High-carb tactic
Even a little bit of pucker power from acidic ingredients can lower your blood sugar response to a carb-rich meal. Making foods more acidic slows the breakdown of starches into blood sugar, so your blood sugar rises more slowly.
Certain acidic foods, though, such as vinegar (acetic acid), seem to work in additional ways, making them more effective.
So think vinegar!
- Toss out those creamy salad dressings and buy or make dressings that combine vinegar with olive oil, such as mustard vinaigrette.
- It takes just a tablespoon of vinegar per serving to substantially lower the GL of a meal.
- Eat a small green salad drizzled with vinaigrette before lunch or dinner several times a week. You'll get some acetic acid in your meals and squeeze more vegetables into your diet. But don't stop there.
- Soak fish in vinegar and water before cooking, suggests the Vinegar Institute; it'll be sweeter and more tender and hold its shape better.
- When poaching fish, toss a tablespoon of vinegar into the simmering water for the same reasons.
- Make a vinegar-based marinade for meat destined for the grill. Mix in a little vinegar when cooking canned soup to perk it up, and add some to the water in which you simmer vegetables.
- If you like Japanese food, you can feel a little better about the rice if you're having sushi, since sushi rice is made with rice wine vinegar.
Low-carb troubles
Low-carb diets usually begin with an "induction" phase that eliminates nearly every source of carbohydrate. Often, you'll consume as few as 20 grams of carbohydrate a day. That's less than 100 calories' worth — about what's in a small dinner roll. On a 1,200-calorie diet, that's only about eight percent of your daily calories.
By contrast, health experts recommend that we get between 45 and 65 percent of our calories from carbs.
When carbohydrate consumption falls below 100 grams, the body usually responds by burning muscle tissue for the glycogen (stored glucose) it contains.
When those glycogen stores start to run out, the body resorts to burning body fat. But that's a very inefficient, complicated way to produce blood sugar. The body tries to do it only when it absolutely has to (such as when it's starving) — and for good reason.
Turning fat into blood sugar comes at a price in the form of by-products called ketones. They make your breath smell funny. They can also make you tired, lightheaded, headachy and nauseated.
Feeling lousy is certainly one way to dampen the appetite, but not one that most people would choose.
With virtually no carbs in your system, you may even have trouble concentrating.
According to the Institute of Medicine of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the human brain requires the equivalent of 130 grams of carbohydrate a day to function optimally — and that's a minimum.
So find a balance that maximizes your performance as well as your fat-burning potential rather then simply eliminating carbs altogether.
