A Good Food Day: Reboot Your Health with Food That Tastes Great Read Online Free PDF Page B

Irish oats, are chunky pieces of whole oat kernels (oat groats). These thick pieces take longer to digest and are lower on the glycemic index than rolled oats, which have to go through more processing to get their flat shape. Steel-cut oats have more protein than rolled oats, but both varieties have the same high level of fiber and are light-years better than the sugar-bomb packets of instant oats.
    2 cups steel-cut oats
    ½ cup canned whole unsweetened coconut milk
    ½ cup unsweetened almond milk, plus more for serving
    1 cinnamon stick
    Large pinch of fine sea salt
    1 In a large pot, combine all the ingredients with 4 cups water and bring to a boil. Reduce the heat to a simmer, cover, and cook for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the oats are cooked through and creamy.
    2 Transfer the cooked oats and cinnamon stick to a glass storage container and let them cool before storing in the fridge.
    3 In the morning, portion out your oatmeal (I do about ¾ cup per serving) and heat it up on the stove with ¼ cup almond milk to thin it out a bit.

GLYCEMIC INDEX & GLYCEMIC LOAD
    Why Slow and Low Is Best
    Bread is my biggest weakness, and it used to be the first thing I ate every day. Whether it was an artisanal loaf or the cheap, sliced stuff, I was in. My craving for bread was matched only by a fierce love for pasta (heaven distilled into a food). I knew they weren’t healthy foods, but I didn’t know they were making me a blood-sugar train wreck. When I visited my doctor complaining of slothlike fatigue, he pointed out that I was eating too much white flour and sugar—refined carbs that have no fiber or nutrients. This caused my blood sugar to spike and then drastically dip, cueing exhaustion and cravings. My blood tests confirmed I was prediabetic, basically the last stop on the road to full-blown type 2 diabetes.
    Had I learned about the Glycemic Index (GI) and Glycemic Load (GL) a lot sooner, I could have started choosing better-quality carbs. Carbohydrates are basically long chains of glucose (sugar) molecules, which your digestive system breaks down and releases into your bloodstream to be used for energy. By ranking how high and how quickly carbohydrate-containing foods raise your blood sugar level, both the GI and GL help you figure out the best carbs to eat and make it much easier to control your blood sugar, manage your weight, and keep your body humming along with a steady (rather than spiking) supply of energy.
    The GI scale is 0 to 100: Foods under 55 are low GI, between 56 and 69 are medium, and above 70 are high. The higher the GI ranking, the quicker that food can send you into a wild sugar rush followed by an exhausting crash. You can easily pick those foods out of a lineup—white bread, white pasta, French fries, potato chips, soda, candy. When you regularly consume too many servings of high-GI foods like I did, you’re more likely to pack on pounds and increase your risk of developing insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes ( see more on how this works ). The lower a food’s GI ranking, the longer it takes to break down in your gut, resulting in a slow-and-steady drip of glucose into your bloodstream. Choosing complex carbs with low GI—almost all vegetables, most fruits, and some beans and grains—is especially crucial at breakfast so you set off with a steady supply of energy for the day. These foods also tend to be higher in fiber, keeping you fuller longer.
    By using the GI as a general guide, I started swapping in low-GI alternatives for my usual crew. I replaced refined and white flour breads with whole-grain breads, like the sourdough rye bread I use in the Breakfast Sandwiches . I chose nuts instead of potato chips, whole wheat pasta instead of white flour pasta. Simply by choosing lower-GI foods, I reversed my prediabetic state and came back to normal blood sugar levels in just a matter of months. (See the chart detailing the whole scale of the GI/GL index.)
    But of course there are some