Did they use hemoglobin A1c as the testing measure? No they used an oral glucose test, which is not nearly as accurate. However as far as I know A1c is a good measure of average blood glucose over a long period of time and is great for identifying diabetics, however it is less useful for monitoring rapidly changing blood glucose, as the attachment of glucose to hemoglobin is not a real time process.
I always like to prove to people that bread is sugar by having them suck on a thin cracker. That cracker in your mouth will break down into simple sugars and they can start to taste the sweetness of it.
Yep, our spit contains amylase which does the breaking down of the long chain polysaccharides into single sugars.
Good ol' amylase. I understand why they were measuring oral glucose but there is not great data necessarily showing that spikes in sugar lead to more health complications than a bad average blood sugar over 3 months.
Lets say that a food like candy spikes the sugar to 300 mg/dl and bread raises if to 230 mg/dl over a longer period of time. The A1c, in my opinion, would be a better predictor on what is better to eat haha. So, the study would need to carry on for at least 3 months.
Again, thanks for writing this!
This is a very good point