How the three types of starches affect prediabetes

How the three types of starches affect prediabetes is discussed; when the spud was dug, how it was cooked and whether it was peeled or not all dramatic affect the GI.

Good morning and welcome again to this short course from the Church of Ascension in Hilton, South Africa on how to detect and manage prediabetes; and make sure that it doesn’t progress to the full blown disease.

Our bodies are holy places

As always our starting point as Christians is that our bodies are the temples of the Holy Spirit. They are holy places that we need to care of, even more surely than we sweep, dust, polish and maintain our churches.

In 1 Corinthians, chapter 9, the apostle Paul declares that “every athlete exercises self-control in all things,” adding that we should pommel our bodies and subdue them.

This allegory of every Christian being an athlete in training is an apt one for the management of prediabetes; self-control and exercise lie at the heart of gaining the victory over chronically raised blood glucose. These are the factors that will enable us to serve God ably with our whole hearts, minds and bodies until the last breath is taken.

Caring for the temple of God is a very spiritual business.

The three types of starches

This week we are talking about the different kinds of starches and how they effect our blood glucose and wellness. It’s a complex business every bit as challenging as gravity was for the deep man of faith, Galileo, dropping coins and feathers and cannon balls from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.

And eventually formulated by Isaac Newton at 9.8m/s2, another profoundly Christian man, described as the supreme genius and most enigmatic character in the history of science. He also declared himself once by saying, “in the absence of any other proof, the thumb alone would convince me of the existence of God.”

There are three kinds of starches; grasping this prickly nettle is what will save you from the ravages of diabetes. I mentioned before that Calvin Cook was long a member of this church and I was privileged to be part of the house group led by Pat and Calvin. He was an insulin dependent diabetic from the age of 30 but he lived a long and very fulfilled life, but I watched with interest how Pat kept his starches under very strict control.

So there are three types of starches.

1. Rapidly-digested starch
   
2. Slowly-digested starch
3. And a third most interesting group known as “resistant-starch” 

We can and do eat starches from all three groups but clearly those that are rapidly digested, producing almost instantly large amounts of glucose have to be strictly limited by those who are prediabetic.

Starches that have been cooled overnight have much larger amounts of resistant starch; like the grits above.

Digestion of starch

The digestion of starch begins in the mouth and continues in the small intestine producing glucose which then passes through what is known as the portal blood system to the liver where it is processed and turned into fats of various kinds.

If large amounts of glucose keeping arriving in the liver and it is unable to process and dispose of all those sugars fast enough, fat begins to accumulate in the organ itself; that's the start of chronic hepatic disease. 

Fatty liver disease

In layman’s terms it is known as fatty liver disease and is an intrinsic factor in diabetes; that adipose tissue is also deposited in the pancreas, displacing and replacing the islets of Langerhans that produce insulin.

Potatoes and prediabetes

It really is a complex business. Let’s take the humble potato for example. Is it rapidly or slowly digested? Or is it a resistant starch? It has elements of all three, depending on the type of spud, when it was harvested and how long it has been in cold storage; how you cook it, whether you peeled it or not and finally whether it was chilled overnight before consumption all also come into the equation too.

Baked, roasted and microwaved potatoes have a very high GI; and french fries too. They are rapidly digested. So have those that have been in cold storage for a long time. Mashed potato is more slowly digested and if you boil your potato for Sunday’s potato salad on Saturday, chill it overnight and eat it the next day, then it is turned into resistant starch. You can even reheat your spuds the after they have been cooled before consumption.

New potatoes

New potatoes are the all-time winners, the smaller the better. They have a large amount of resistant starch; it is digested slowly in the mouth and the small intestine; and much passes through unabsorbed to the colon where it serves as very important food for the friendly bugs in the gut known as the microbiome.

The speed at which your potato is digested is also very dependent on the fibre, much of which is located in the skin.

Because you don’t need to peel new potatoes they have large amounts of fibre; resistant starch. Those skins on vegetables are rich in important nutrients too and good for you.

I learned this first from a diabetic patient who told me that if he ate conventional spuds, he had to give himself an extra squirt of insulin. But new potatoes hardly affected his blood glucose.

Fibre in potatoes

The Good Lord in his wisdom gave us starches that are loaded with fibre; the peel on apples and potatoes, the bran around grains of wheat and maize and the pulp in an orange.

The fibre slows the release of food from the stomach giving greater satiety, slowing digestion into glucose and it provides food for the microbiome as it’s known; those friendly bugs in the gut. And it gives the stool bulk making it easy to pass.

• How to get more fiber
  

Grasping how the three types of starches affect prediabetes is a prickly nettle; joyfully accepted it will utterly change your health for the better.

The Screwtape Letters

Screwtape in his wiliness sent Wormwood out to advise and direct the way that the food industry should process its products. The first important principle he told all millers is that the fibre must be extracted; it is unpalatable, it has coarse mouthfeel and their customers won’t like it. Sales will be poor and you cannot mark up the price.

Most important, farmers will pay very handsomely for the bran and germ; chickens, pigs and cattle need that hominy chop in cereals as it is called far more than people. The empty calories that are left can be turned into cornflakes at R80/kg; they slide down the throat deliciously like a slice of cheesecake, he told them. And at a cost price of R4 per kilogramme they can turn a very quick buck out of maize.

Screwtape’s letters to the food industry counselling, mentoring and guiding them on how to process our nosh have been strikingly effective. Only 5% of Americans are consuming the recommended 30 to 40 grams of fibre per day, and that’s probably equally true in South Africa; and in all people consuming typical grocery store food. It comes as no surprise that the prevalence of serious diseases of the bowel is growing in leaps and bounds, especially in younger people.

• Why were cornflakes invented?
  

Taken in by ultra-processed foods

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ, I do realise full well that this is going to be difficult. Such has been the success of Screwtape’s strategies and the effectiveness of the convincing arguments presented by Wormwood, that almost to a man we have been taken in by the ultra-processed foods being presented to us today.

It is only as we abide in him that his Spirit will lead us into all truth and empower us to ring in the changes that will get enable us to escape from today what is known as Metabolic Syndrome; hypertension, raised blood glucose and too much fat around the waist. High cholesterol and triglycerides feature too.

The devil has been prowling around looking for people to devour. So successful has he been in convincing us that the foods in his pantry are quite normal and good for us, that I’m afraid I do not believe that Christians in the main are any healthier that the rest of the world around us. Understanding how the three types of starches affect prediabetes is for every family.

I pray this morning, Lord for each and every person listening to this clip, that your Spirit will lead us into all truth and goodness, including right eating.

So this is Johnny B signing off, a lone reed rustling in the wind, until tomorrow.

Disclaimer

How the three types of starches affect prediabetes

How the three types of starches affect prediabetes; as in potatoes for example.

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