| Haha, I think you have mildly violated your own rule 2! Anyway, you're right that almost any statement about nutrition and diabetes can be disagreed with and picked apart. Ultimately, nutrition is complex and highly personal and exponentially more so when metabolic disorders are at play! Taking this specific example: "...the specific reason T1 diabetics are advised to avoid them is because of how slowly your body breaks down carbohydrates from these foods after consuming." In my experience most medical professionals lump all potato preparations together as "high-GI foods" and therefore advise that they will raise blood sugar much more quickly than other sources of starchy carbohydrates such as oats, whole-wheat bread, or brown rice. This is backed up by evidence that, for example, baked potatoes can have a GI of higher than 100 (i.e. they raise blood sugar faster than the same number of grams of pure glucose) [1]. Your experience seems to be the opposite, since you claim a "slow" break down. And that's backed by research also! It turns out that the GI of a potato can be drastically changed by cooking method. [2]. Boiling and then cooling a potato causes starches to first gelatinize (raising GI) and then undergo retrogradation, in which hard-to-digest "resistant starch" is reformed (lowering GI again). For those reasons, a cold potato salad (with cooked-and-cooled potato) made with new potatoes (lower GI to begin with due to higher amylose) and mixed with fats (which further reduce GI), might have a shockingly low GI compared to a fresh fluffy baked potato. All of that to nit-pick the details of your post while agreeing with your overall thesis. This topic is extremely nuanced! [1] Miller et al. (1992) - American Journal of Clinical Nutrition: Found baked potato to have GI of 121 ± 9 [2] Ek et al. (2012) - Food & Function: Reported GI values ranging from 56 to 94 for different preparations |
Yeah, but just a little though! (Plus, I got the beetus so I get a little slack right? Lol).
But yeah, potatoes are a really fun one. I think French fries are going to be the more common way potatoes get consumed in the US and in my experience it's almost always a side for a high fat main course. I'd wager it's these exact complex scenarios that lead Doctors to just avoid trying to explain the nuance to diabetics and instead just have a blanket policy of "stay away from it".
I mean, after a decade with the disease (I didn't catch it until I was in my mid 20's so I didn't grow up learning the stuff), I have not had a single doctor and had exactly 1 Nurse Practitioner actually bring up fiber and its role in calculating insulin boluses before meals.
All that said, I'm going to break rule 2 for real and declare Pizza to be the most evil food ever from a diabetic standpoint. Starches in the dough, sugars from all the tomato sauce, tons of fats and proteins from the cheese and meats, I honestly don't think I will ever be able to accurately predict how a couple slices of Pizza will decide to break down on a given day lmao.