In a previous post, I had mentioned that some foods caused a spike in my 1-hour post prandial glucose level. To catch such spikes satisfactorily, I might need to prick myself at a minimum of 10 minute intervals. That is a lot of holes to prick on my body. Instead, I thought of catching a spike with considerably less number of glucose readings. I was not successful yesterday in catching the spikes that mock my delusion of not yet being a full blown diabetic. But I did catch an interesting glucose response and found that a favourite dish of mine caused slightly above-normal readings yesterday. Thought this glucose response might be of interest to people here.
Elephant yam ('
chena ' in my mother tongue and '
suran ' in Hindi) is a tuber rich in carbohydrates. Dry curry with elephant yam is a favourite of mine (a link to a recipe is given at the end of this post). Unfortunately it is one of the few foods that sometimes (but not always) cause a glucose spike for me. We had elephant yam curry yesterday. For lunch I had about 75 grams of cooked Basmati rice, about 75 g of vegetable stir fry (assorted vegetables cooked with olive oil and condiments), 75 g of elephant yam curry (cooked with olive oil and condiments), half a cup of curry with gravy (cooked with assorted vegetables, yogurt, condiments and a little olive oil) and about half a cup (100 g) of plain yogurt. I don't have a kitchen scale yet (have ordered one), so the measures mentioned are very approximate and may be quite off the mark. I checked my glucose level half hourly till 2 hours past lunch and hourly thereafter till 4 hours past lunch. Here are the readings.
Well, it may be remarked that meter does not give very reliable readings and that a reading of 5 mmol/L could be as high as 6 or as low as 4. Well, I am actually more interested in the relative values than the absolute values. The readings were taken with the same meter, with strips from the same batch with the same code number from the same container and all readings taken within a time span of 4 hours. So the relative values are likely to be consistent enough for our purposes. The next point is how these readings might compare with what one measures in a lab. 3 months ago, after a lab test, the number that my meter showed 5 minutes after the lab test and the lab test results differed only by 0.1 mmol/L.
I am interested in explanations of the slight increase in glucose level after one hour. Could it be the glucose from low glycemic stuff kicking in?
Here is a link to a recipe for elephant yam curry:
jugalbandi Mezhukkuparatti / Upperi
Regards,
Rad
