💡 Here is a little eye opener to help you optimise the way you eat:

Last week I had lentil soup🍲. Lentils contains some carbs which enter our blood in the form of glucose. In order to get this glucose out of our blood and into our cells (to use or store as energy), we need insulin. Due to Type 1 diabetes, my pancreas no longer makes any insulin so I need to inject some. For a regular sized bowl of Ientil soup that I had last week I needed 3 units of insulin.

This week, the kids took some lentil pasta to school and so I had a little of it with my lunch 🍜. For lentil pasta that barely covered 1/2 of my plate, I needed a whooping 6 units of insulin!

I had a smaller total amount of lentils in pasta form than I had in a soup last week. Yet, the insulin needed to get the glucose I got from it out of my blood and into my cells was double!

How come? Its all lentils after all, isn't it?

Yes and No. Lentils, in the form that nature designed them, are packaged with lots of fibre. This slows down how fast they go through your digestive system, which means the glucose from them enters your bloodstream at a slower rate. Some of it, even makes it down to your large intestine and feeds your friends that live down there - The All Mighty Microbiome! 

Lentil pasta, is made out of lentils that have been ground into a fine powder, mixed with water and formed into pasta. 

The grinder broke the bonds between the molecules. 

The fibre, which is normally long chains of glucose in a form we cannot break down to digest but is a feast for our microbiome, has been broken down into much much smaller chains of glucose. This means more glucose for me, less for the my gut bug friends.

The carbs in the lentils, normally in the form of long chains of glucose in a form my digestive system has to work to break down, have also been broken down for me. Less work for my digestive enzymes, more glucose straight into my blood, less for the microbiome.

So, 6 units of insulin is the price I paid for my convenience of making lentil pasta in 10' in the morning for school lunches, rather than pre-soaking lentils and cooking them for 25'.

What does this mean for you?

• Know that the more processed something is, even if it is labeled as "healthy", the bigger the spike in your blood sugar 📈 and the fewer the prebiotics for your microbiome. Its the same principle for regular wheat flour, rice flour, corn flour, oat flour ... you get the idea.
• If you chose to go for convenience, try to pair the pasta with lots of veggies and some good fats. This will "dilute" the pasta in a "sea" of fibre and fat and slow it down.
• Eat the veggies first - this will provide a cushion in your stomach and (somewhat) slow down the entry of glucose from the pasta into your blood (don't expect miracles from this!).
• Try to move around after such a meal. Even a normal pace walk or doing some housework will help get the glucose out of your blood much faster than if you just go sit down for 3 hours or go to bed right after.
• If you really want to know whether YOUR body is able to deal with the pasta - test don't guess! Its not hard and you will get real time information you will never get from a blood test. I explain how you can do that here.

So the moral of this story is, be smart about how/when you have your pasta and, if you can, go for the "real deal" in the form designed by nature!