Ep. 20 Whole grain versus refined grain : A small change can go a long way!
Jul 12, 2023
Dr Jenny Gourgari
White or brown rice? White or brown pasta? Whole wheat or white bread?
Whole grain versus refined grain can be another small change you can implement to improve your child's insulin sensitivity and risk for diabetes. A great study was done in children that measured that effect in the lab.
The details of this study are : Whole Grain Intake Is Associated with Lower Body Mass and Greater Insulin Sensitivity among Adolescents Lyn M. Steffen1, David R. Jacobs, Jr.1, Maureen A. Murtaugh1, Antoinette Moran2, Julia Steinberger2, Ching-Ping Hong1, and Alan R. Sinaiko2 Am J Epidemiol 2003;158:243–250
I hope this episode is helpful to you. If so, feel free to share it with your friends and family, so that more people can benefit from it.
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
White or brown rice? White or brown pasta? Whole wheat or white bread?
Whole grain versus refined grain can be another small change you can implement to improve your child's insulin sensitivity and risk for diabetes. A great study was done in children that measured that effect in the lab.
The details of this study are : Whole Grain Intake Is Associated with Lower Body Mass and Greater Insulin Sensitivity among Adolescents Lyn M. Steffen1, David R. Jacobs, Jr.1, Maureen A. Murtaugh1, Antoinette Moran2, Julia Steinberger2, Ching-Ping Hong1, and Alan R. Sinaiko2 Am J Epidemiol 2003;158:243–250
I hope this episode is helpful to you. If so, feel free to share it with your friends and family, so that more people can benefit from it.
Dr Gourgari is a pediatric endocrinologist, certified in obesity medicine expert and weight loss coach for teens with more than 15 years of experience. She helps teens build healthy habits that last, so they can feel happier, be more confident and love their body again .
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Speaker 2:
This is the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. If you are a mom and want to help your child who is struggling to lose weight, you are in the right place. If you are looking for healthy lifestyle tips, dr Gorgary is here to help you understand the science around safe weight loss in teens and children, because what works for adult weight loss is not always the best for children. This podcast is for educational purposes only. Dr Gorgary does not provide medical, psychological or nutrition therapy advice. You should not use this information to diagnose or treat any health problems without consulting your own medical practitioner and now your host, dr Jenny Gorgary.
Speaker 1:
Hello, welcome to another episode of the Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens podcast. This is Dr Jenny Gorgary, and today I'm going to talk about whole grains. I'm sure you have heard about before the importance of having whole grains in our diet, and when we say whole grains, we really mean carbohydrates that have not been refined. For example, we are talking about brown rice instead of white rice, brown pasta instead of white pasta, having oatmeal that is whole grain oatmeal, and flour that is used that is whole grain flour instead of white flour. So these are just some main options of whole grain foods and there are sometimes the choice of which to get. Like you know, have you been to one of these fast food places and they ask you would you like to have white rice or brown rice? And maybe out of habit, you just say white rice. But with this episode, what I'm trying to give you some more data so that the next time you're faced with this question brown rice or white rice, or similar questions you want to think twice and maybe consider trying out whole grains instead of refined grains. So this is a study that was done to check what's the effect of the whole grain, specifically in teenagers insulin sensitivity. So when we talk about insulin sensitivity, again is a method where we can test the risk that somebody has to develop diabetes. So the better insulin sensitivity you have, the lower the risk to develop diabetes in the future, or lower insulin sensitivity is the same thing as higher insulin resistance. So researchers have some very sophisticated methods to actually measure that. They bring kids in the lab and they can give them sugar, they can give them insulin and then they can measure the amount of insulin that is required to maintain a normal sugar level. And then they have some mathematic models they use and they can figure out the amount of insulin sensitivity a certain person has. So, researchers, what they did is they used one of these methods to actually measure the insulin sensitivity and the collected data, also on whole grain intake. So let me tell you more about this.
Speaker 1:
The actual title of the manuscript and the research I'm going to present is whole grain intake is associated with lower body mass index and greater insulin sensitivity among adolescents. It was done in the division of epidemiology at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health in Minneapolis. It was published in 2003 in the American Journal of Epidemiology. It was done by Lynn Steffen and the group and let's just dive into it. So the researchers in this study used data from 285 teenagers that had completed this sophisticated insulin methods that I just told you about. There were 155 boys and 130 girls, so they had the data on them, on their weight and height, and again they calculated the body mass index, which is the measurement of healthy or unhealthy, or measurement of overweight in a child. You don't know what the body mass index is? Go back to episode one of this episode series where I talk about how to calculate your child's body mass index and how to figure out how much weight a teenager needs to lose to be in a healthy weight. So they collected data on body mass index in all these teenagers. They also collected data on their insulin sensitivity and insulin resistance by doing this sophisticated test I just told you about, and they also had collected data about their physical activity, like how much activity they were doing and what they were eating. So they used the food frequency questionnaire to find data about whole grain consumption. So to define whole grain breakfast, it would have to be breakfast options that had at least 25% whole grain or brown by weight, as determined by the package label, and foods that were classified as whole grain in this research, for example, would be cooked oatmeal, dark bread, brown rice, bulgur, kasha, couscous bran with germ and popcorn, and then, on the other hand, refined carbohydrates, where those that had more what that would have less than 25% of whole grain or bran. There would be foods like white bread, bagels, rolls, muffins, pasta, white rice, pancakes and waffles, donuts, cake, cookies, bars and pies. So those will be refined carbohydrates.
Speaker 1:
Okay, so let's look what the researchers found. What they found was, as expected, boys in this study consumed more calories than the girls. The average energy intake was 2,600 calories in boys and 2,270, 15 calories in girls. On average, the calories came 55% from carbohydrates, 15% from protein and 30% from total fat. As a group, the average servings of whole grain in every day was 1.3 servings in the total sample of girls and 1.4 in total sample of boys. Fine grains were 3.1 servings in girls and 3.3 servings in boys. Fortunately, they had also high consumption of 5.5 servings of fruits and vegetables in girls and 6.3 servings in boys. That was good. As I mentioned, they had expenditure, a data energy expenditure, in other words, what color is the consumed? Because they were active. It was an average of 551 calories in girls and 854 calories in boys.
Speaker 1:
What they did is they divided its group in people that consume less than half a serving of whole grain, people that have 1.5 serving per day, and also people that have more than 1.5 servings per day of whole grain. Then they compared and they wanted to see what was their differences in terms of their insulin sensitivity and their body mass index, and all that. What they found was that people that had a higher intake of the whole grain servings the people that had more than 1.5 servings had significantly higher insulin sensitivity compared to the group that consumed less than half a serving of grain. When they took into consideration other factors that can explain this, like the age, their puberty stage, their how much activity they had and also what was their body mass index, this association persisted. In fact, it was stronger among the kids that were more overweight. That tells you, in other words, that even though you can have the same amount of activity, the same amount of body weight and puberty and age and your gender, even though they took this other factors that can affect your risk for diabetes and your insulin sensitivity, if you eat whole grain, your insulin sensitivity is better.
Speaker 1:
Having better insulin sensitivity not only decreases the risk for future diabetes, but it can also improve your efforts to maintain a healthy weight Easier for you, because insulin is a hormone that helps store fat tissue in your body. If you have less of insulin, better insulin sensitivity, then it's easier for you to burn fat. It's easier for you to maintain a healthy weight. You want to have insulin sensitivity to help your efforts towards being healthy, a life cell. Therefore, this can also be true in adolescence. There is a, by definition, a state in the body where we see high insulin levels because of pubertal hormones. If you are a teenager, you have a teenager who is going through puberty and struggling with weight. It's very likely you have high insulin resistance or low insulin sensitivity just by the simple fact that you are in puberty.
Speaker 1:
One simple change that you can do and it can help your body with your insulin sensitivity is substitute the refined carbohydrates with whole grain carbohydrates. Help your body with this hormonal imbalances that you may have as a teenager being overweight, by making a healthier choice. And once again, it may seem insignificant when somebody asks you oh, would you like brown rice or white rice? However, it's not. It's those choices that we make every single day, again and again and again that make huge results. You may think, oh, it's not going to make a big difference, it's just one meal. It's not just one meal, it's every single meal that you make this choice to have white rice instead of brown rice, white pasta instead of brown pasta, muffin instead of oatmeal all these little choices, they add up. So you don't need to change all your diet and you don't need to give up completely in all the refined carbohydrates.
Speaker 1:
I'm with you. I totally understand it. What I'm trying to say is make this simple choice. Is it one time a week that you can do it? That's fine. Do it one time a week. Is it two times a week? Do it two times a week. The more you do it, the more and the better results you're going to get. So I hope this was helpful to you and I hope it can help you think about the choices you make next time.
Speaker 1:
And also for those of you that are actually cooking and preparing the meal. You have the choice what meal to serve on the table. You have the choice to choose brown rice over white rice and similar other things. Whole grains you get the idea, and you can mix it with your salad, mix it with other things so it can taste better. And it's all a matter of a habit after some time. If you had the same thing again and again, it kind of becomes a habit. So I encourage you to just try it out, and try it out for a few times before you decide. That's not for you, but at the end of the day, the decision is yours. Wish you good luck and I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you find it helpful, please share it with your friends and family so we can spread the message on how to build healthy habits for our kids and our teenagers. Take care, and I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 2:
Bye, if you enjoyed listening to this podcast. I invite you to come check out the LIFT program. It's Dr Gorgary's 12-week coaching program for teens and their moms, where we take all this information, we apply it to your daily life and we work together so your teenager learns how to create a healthy lifestyle so they can feel happier, more confident, less stressed and love their body again. Visit the website at lifestyleforteenscom and click on the work with me and free resources to learn more about this program and get free help to start this journey right away. Thanks for tuning in and we'll catch you in the next episode of Lifestyle and Weight Loss for Teens.