Hello Health Champions. When you put a creamer in your tea or coffee is it
better to use milk or whole cream or maybe skim milk or half and half which
is better. There has been so much misinformation about fat and some of the
products that have been promoted as heart healthy or guilt-free are actually
your absolute worst choice so today we're going to talk about this from a
perspective of what really matters which is how do these products affect your
blood sugar and your insulin response coming right up.
Hey I'm Dr. Ekberg. I'm a holistic doctor and a former Olympic decathlete and if
you want to truly master health by understanding how the body really works
make sure you subscribe and hit that notification bell so you don't miss
anything so let's talk about glycemic index real quick that's a measurement of
how quickly your blood sugar rises in response to eating a food. In other
words after you consume the food how long does it take before that food
enters your bloodstream now they've done measurements with this
and you can find tables but there are some problems with this as well there's
some limitations to the measurements and to the concept the first limitation the
first problem is that this measurement is highly variable from person to person
right you can measure it on one person you give them a certain food you measure
how much the blood sugar rises you give it to another person and the response is
completely different the second problem is that they haven't done a whole lot of
measurements they haven't done studies on a regular basis so we get a really
good average and even if they did they wouldn't necessarily predict how you
respond another problem is that when you're in a low carb diet or ketogenic
diet then there's hardly any information there to be found because most of the
measurements are done on high glycemic index foods and they're just looking at
super high and kind of high and not so high they don't really look at the low
glycemic foods like vegetables and meat and fat they look at various forms of
grain and processed foods so that makes it very difficult to really find out how
these work but the good news is that once you understand how this works
then you'll be able to predict a little bit how they're gonna work on different
foods and if you eat low carb then that's going to be your best bet to get
really low glycemic foods another limitation of this measurement is that
when they test it they give the person one food only. They give them milk or they
give them potatoes or rice or lentils or oats they don't give them the butter or
the meat or the vegetables with it and that's the way that we normally consume
food and that changes everything so we want to take these numbers with a grain
of salt but it's still a useful concept in that it helps us start to understand
the general ideas the general principles that are in place another limitation
with the glycemic index is that it's not really the glucose that we're interested
in it just measures how much does the blood sugar the blood glucose level rise
but what we're really interested in is how does it affect insulin and glucose
is not the only thing that affects insulin protein also effects insulin so
the glycemic index kind of pretty well predicts your insulin responses but it
doesn't do a real good job however once we put the protein into the equation now
we get a much better prediction because protein has some influence on insulin so
let's talk about these six dairy products we have butter which has a
glycemic index of zero heavy cream I couldn't find a number but it's really
low close to zero half in halves a little higher but still very very low
whole milk is 27 skim milk is 34 and low-fat yogurt is 33 so all of these
foods would definitely be classified as low glycemic index because high glycemic
index they consider like 60s and 70s but then we look at the insulin index which
is what we're really interested in because the insulin in the end is is the
key to metabolic syndrome and heart disease and diabetes and so forth so
butter is - which is very very low heavy cream is four still very low
half-and-half starts coming up a little bit which is 18 and we're going to
explain exactly why these numbers are the way they are whole milk is
twenty-four skim milk is 60 so now we're getting some really strong insulin
responses and by the time we get to low-fat yogurt its 84 it's super high
it's in with a rocket fuel the candies and the jellybeans and so forth. And this
low-fat yogurt we're talking about is something that has added sugar and it's
not that the sugar affects the glycemic index so much but the percentage of
sugar in that product goes up dramatically now let's start taking a
look at the macros in these foods so you can start understanding why the numbers
are the way they are when it comes to sugar butter is zero heavy cream is two
point eight we have half and half is four point three we have whole milk is
four point eight skim milk is five point one and the low-fat yogurt which is kind
of a fruit or vanilla or something has added sugar so it has 18% sugar so all
of these macros are in grams per hundred so it's a percentage basically then we
look at protein and butter has a tiny little bit of protein it's less than a
gram heavy cream is going to have two point one half and half is three whole
milk three point three skim milk and low-fat yogurt so these are only going
to differ primarily based on yogurt is strained so they concentrate they drain
off some fluid but all the milk products are going to be about the same heavy
cream is going to be less because a lot of that is fat and butter is almost
exclusively fat when we look at the fat portion butter is about 80% fat heavy
cream is about 37 half-and-half is about 12 full milk about three and a half skim
milk 0.1 0.2 somewhere depending on on where you find the information and this
low-fat yogurt had a 1% milk fat so now that we know what the numbers are we can
see how these differ in composition of the macros
let's go and take a look at how much different macros affect insulin so if we
put the index at carbs we have that as a reference point then we say carbs is a
hundred percent then how much do the other ones stimulate insulin
comparatively and protein is going to be about 50 percent so for every gram of
protein the protein is going to stimulate about half as much insulin now
there are some other differences it's going to affect it slower because
protein is absorb much slower but overall it's about 50 percent fat on the
other hand is some around two to three percent it is negligible it's close so
close to zero it really doesn't matter in the big scheme of things when we're
talking insulin resistance and that's why low-carb diets ketogenic diets
high-fat diets that's why they're so powerful at reversing insulin resistance
so keep these bars the height of these in mind and we're going to take a look
now at the composition of the macros from a calorie perspective so if we draw
this out the sugar in butter is so low that it wouldn't even show it's like
zero point zero something all right it wouldn't show the protein is less than
1% so it's that tiny tiny little blue bar right there and the rest of the
calories the macro the calorie percentage in butter 99 percent of
calories in butter comes from fat and fat has virtually no insulin response so
that's why that insulin index is so low when we look at heavy cream it's still
mostly fat all right it has almost 40 percent fat there's a tiny bit of sugar
there's a tiny bit of protein but 94 percent is still from fat 94 percent of
calories come from fat and that doesn't trigger much insulin so it has a very
very low insulin index when we get up to half and half now the percentage of fat
Croesus so fat is still dominant but we shift this just a little bit but with
80% 79 percent of calories coming from fat insulin index is still very low and
then is where it gets surprising because the protein and the sugar is not that
different but the fat is very different and the fat is what slows things down so
when we look at whole milk even though it still has the same glycemic response
as the other low-fat there is the fat slows it down the fat slows down the
absorption and the blood sugar response and the insulin to where it's only
barely above 18 still a very low number however when we get to the skim milk
with 0.1 percent fat even though the protein and the carbs is virtually the
same in skin and whole milk there is no fat to slow it down alright we just have
this tiny little bit of fat to slow down the insulin so now we get an insulin
response of 60 which puts it at a high glycemic food and low-fat yogurt is
again because so much of the calories come from sugar then we're gonna have a
much faster insulin response from that so here's what I want you to take away
from this is to understand the proportion of these different macros
when you put them in graphics like this you can see that it goes from almost all
fats even in cream which doesn't seem too far from from skim milk the
percentages changed dramatically and if you understand this about food you
understand that the sugar is what drives it the protein is kind of in the middle
and the fat is what slows it down then you can tell how different foods are
gonna affect you if you enjoyed this video make sure you also check out that
thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video