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Chips.....opinions wanted

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Bob700

Bob700

Member
Relationship to Diabetes
Type 2
Hi
I'm fed up with eating small portions of frozen chips, so question is this....would I be a carb criminal if I had a decent sized portion of hand cut chips once a week, I used to buy fantastic potatoes for chipping but since I've cut way down on portion sizes I stopped buying them it seems to be my only craving
 
It depends on how your blood glucose goes up afterwards - I saw double digits after just one trial of ordinary potatoes, and so gave them up.
 
I too craved chips, still do. I tested after getting the Diabetes under control, I found I could manage a small portion of home made proper chips once a week. Indeed had some a few hours ago and my reading is only 9.0. Happy days! ( or at least acceptable to me! ) I guess the question you must ask, is yours under control? Then experiment, as everyone reacts differently. For instance if I even look at rice and pasta, I am in instant double figures! 🙂
 
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A litle bit of what you fancy, and all that.
 
Chips are an odd one for me. I recognise it’s different when you are dosing (and timing) your own insulin, but sometimes I get the ‘calculation’ (ha!) massively wrong, and other times I get barely a wibble in my BG.

I use a higher carb:insulin ration and have to delay at least some of the insulin to work over a longer time though, so they tend to hit my bloodstream with quite a lot of oomph over an extended period.
 
I am a little confused by chips as well and I have a theory. It's the starch in potatoes that is the problem, right? My theory is that the crispy outside on a chip used to be starch but is starch no more because it has been broken down by the frying process into something else. If you eat the things called French fries, that is the stick like jobbos beloved of fast food places, you get mostly crispy whereas if you eat chip shop chips you get mostly unconverted potato. All about surface to volume ratio. As a result, for a given weight of chips you get more original starch if you eat big chips and because you get more starch you are likely to get a bigger spike.

I came to this conclusion when, in the early days, I found (albeit with poor experimental technique) that a chippie tea gave me a spike but a couple of handfuls of French fries with a steak did not. Not repeated the chippie tea but use French fries whenever I fancy some chips. As I say it is a theory. Can anybody tell me it's a load of old rubbish?
 
If I eat potatoes I cook, cool and reheat. For chips at make them out of swede, spray with oil and rosemary sprinkled on top and they are quite a good substitute
 
While I am staying away from potatoes - just too many carbs for me at the moment.

I believe it's very complex with potatoes for a number of reasons.

First the varieties of potatoes vary as to how much carbs / fibre etc that they have - And often many varieties are clumped are generic names like 'white' and potatoes are stored for long periods - which I am not sure if the carb count changes or not but I know some of the starch turns to sugar - which would cause different BG spikes.

Second when comparing for example one type of chip to another if tricky to understand portion sizes as they stack differently and if you weight them cooked, the fat % will be higher on thinner chips so knowing the true potato weight is tricky. If you weight then pre cooking, do they have added fat - like oven chips, are they wet etc - all making working out the potato weight.

Thirdly often chips are soaked in water which will remove some of the starch and lower the carbs. As an example a fish and chip shop will often chip up a supply of spuds before busy times, having buckets of chips in water, then drain shortly before frying. If they are unexpectedly busy they may just chip, drain and fry. Plus some might even use pre chipped frozen spuds where I have no idea how washed they might be.

And on top of all of this, cooking can destroy some carbs - no idea how you could account for this 🙂.
I guess test and see is the best way - try and understand what the variety is and how old the potato is and best to make own and soak for a couple of hours. Might be fine for half the year but not when its older spuds for example.
 
Wow! This all got very technical and clever very quickly! 😛o_O😛
 
I simply have no will power, so tend to avoid them because I know that I will not resist those few more!!
 
everydayupsanddowns said:
Wow! This all got very technical and clever very quickly! 😛o_O😛
Click to expand...

Yeh, but interesting. We read the labels on the back of packets or look things up on line, but most never think very much about how accurate the numbers are. The humble spud is a good example. In reality there are lots of different varieties which have different characteristics. We never eat them raw. We boil them, stew them, sauté them, chip them, we sometimes soak them in water, we sometimes cook them and freeze them, and sometimes mash them. All these processes are going to affect the carb content in one way or another but there seems to be no consensus on how.

Do you know how the carb content of food is actually measured? Had a quick look up the other day and it is not straight forward. I wonder how many labels are guestimates based on the ingredients list rather than a laboratory measurement on the finished, processed product. Also, if it is measured, is the number quoted that derived from a single trial batch or is it regularly checked to ensure it is reasonable.

Maybe it is all too complicated and you might just as well eat stuff that you think is roughly right and monitor to weed out things that spike you as an individual.

EDIT...

Just found this on the food standards agency website under nutrition labelling.

Declared values must be based on:

  • manufacturer's analysis of the food
  • calculation from the known or actual average values of the ingredients used
  • calculation from generally established and accepted data
Which could be interpreted to mean that when putting a carb content on a label then a good guess will do!
 
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Docb said:
Maybe it is all too complicated and you might just as well eat stuff that you think is roughly right and monitor to weed out things that spike you as an individual.
Click to expand...

Yes I recognised eventually that ‘diabetes maths’ was at least 50% illusion. More precision does offer some benefits, but there are so many variables (in terms of the information about carbs but also about dose, absorption, insulin sensitivity, hormone levels, recent activity, ambient temperature etc etc etc) that ’reasonable estimates’ were as much as I needed - certainly at my moderate carb intake.

I suppose if I was aiming for very low carb the differences would have more relative impact - but I’ve established what I consider to be a happy medium between effort/precision and reliability of outcomes 🙂
 
If you soak the cut uncooked chips in cold water for a while and change the water for fresh a couple or so times, then dry them in kitchen towel, before you cook them, that will reduce some of the starch.
 
Docb said:
I am a little confused by chips as well and I have a theory. It's the starch in potatoes that is the problem, right? My theory is that the crispy outside on a chip used to be starch but is starch no more because it has been broken down by the frying process into something else. If you eat the things called French fries, that is the stick like jobbos beloved of fast food places, you get mostly crispy whereas if you eat chip shop chips you get mostly unconverted potato. All about surface to volume ratio. As a result, for a given weight of chips you get more original starch if you eat big chips and because you get more starch you are likely to get a bigger spike.

I came to this conclusion when, in the early days, I found (albeit with poor experimental technique) that a chippie tea gave me a spike but a couple of handfuls of French fries with a steak did not. Not repeated the chippie tea but use French fries whenever I fancy some chips. As I say it is a theory. Can anybody tell me it's a load of old rubbish?
Click to expand...
I'm not sure about your theory but it does sound reasonable,but it has made me feel like having French fries😉
 
Try soaking the chips in salted water, then dry and cook them in an air fryer with no oil. Takes about 20 mintes. Wonderful greaseless chips!
 
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