Each of us has a different metabolic response to eating the same bread
Matthew Ashmore/Arrival
Consider two slices of bread, one from a ball of artisanal curd, and the other from a cheap mass-produced white loaf. Which do you think is healthier?
The correct answer is that you don’t know until you try. Some people will have a bad reaction to the cheap stuff, raising their blood sugar levels. But others won’t, and instead experience a significant spike in blood sugar after eating salty dough. Some will climb both, others hardly.
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The same goes for other foods and other nutrients, especially fats, which can also dangerously rise in the blood after eating. How our metabolism responds to food is very idiosyncraticA surprising discovery that is overturning decades of nutritional orthodoxy and hopes to finally answer that incredibly complicated question: what should we eat to be healthy?
A rise in blood glucose and lipids after eating is quite normal, but if they rise too quickly – called picking – they can cause problems. Frequent increases in glucose and a type of fat called triglycerides are linked to the risk of developing diabetes, obesity and heart disease. For decades, nutrition researchers assumed that all humans responded to a given food in roughly the same way, with a uniform rise in blood sugar and fat.
Glycemic index
Under this assumption, nutritional advice was simple and one-size-fits-all. Reduce the consumption of foods that cause breakouts. Not surprisingly, most…
