Do you ever feel cranky or foggy or hungry
in the hours after a meal, especially when it's rich in carbs?
Well, then this vidoe may be just for you.
I'm Dr. Chris Masterjohn of ChrisMasterjohnPhD.com
and you're watching Chris Masterjohn Lite,
where the name of the game is
“Details? Shmetails. Just me what works!”
and today we’re talking about why you may tolerate sugar
better than starch.
The first thing that happens when we eat starch is we begin
breaking it down into sugar right in our mouths
with an enzyme contained in our saliva,
and although we may not notice the sweet taste,
our bodies do, and that sweet taste
generated in our mouths
allows our bodies to know that carbohydrate is
coming and allows our bodies to prepare for that
carbohydrate so that we can can digest
it, absosrb it, and metabolize it in a smooth
and stable way. The problem is that some
of us have a lot of this enzyme in our saliva
and some of us don’t. And if we don't
have much of that enzyme, what happens when we eat starch
is we don't break it down to sugar.
in our mouths and our body doesn't know that it's coming.
and then when it does come and we do digest it,
our body isn't prepared to handle it, so
our blood sugar can spike up too much and crash
back down too much as a result and that can
make us feel like we’re swinging,
whether it’s our mood or our energy, we’re swinging just like our
blood sugar’s swinging. So,
there's not a good way to test your genetics
but you can do a really simple experiment
at home just to see what kind
of foods you tolerate best.
So what you would want to do for this experiment
is to compare how you respond
to an equal amount of carbohydrate from
sugar and from starch. If you have a glucometer
you could measure how your blood sugar responds,
or you could just log your symptoms and write down
how you feel after these meals.
And you want to try to do each meal several times,
in random order,
and under pretty much the same conditions.
So, for example, do each one
when you wake up in the morning, or do each one at lunch.
And you want to make sure the carbohydrate
load is the same. So the purest way to do
this would be to purchase some potato starch
and to purchase some pure dextrose
and weigh out 50 g of each of those.
You can also use foods, for example you could compare
potatoes to overripe bananas,
but if you do that you should look up on nutritiondata.com
the amount of carbohydrate
in a given weight of that food and weigh
it out to make sure that you’re getting the same carbohydrate load
from each of the two foods.
However you choose to do it you should try to make sure
that you get a few measurements, say three of each,
so three with the banana, three with the potato,
three with the dextrose, three with the potato starch.
And you want to do ‘em in random order.
So flip a coin each day to decide
which one you do.
And if you find that you tolerate
the sugar better than the starch,
then what I would do is try to find
the amount of natural sugar that it
takes for you to be able to
add to a starch-rich meal to be able to feel well
with that meal. So for example
let's say that you want to eat potatoes or
rice or whathaveyou
as your starch. Well,
if you know that you respond better to sugar
it may be that all you need to do is add a little bit of sugar
to the beginning of that meal.
So maybe eating a teaspoon of honey or two teaspoons of honey before the meal
is going to be enough to do the trick.
So just fine whatever is the minimal dose of natural
sugar that you need to add, and then if that
works you have a quick fix that will allow you
to eat a broader spectrum of foods,
and to feel good after you eat them.
Now. Don't try this if you
have diabetes. If you have a medical condition,
make sure that you talk to your doctor before you try
any kind of experiment related to your blood sugar.
But if you're healthy
and you just want to be able
to tolerate more foods and to feel better after
you eat, then I think this is a great experiment try.
All right, signing off,
this is Chris Masterjohn of chrismasterjohnphd.com.
You’ve been watching Chris Masterjohn Lite,
and I’ll see you in the next video.