The dumplings look healthy and well-rounded with meat and vegetables, meat and veggies, and not too much of the main course.
However, many diabetics have found that eating dumplings seems to raise their blood sugar particularly easily when compared to eating rice with vegetables on a daily basis!
A friend told me:
My doctor told me that dumplings are a healthy food, with meat and vegetables, a variety of foods, and a low GI value. I did the opposite. My blood glucose was 6-7 2 hours after a meal, but with dumplings my blood glucose went up to over 10!
This result is not a coincidence. There may be several reasons for this, so let me explain.
Firstly, dumpling skins are softly boiled fine white pasta, which is very easy to digest when eaten while hot.
Dumplings and pasta use refined white flour, not whole grains and beans, and hot, soft-cooked pasta is the stuff of high glycaemic response. After you cook the rice and eat it later, after it’s not hot, the rate of digestion goes down a bit; and dumplings are eaten while they’re still hot; no one eats cold dumplings. So the theory is that a hot dumpling skin will have a higher glycaemic response than a lukewarm, cold cake, cold noodles or whatever.
Secondly, dumplings tend to have a higher fat-to-energy ratio, especially many commercially available frozen dumplings.
Dumplings are filled with meat, and the meat is three fat and seven lean, with a little more oil added. Daily stir-fry is not eaten fat meat, and the filling contains fat, too much fat will reduce insulin sensitivity, and also have a negative impact on the blood sugar of the second meal. This is especially true of commercially available frozen dumplings, many of which are high-fat products. My students have done some calculations and found that some frozen dumplings, which do not feel greasy, actually have a fat-to-energy ratio of nearly 50%!
Thirdly, and perhaps most importantly, the amount of vegetables that go into eating dumplings is far from adequate, and the vegetables are still chopped and squeezed out of their juices.
Large amounts of vegetables are extremely beneficial for blood sugar control. There are several more influences involved:
1 The large amount of dietary fibre in vegetables. This is based on sufficient quantity. The amount of vegetables contained in a dozen dumplings is obviously too small compared to the amount of stir-fried and boiled vegetables prepared in large plates and bowls.
2 Chewiness of vegetables. Whole or large pieces of vegetables need to be chewed slowly, physically preventing the food from being digested quickly. In contrast, vegetables in dumplings are chopped up and chewiness is reduced.
Some studies have found that when vegetables are broken into pulp, they are not as effective as chewing them directly, in terms of slowing down the rise of blood sugar after a meal.
3 Healthy ingredients in vegetables. Many families squeeze vegetables before making dumplings. The vast majority of the health ingredients in vegetables are in the juice. Removing them is obviously not conducive to preserving the nutritional value, including the components that may delay the rise of blood sugar after a meal will also have a great loss.
4 Vegetables are best for blood sugar control when eaten before a meal. Small amounts of vegetables and meat stirred together and swallowed at the same time are not as effective as if the vegetables were eaten first.
Fourthly, dumplings can unknowingly take in a lot of starch.
Many people think of dumplings as a snack and don’t think of them as a staple food. In fact, dumplings are a real fancy staple food. There is quite a lot of flour in them.
The standard-sized dumplings made in northern canteens/homes contain 50 grams of flour for an average of 6 dumplings (40 years ago, you had to pay 1 tael of food stamps to buy 6 dumplings). Eating 12 dumplings is 100 grams of flour, which is equivalent to a bowl full of rice.
However, eating a bowl full of rice will make diabetics feel that they have eaten too much. If you eat 12 dumplings, you don’t think it’s too much.
Fifth, dumplings are eaten too quickly.
It takes a short time to eat a dozen dumplings, and a long time to slowly eat mixed rice and a lot of vegetables, fish and meat. Food enters the stomach and intestines quickly, and naturally speeds up the rise in blood sugar after meals.
So, eating frozen dumplings is indeed a good ‘convenience food’, but not a good blood sugar control food.
However, when it comes to the Winter Solstice, the New Year and the Chinese New Year …… It’s always time to eat dumplings. How to coexist with dumplings peacefully? Here are a few ideas for you:
1 Adjust the ingredients of the dumpling filling. Increase the proportion of vegetables and reduce the proportion of fatty meat.
When there is less fat and more lean meat, the texture of the cooked dumplings will tend to be “firewood”. You can add eggs, watery tofu and vegetable juice (the water that comes out of the vegetables when they are stuffed) to keep the texture juicy.
Soft boiled seaweed, boiled lotus root or chopped potatoes added to the filling are also good for retaining water.
Many people will ask: what happens when there are more vegetables and water comes out? This is not hard to fix.
When you cut the vegetables, the particles are bigger, not chopped. This way less water comes out, the flavour is fresh and fragrant, and keeping the natural cell structure of vegetables is good for blood sugar control. Instead of squeezing the water out of the vegetables, try to use minced meat, dried vermicelli, dried shrimp, dried shiitake mushrooms, etc. to soak up the excess water and keep the nutrients in them as well.
2 Adjust the dumpling skin recipe.
Adding a small amount of egg, soya flour, wholemeal flour, oat flour, etc. to the dough used to make dumpling skins is good for lowering the blood sugar response.
However, it is not recommended to add mixed grain flour other than wheat. This is because grain flours other than wheat do not have gluten and the resulting dumplings will easily cook and break. It is also not recommended to use all wholemeal flour. This is because the bran in wholemeal flour also reduces the continuous structure of the gluten, which makes the texture of the dumpling skins significantly lower and makes them easy to cook and break.
3 Increase the number of side dishes, start with half a bowl of vegetables with less oil, then start eating the dumplings with the vegetables.
The benefits of eating vegetables first have been mentioned many times before. According to reported experimental results, eating 100-200 grams of vegetables such as choy sum, rape, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage, aubergine, mushrooms, etc. first, and then eating the main course with the food, can effectively reduce the postprandial blood glucose response.
4 Eat half of the mixed grain rice + vegetables and meat, and then eat half of the dumplings slowly.
Dumplings are a festive food and don’t necessarily need to be turned into an everyday staple. Eat half of the mixed grain rice and meat and vegetable dishes, including more green leafy vegetables, in your daily style, and then eat a few dumplings for the occasion, and you won’t have much to worry about.
5 Add less salt to the dumpling filling and then use more vinegar with the dumplings.
Acetic and lactic acids are good for lowering the postprandial glycaemic response, as has been reported in many studies. But vinegar also contains salt, and eating too much of it can increase your sodium intake. So you can make up for this by using less salt when making the filling, cooking it and eating it with vinegar.
If you are making steamed or pan-fried dumplings (including potstickers), you need to be more careful about adding less salt to the filling. This is because some of the salt will run off when you cook the dumplings, whereas steamed and pan-fried dumplings won’t, and can easily taste too salty.
6 Move around promptly after eating to reduce postprandial blood sugar spikes.
Don’t sit down immediately after a meal, get up and do your chores and walk around. Counting from the first bite of food, 30 to 60 minutes after the blood sugar peak (depending on how fast you eat, what you eat). At this time, get up and walk, such as walking for half an hour, is conducive to reducing the postprandial blood sugar peak.