Laura said:
There's always fruit. I know that sounds like heresy after reading Taubes, but there are some advantages to getting carbohydrate from fruit instead of vegetables. For one thing, fruit has the distinct advantage of being something that wants to be eaten. It's designed for it. Therefore it doesn't have all the nasty plant defenses found in veggies that discourage their consumption.
Health researcher Ray Peat actually favours the use of sugar (from fruit) over the use of starch (from veggies, but more specifically, grains). Sugar does not raise blood sugar faster than starch, contrary to popular belief, and fructose (which is half of a sugar molecule) apparently has an inhibatory effect on insulin.
Here's an exerpt from one of his articles (emphasis his):
[quote author=http://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glycemia.shtml]
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“Professional opinion” can be propagated about 10,000 times faster than research can evaluate it, or, as C. H. Spurgeon said, "A lie travels round the world while Truth is putting on her boots."
In the 1970s, dietitians began talking about the value of including "complex carbohydrates" in the diet. Many dietitians (all but one of the Registered Dietitians that I knew of) claimed that starches were more slowly absorbed than sugars, and so should be less disruptive to the blood sugar and insulin levels. People were told to eat whole grains and legumes, and to avoid fruit juices.
These recommendations, and their supporting ideology, are still rampant in the culture of the United States, fostered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American Dietetic Association and the American Diabetes Association and innumerable university departments of home economics, dietetics, or nutrition.
Judging by present and past statements of the American Dietetic Association, I think some kind of institutional brain defect might account for their recommendations. Although the dietetic association now feebly acknowledges that sugars don't raise the blood sugar more quickly than starches do, they can't get away from their absurd old recommendations, which were never scientifically justified: “Eat more starches, such as bread, cereal, and starchy vegetables--6 servings a day or more. Start the day with cold (dry) cereal with nonfat/skim milk or a bagel with one teaspoon of jelly/jam. Put starch center stage--pasta with tomato sauce, baked potato with chili, rice and stir-fried beef and vegetables. Add cooked black beans, corn, or garbanzo beans (chickpeas) to salads or casseroles.”
The Dietetic Association's association with General Mills, the breakfast cereal empire, (and Kellog, Nabisco, and many other food industry giants) might have something to do with their starchy opinions. Starch-grain embolisms can cause brain damage, but major money can also make people say stupid things.
In an old experiment, a rat was tube-fed ten grams of corn-starch paste, and then anesthetized. Ten minutes after the massive tube feeding, the professor told the students to find how far the starch had moved along the alimentary canal. No trace of the white paste could be found, demonstrating the speed with which starch can be digested and absorbed. The very rapid rise of blood sugar stimulates massive release of insulin, and rapidly converts much of the carbohydrate into fat.
It was this sort of experiment that led to the concept of "glycemic index," that ranks foods according to their ability to raise the blood sugar. David Jenkins, in 1981, knew enough about the old studies of starch digestion to realize that the dietitians had created a dangerous cult around the “complex carbohydrates,” and he did a series of measurements that showed that starch is more “glycemic” than sucrose. But he simply used the amount of increase in blood glucose during the first two hours after ingesting the food sample, compared to that following ingestion of pure glucose, for the comparison, neglecting the physiologically complex facts, all of the processes involved in causing a certain amount of glucose to be present in the blood during a certain time. (Even the taste of sweetness, without swallowing anything, can stimulate the release of glucagon, which raises blood sugar.)
More important than the physiological vacuity of a simple glycemic measurement was the ideology within which the whole issue developed, namely, the idea that diabetes (conceived as chronic hyperglycemia) is caused by eating too much sugar, i.e., chronic hyperglycemia the illness is caused by the recurrent hyperglycemia of sugar gluttony. The experiments of Bernardo Houssay (1947 Nobel laureate) in the 1940s, in which sugar and coconut oil protected against diabetes, followed by Randle's demonstration of the antagonism between fats and glucose assimilation, and the growing recognition that polyunsaturated fatty acids cause insulin resistance and damage the pancreas, have made it clear that the dietetic obsession with sugar in relation to diabetes has been a dangerous diversion that has retarded the understanding of degenerative metabolic diseases.
Starting with the insulin industry, a culture of diabetes and sugar has been fabulized and expanded and modified as new commercial industries found ways to profit from it. Seed oils, fish oils, breakfast cereals, soybean products, and other things that were never eaten by any animal in millions of years of evolution have become commonplace as “foods,” even as “health foods.”
Although many things condition the rate at which blood sugar rises after eating carbohydrates, and affect the way in which blood glucose is metabolized, making the idea of a “glycemic index” highly misleading, it is true that blood sugar and insulin responses to different foods have some meaningful effects on physiology and health.
Starch and glucose efficiently stimulate insulin secretion, and that accelerates the disposition of glucose, activating its conversion to glycogen and fat, as well as its oxidation. Fructose inhibits the stimulation of insulin by glucose, so this means that eating ordinary sugar, sucrose (a disaccharide, consisting of glucose and fructose), in place of starch, will reduce the tendency to store fat. Eating “complex carbohydrates,” rather than sugars, is a reasonable way to promote obesity. Eating starch, by increasing insulin and lowering the blood sugar, stimulates the appetite, causing a person to eat more, so the effect on fat production becomes much larger than when equal amounts of sugar and starch are eaten. The obesity itself then becomes an additional physiological factor; the fat cells create something analogous to an inflammatory state. There isn't anything wrong with a high carbohydrate diet, and even a high starch diet isn't necessarily incompatible with good health, but when better foods are available they should be used instead of starches. For example, fruits have many advantages over grains, besides the difference between sugar and starch. Bread and pasta consumption are strongly associated with the occurrence of diabetes, fruit consumption has a strong inverse association.
Although pure fructose and sucrose produce less glycemia than glucose and starch do, the different effects of fruits and grains on the health can't be reduced to their effects on blood sugar.
Orange juice and sucrose have a lower glycemic index than starch or whole wheat or white bread, but it is common for dietitians to argue against the use of orange juice, because its index is the same as that of Coca Cola. But, if the glycemic index is very important, to be rational they would have to argue that Coke or orange juice should be substituted for white bread.
After decades of “education” to promote eating starchy foods, obesity is a bigger problem than ever, and more people are dying of diabetes than previously. The age-specific incidence of most cancers is increasing, too, and there is evidence that starch, such as pasta, contributes to breast cancer, and possibly other types of cancer.
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I don't know if this is the answer, but fruit is something to consider. Maybe even honey?
