Laura Schoenfeld: Certain carbs, for whatever reason, affect people differently. I’ve had clients that can eat most carbs except for potatoes, and for whatever reason, potatoes raise their blood sugar. So it could potentially be that just sweet potatoes are causing that blood sugar rise, and perhaps she’d be better off having rice or white potatoes or plantains. If she’s been on a long-term low-carb diet and she’s adding carbs back in and her blood sugar is going up, then again, it’s going to take some time for her body to readjust to the carb intake.
If she is just completely metabolically disturbed and she just cannot tolerate carbs and she’s been eating them for weeks and trying and her blood sugar is still going really high, then that person may not really benefit from a high-carb intake. So maybe either reduce the portion sizes or cut them out altogether and stick to more of a ketogenic approach. If somebody has adrenal fatigue and they want to do a ketogenic diet, just making sure that they’re getting enough calories is a really important side of things, so just significantly increase the fat so that way they’re not low calorie along with low carb.
A little extra fiber is going to help. Sweet potatoes, especially, and potatoes and plantains also have fiber in them. They also have resistant starch in them, which helps reduce some of the blood sugar response. Usually I’ll recommend having fat and protein with the meal and having smaller portions of those carbs to help deal with some of the blood sugar spikes that come.
As far as sprouted beans, if somebody is reacting to sweet potato, white potato, and plantain, then I don’t know if sprouted beans are going to be any better for them, but it’s something worth trying. If they don’t have any gut issues that would be affected by sprouted beans and they want to try seeing if soaked and sprouted legumes work better for them from a blood sugar control perspective, then once you’ve established that those are appropriate for that patient, then legumes, I think, are another one of those gray-area foods that are potentially OK, depending on the patient.