, yam, green bananas, green plantains, beans and peas and tiger nuts. But unfortunately, once you cook these foods, you destroy the resistant starch in them and it becomes just like regular starch and it will raise your blood sugar when you eat it. But after... cooking your potatoes, rice and pasta and other starchy foods in water, something interesting happens. When you cool these foods in the fridge overnight, some of the regular starch that would raise your blood sugar gets turned into a different type of resistant starch. And then if you heat up these foods and cool them again, you get even more of this resistant starch. And the great thing is that heating doesn't destroy this type of resistant starch. You can get the same effect with bread if you freeze it and then defrost it before eating. Using this method, you can reduce the rise in your blood sugar by up to 40%. Another great thing about eating resistant starch itself is that It makes your body more sensitive to insulin over time. That means that when you eat, your blood sugar won't go up as much as it would have before. So that's why you need to start thinking about what you're going to eat one or two days ahead. So you can go through this process of heating and cooling to make sure that these foods won't raise your blood sugar. as much when you eat them. So I have an extra tip for you when it comes to cooking rice. Adding coconut oil to the rice while it's boiling and then cooling it in the fridge overnight may increase the amount of resistant starch even more. There are three drinks that can stop your blood sugar from rising after eating starchy food. The first two I recommend, the third one I don't but I still have to mention it. So the first thing that you can drink is lemon or lime juice. Either one is fine. Of course you're better off with the fresh lemon or lime juice because of the vitamin C and the antioxidants but what you really want there is the acid. So we have an enzyme in our saliva called salivary amylase and what this does is that it breaks down starch into smaller units which eventually give you glucose. When you take acid with your starch it stops the salivary amylase from working. So the starch doesn't get broken down and you don't get the glucose going into your blood. Another thing that this acid does is that it slows down the rate at which your stomach empties, which means that you feel fuller for longer and you're less likely to snack. And so the process of digestion is slowed down so that even when glucose eventually goes into your blood, the rise is much slower and more gradual. The second thing you can drink is vinegar and I'm sure you've heard a lot about apple cider vinegar, vinegar with the mother, raw, filtered and all that. It really doesn't matter. Any kind of vinegar will work. So that means that you can use white vinegar, apple cider vinegar, rice vinegar, whatever. The important thing is that the vinegar shouldn't have any sugar added to it. And vinegar works much the same way as lemon or lime juice, but it has some added benefits. It works on your muscles so that it helps them to soak up sugar from your blood. And then apple cider vinegar in particular has antioxidants and polyphenols from the apples that are used to make the vinegar. And then if you're taking vinegar that's raw and unfiltered. That means that it has the mother of vinegar, which acts as a probiotic, which can help if you've got gut issues. Another thing you can drink is wine. Yes, wine is a little bit acidic, but there are other ways in which it brings down your blood sugar. When you're not eating, your liver breaks down the carbohydrates that it stored away to give glucose. It also produces glucose from your protein and your fat. All this is to make sure that your blood sugar never falls below a certain level. When you drink alcohol, alcohol takes priority over anything else in your liver. So your liver will break down that alcohol first. And while it's breaking down this alcohol, it can't produce glucose from glycogen. and it can't produce glucose from protein and fat, which means that your blood sugar keeps going lower and lower. And if I were to rank these three drinks from worst to best, right at the bottom of the list would be wine, because yes, it does bring down your blood sugar, but it does it in a very unpredictable way. And when you're taking blood sugar lowering medicine, It's not a good idea to combine alcohol with that. Another problem is that when you have diabetes, you already have fatty liver. So when you drink alcohol, which also causes fatty liver, you're giving yourself double trouble. Then in second place on our ranking would be your lemon or lime juice because of the vitamin C and the antioxidants that are... in the fresh juice. And then at the top of the list would be vinegar, particularly apple cider vinegar because of one, the effect on the muscles to increase insulin sensitivity and the presence of the mother, which can help with gut problems. So to reduce the rise in blood sugar you would get from eating starchy food. We'll look at what you can do. before you start eating, during your meal and after your meal. So what do you do before you start eating? There are several options here. You can take two tablespoons of lemon or lime juice or vinegar, put that into half a glass of water and drink that. You can take a fiber supplement like cognac root or psyllium with lots of water. You can also take 5 grams of fenugreek powder or 500 milligrams of a fenugreek supplement. And then you can also take 400 milligrams of a Gymnema Sylvester supplement. And finally, you can eat a big plate of vegetables, especially leafy greens, before your meal. To get the maximum blood sugar lowering effect, You will take all these at least 30 minutes before your meal. These tips are very useful if you're going out for some function or a special occasion and you're not sure that there'll be healthy food there for you to eat. So we've talked about what to do before your meal. Now what do you do while you're eating to make sure that your blood sugar doesn't spike too high? First of all, never eat your carbohydrates naked. Always combine them with protein like meat, fish, eggs, with fat, with fiber like leafy vegetables. Combine them with at least one of these and if you can, all three. I have a document for you in the description that you can download that contains a list of different groups of foods so you'll know how to combine them and the link for that is in the description. If you're eating a salad that has a dressing. that's made up of oil and vinegar, then both of these will help to reduce the spike from any starch that you eat later on. So for example, if you eat an egg sandwich, the egg has fat and it has protein and you're combining that with the carbohydrates in the bread. If you eat rice, you can pair it with beans because the beans has fiber and a little bit of protein and the rice has starch. You can add a bit of butter or ghee, which is fat, to your starchy potatoes. And you can have your cooked starchy oatmeal with Greek yogurt, with nuts, seeds and berries, which will add fibre, protein and fat. If you're having a starter with your meal, make it vegetables. Don't start with bread. And then when you look at your plate, find the food that has the most fibre. That would typically be your vegetables and you would eat those first. And next you would eat your protein and your fat, which would be your meat, chicken, fish and so on. And then last of all, you would eat your starchy foods, which would be rice, potatoes, pasta, for example. But there are some situations where it isn't very practical to separate your food. eat one and then the other and then the other. For example, if you're eating spaghetti bolognese, it would be hard to eat the sauce first and then the spaghetti last. And then again, you don't want to suck all the joy out of eating. So you might just decide to eat everything together, which is just fine. And then, especially if you don't want to drink vinegar in water, you can find ways to add vinegar to your food. It can be in the form of a dressing on your vegetables or your salad, or you can try adding pickles. The Japanese use vinegar in rice. The Brits have vinegar with their fish and chips. So all these would help to reduce the spike from the carbs in these foods. So let's talk about what to do after your meal. But before that, you might be asking, why should I be worried about blood sugar spikes anyway? Well, the main function of glucose, which comes from your carbohydrates, is to go into your cells so you can use it for energy. When your cells keep getting flooded with so much sugar from repeated blood sugar spikes, at a point, they don't know what to do with all this sugar. If they can't use it fast enough, it just piles up inside your cells and you slow down. So if you're going on a journey with your car and you have a full tank of petrol or gasoline, you're going to get much further than the person who has half a tank of gasoline. So think of your pancreas as that car. Your pancreas produces insulin that helps to bring down your blood sugar. By the time you find out that you have high blood sugar, you've already lost half of the cells that produce insulin in your pancreas. So if you have diabetes, when it comes to bringing down your blood sugar after a meal, as far as your pancreas is concerned, you're starting your journey with half a tank of gas. So it's harder for you to bring down your blood sugar. And then there's another problem. When you have diabetes, you also have what we call insulin resistance. That means that Even when your pancreas does produce insulin, the insulin goes to your cells, asks them to open up and remove the sugar from your blood, and they refuse. And the sugar just stays in your blood. This makes it much more difficult to bring down your blood sugar after each blood sugar spike. And when you have all that sugar floating around in your system, it attaches itself to everything. And this can eventually cause heart disease, kidney problems and problems with memory, as well as wrinkles. And this is what we call browning. It's the same thing that happens when you toast a slice of bread. Once you toast it, you can't untoast it. And the more glucose spikes you have, the more sugar you have going around your body and the faster you're browning. on the inside. Even if you don't have high blood sugar, frequent blood sugar spikes tell your body to store fat. Apart from that, having your blood sugar swinging up and down all day affects the quality of your day-to-day life. You're more likely to have dizziness, brain fog, anxiety, food cravings, headaches. mood swings, nausea and constant hunger. When you eat a sugary snack you might feel great for a while and that's because of the happy hormone dopamine and this is released each time you get your sugar hit. Then as your blood sugar crashes you start feeling some of those negative effects that I mentioned earlier. Blood sugar spikes also depressed your immune system for a little while. And if you have the occasional blood sugar spike, it's not a big deal. But if you're having repeated spikes throughout the day, day in, day out, that means that there are large chunks of time when your immune system is not working at its best, which leaves you open to infections. So what do you do after your meal? Within 30 minutes of eating, get active for 10 to 20 minutes. If you can, longer than that. You can walk, you can dance, you can do some kickboxing, you can climb stairs, it doesn't matter. The most important thing is that you should be slightly breathless and you should try to move the big muscles of your body. That would be your trunk and your legs. And the great thing about muscle is that when it's active, it can actually take glucose out of the blood without insulin. And this is great for you if you have type 1 diabetes, because that means that you'd be injecting less insulin after your meals, which is always a good thing. So what do you do about snacks? Choose savory rather than sweet. Opt for things like cheese, nuts, vegetables with a dip. for example pickles, all those are good options, and choose starchy food rather than sugary food. I'll tell you why in a minute. And then drink some vinegar with your snack either before or within 30 minutes of having that snack. The reason why you would choose starchy rather than sweet is that vinegar acts on the way your body breaks down starch but it doesn't affect the way it breaks down sugar. So if you eat lots of sugar, your blood sugar will still go up even though you've taken vinegar. And all these tips would be even more effective if you combine them with everything you learn in this next video.

Carbohydrate foods include potatoes, yam, rice, beans, bread, corn, bananas, mangoes, sugar and lots more. Potatoes, rice, pasta and bread contain starch. Starch is a carbohydrate that's made up of glucose.

arranged like a string of beads or pearls, one joined to another, joined to another. When you eat your potatoes, for example, it goes into your stomach and your body starts breaking down and cutting up this big starch molecule to release the glucose. This glucose then goes into your blood and raises your blood glucose, that's your blood sugar.

There are two main types of starch. when you're thinking about your blood sugar. You have regular starch and you have resistant starch.

The great thing about resistant starch is that your body can't break it down to release the glucose. So the resistant starch stays in your gut and it behaves like fiber. It feeds the good bacteria in your gut.

Foods that contain a lot of resistant starch include fiber. Irish potatoes, sweet potatoes, yam, green bananas, green plantains, beans and peas and tiger nuts. But unfortunately, once you cook these foods, you destroy the resistant starch in them and it becomes just like regular starch and it will raise your blood sugar when you eat it. But after...

cooking your potatoes, rice and pasta and other starchy foods in water, something interesting happens. When you cool these foods in the fridge overnight, some of the regular starch that would raise your blood sugar gets turned into a different type of resistant starch. And then if you heat up these foods and cool them again, you get even more of this resistant starch. And the great thing is that heating doesn't destroy this type of resistant starch. You can get the same effect with bread if you freeze it and then defrost it before eating.

Using this method, you can reduce the rise in your blood sugar by up to 40%. Another great thing about eating resistant starch itself is that It makes your body more sensitive to insulin over time. That means that when you eat, your blood sugar won't go up as much as it would have before.

So that's why you need to start thinking about what you're going to eat one or two days ahead. So you can go through this process of heating and cooling to make sure that these foods won't raise your blood sugar. as much when you eat them.

So I have an extra tip for you when it comes to cooking rice. Adding coconut oil to the rice while it's boiling and then cooling it in the fridge overnight may increase the amount of resistant starch even more. There are three drinks that can stop your blood sugar from rising after eating starchy food. The first two I recommend, the third one I don't but I still have to mention it. So the first thing that you can drink is lemon or lime juice.

Either one is fine. Of course you're better off with the fresh lemon or lime juice because of the vitamin C and the antioxidants but what you really want there is the acid. So we have an enzyme in our saliva called salivary amylase and what this does is that it breaks down starch into smaller units which eventually give you glucose.

When you take acid with your starch it stops the salivary amylase from working. So the starch doesn't get broken down and you don't get the glucose going into your blood. Another thing that this acid does is that it slows down the rate at which your stomach empties, which means that you feel fuller for longer and you're less likely to snack. And so the process of digestion is slowed down so that even when glucose eventually goes into your blood, the rise is much slower and more gradual. The second thing you can drink is vinegar and I'm sure you've heard a lot about apple cider vinegar, vinegar with the mother, raw, filtered and all that.

It really doesn't matter. Any kind of vinegar will work. So that means that you can use white vinegar, apple cider vinegar, rice vinegar, whatever. The important thing is that the vinegar shouldn't have any sugar added to it. And vinegar works much the same way as lemon or lime juice, but it has some added benefits.

It works on your muscles so that it helps them to soak up sugar from your blood. And then apple cider vinegar in particular has antioxidants and polyphenols from the apples that are used to make the vinegar. And then if you're taking vinegar that's raw and unfiltered.

That means that it has the mother of vinegar, which acts as a probiotic, which can help if you've got gut issues. Another thing you can drink is wine. Yes, wine is a little bit acidic, but there are other ways in which it brings down your blood sugar.

When you're not eating, your liver breaks down the carbohydrates that it stored away to give glucose. It also produces glucose from your protein and your fat. All this is to make sure that your blood sugar never falls below a certain level. When you drink alcohol, alcohol takes priority over anything else in your liver. So your liver will break down that alcohol first.

And while it's breaking down this alcohol, it can't produce glucose from glycogen. and it can't produce glucose from protein and fat, which means that your blood sugar keeps going lower and lower. And if I were to rank these three drinks from worst to best, right at the bottom of the list would be wine, because yes, it does bring down your blood sugar, but it does it in a very unpredictable way. And when you're taking blood sugar lowering medicine, It's not a good idea to combine alcohol with that.

Another problem is that when you have diabetes, you already have fatty liver. So when you drink alcohol, which also causes fatty liver, you're giving yourself double trouble. Then in second place on our ranking would be your lemon or lime juice because of the vitamin C and the antioxidants that are... in the fresh juice.

And then at the top of the list would be vinegar, particularly apple cider vinegar because of one, the effect on the muscles to increase insulin sensitivity and the presence of the mother, which can help with gut problems. So to reduce the rise in blood sugar you would get from eating starchy food. We'll look at what you can do. before you start eating, during your meal and after your meal. So what do you do before you start eating?

There are several options here. You can take two tablespoons of lemon or lime juice or vinegar, put that into half a glass of water and drink that. You can take a fiber supplement like cognac root or psyllium with lots of water.

You can also take 5 grams of fenugreek powder or 500 milligrams of a fenugreek supplement. And then you can also take 400 milligrams of a Gymnema Sylvester supplement. And finally, you can eat a big plate of vegetables, especially leafy greens, before your meal.

To get the maximum blood sugar lowering effect, You will take all these at least 30 minutes before your meal. These tips are very useful if you're going out for some function or a special occasion and you're not sure that there'll be healthy food there for you to eat. So we've talked about what to do before your meal. Now what do you do while you're eating to make sure that your blood sugar doesn't spike too high? First of all, never eat your carbohydrates naked.

Always combine them with protein like meat, fish, eggs, with fat, with fiber like leafy vegetables. Combine them with at least one of these and if you can, all three. I have a document for you in the description that you can download that contains a list of different groups of foods so you'll know how to combine them and the link for that is in the description. If you're eating a salad that has a dressing. that's made up of oil and vinegar, then both of these will help to reduce the spike from any starch that you eat later on.

So for example, if you eat an egg sandwich, the egg has fat and it has protein and you're combining that with the carbohydrates in the bread. If you eat rice, you can pair it with beans because the beans has fiber and a little bit of protein and the rice has starch. You can add a bit of butter or ghee, which is fat, to your starchy potatoes. And you can have your cooked starchy oatmeal with Greek yogurt, with nuts, seeds and berries, which will add fibre, protein and fat.

If you're having a starter with your meal, make it vegetables. Don't start with bread. And then when you look at your plate, find the food that has the most fibre.

That would typically be your vegetables and you would eat those first. And next you would eat your protein and your fat, which would be your meat, chicken, fish and so on. And then last of all, you would eat your starchy foods, which would be rice, potatoes, pasta, for example. But there are some situations where it isn't very practical to separate your food.

eat one and then the other and then the other. For example, if you're eating spaghetti bolognese, it would be hard to eat the sauce first and then the spaghetti last. And then again, you don't want to suck all the joy out of eating. So you might just decide to eat everything together, which is just fine.

And then, especially if you don't want to drink vinegar in water, you can find ways to add vinegar to your food. It can be in the form of a dressing on your vegetables or your salad, or you can try adding pickles. The Japanese use vinegar in rice.

The Brits have vinegar with their fish and chips. So all these would help to reduce the spike from the carbs in these foods. So let's talk about what to do after your meal. But before that, you might be asking, why should I be worried about blood sugar spikes anyway?

Well, the main function of glucose, which comes from your carbohydrates, is to go into your cells so you can use it for energy. When your cells keep getting flooded with so much sugar from repeated blood sugar spikes, at a point, they don't know what to do with all this sugar. If they can't use it fast enough, it just piles up inside your cells and you slow down.

So if you're going on a journey with your car and you have a full tank of petrol or gasoline, you're going to get much further than the person who has half a tank of gasoline. So think of your pancreas as that car. Your pancreas produces insulin that helps to bring down your blood sugar. By the time you find out that you have high blood sugar, you've already lost half of the cells that produce insulin in your pancreas.

So if you have diabetes, when it comes to bringing down your blood sugar after a meal, as far as your pancreas is concerned, you're starting your journey with half a tank of gas. So it's harder for you to bring down your blood sugar. And then there's another problem.

When you have diabetes, you also have what we call insulin resistance. That means that Even when your pancreas does produce insulin, the insulin goes to your cells, asks them to open up and remove the sugar from your blood, and they refuse. And the sugar just stays in your blood. This makes it much more difficult to bring down your blood sugar after each blood sugar spike. And when you have all that sugar floating around in your system, it attaches itself to everything.

And this can eventually cause heart disease, kidney problems and problems with memory, as well as wrinkles. And this is what we call browning. It's the same thing that happens when you toast a slice of bread.

Once you toast it, you can't untoast it. And the more glucose spikes you have, the more sugar you have going around your body and the faster you're browning. on the inside.

Even if you don't have high blood sugar, frequent blood sugar spikes tell your body to store fat. Apart from that, having your blood sugar swinging up and down all day affects the quality of your day-to-day life. You're more likely to have dizziness, brain fog, anxiety, food cravings, headaches.

mood swings, nausea and constant hunger. When you eat a sugary snack you might feel great for a while and that's because of the happy hormone dopamine and this is released each time you get your sugar hit. Then as your blood sugar crashes you start feeling some of those negative effects that I mentioned earlier. Blood sugar spikes also depressed your immune system for a little while.

And if you have the occasional blood sugar spike, it's not a big deal. But if you're having repeated spikes throughout the day, day in, day out, that means that there are large chunks of time when your immune system is not working at its best, which leaves you open to infections. So what do you do after your meal?

Within 30 minutes of eating, get active for 10 to 20 minutes. If you can, longer than that. You can walk, you can dance, you can do some kickboxing, you can climb stairs, it doesn't matter.

The most important thing is that you should be slightly breathless and you should try to move the big muscles of your body. That would be your trunk and your legs. And the great thing about muscle is that when it's active, it can actually take glucose out of the blood without insulin. And this is great for you if you have type 1 diabetes, because that means that you'd be injecting less insulin after your meals, which is always a good thing. So what do you do about snacks?

Choose savory rather than sweet. Opt for things like cheese, nuts, vegetables with a dip. for example pickles, all those are good options, and choose starchy food rather than sugary food. I'll tell you why in a minute. And then drink some vinegar with your snack either before or within 30 minutes of having that snack.

The reason why you would choose starchy rather than sweet is that vinegar acts on the way your body breaks down starch but it doesn't affect the way it breaks down sugar. So if you eat lots of sugar, your blood sugar will still go up even though you've taken vinegar. And all these tips would be even more effective if you combine them with everything you learn in this next video.

Transcript for:Managing Blood Sugar with Resistant Starch

Transcript for:
Managing Blood Sugar with Resistant Starch