What Are Heart-Healthy Carbs? Here’s Why You Should Try A Low-Glycemic Diet

When you think of heart-healthy eating, you might immediately think of dietary fat and cholesterol. While these are two very important considerations to keep in mind if you’re trying to eat better for your cardiovascular health, there’s another nutrient at play here: carbohydrates.

They tend to be villainized pretty heavily when it comes to eating healthy and managing your weight. As it turns out, foods that have carbs aren’t inherently bad, and some can even be considered heart healthy foods! But they aren’t all made equally, and some are definitely better for you than others.

Here’s how watching your carbs and eating a low-glycemic diet might be one of the ways you can present cardiovascular disease and give your overall health a major boost. 

Low-Glycemic Eating: What Is The Glycemic Index? 

Along with protein and fat, carbohydrates are macronutrients that your body needs for a variety of functions. Carbs are especially important for energy since they break down into a simple sugar called “glucose” that your cells can store and use quickly as fuel. The quality of different carbohydrates is determined based on where they land on the glycemic index. This index can be thought of as a scale that indicates how quickly each food containing carbohydrates will affect your blood sugar.

Under normal circumstances, carbohydrates are digested and broken down into glucose, which then circulates in your bloodstream until the hormone insulin signals to your cells to take in that glucose and store it for energy. 

• If something is a high-glycemic food, it digests fairly quickly, which means that it can cause quick blood sugar spikes.

• Low-glycemic foods take a little longer for your body to digest, so their effect on your blood sugar is more gradual. 

There are a couple of different factors that can affect where a food falls on the glycemic index, including the way that it’s processed, the other nutrients it contains, and the kinds of sugars it has. As a general rule, high-glycemic foods tend to be more heavily processed. They might contain refined grains and simple sugars, and have fewer other nutrients to slow down their absorption in the body.  On the other hand, low-glycemic index foods tend to contain more nutrients like protein and fiber, which can slow the digestion process.

And here’s why this matters: if you’re eating a dietary pattern that’s filled with high-glycemic foods, you could be setting yourself up to have chronically high blood sugar levels, and that can lead to a world of health complications including metabolic syndrome, type 2 diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. 

Why Glycemic Index Matters: The Connection Between Carbs and Heart Health

The kind of diet you eat can have a huge effect on your cardiovascular health, especially if you are consistently loading up on poor-quality, high-glycemic carbs. Take this study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, for example. Researchers who wanted to understand the connection between the glycemic index and cardiovascular health evaluated the diets of a diverse range of people across multiple countries using a food questionnaire. They then followed up with the participants after 9.5 years.

After the follow-up, they found that the people whose diets consistently ranked high on the glycemic index tended to have higher instances of major cardiovascular events (like strokes and heart attacks), and there were even more instances of cardiovascular-related deaths.

So why is this? As mentioned above, foods that rank high on the glycemic index tend to be more heavily processed and less nutritious than lower-glycemic foods. This often coincides with calorie-heavy, nutrition-poor “junk foods”. When eaten in excess, this can contribute to unhealthy weight gain, which can then go on to affect your cardiovascular health. 

There’s another big issue here as well: eating an unhealthy high-glycemic diet can also affect your insulin sensitivity, which can lead to a whole host of cardiovascular and metabolic issues. Remember, insulin signals to your cells to take in that sugar in your blood to be used as fuel. If you are constantly eating high-glycemic foods, your body responds to all that excess blood sugar by increasing insulin production, and cells start becoming less insulin sensitive. They stop responding as easily to insulin, in a condition known as becoming insulin resistant, leaving the glucose in your bloodstream.

Your body then starts storing that excess blood sugar as fat instead. These issues brought on by insulin resistance can then lead to issues like high LDL particles (often referred to as “high cholesterol”), high blood pressure, obesity, and other cardiovascular complications in a cluster of symptoms we collectively refer to as metabolic syndrome. Unfortunately, developing metabolic syndrome can increase your risk of developing serious (and even life-threatening) conditions like cardiovascular disease, strokes, and type 2 diabetes.

What Are Low-Glycemic Foods You Should Be Eating More Of? 

But on the plus side, changing the way that you eat can also improve your insulin sensitivity, help combat these metabolic conditions, and lead to overall better health. Some evidence is pointing towards low-glycemic diets as a heart-healthier way to be eating. One study that evaluated the effect of different kinds of diets in patients with type 2 diabetes put patients on either a low-glycemic or a high-glycemic diet. They found that low density lipoproteins levels fell more significantly when they were on a low-glycemic diet vs a high-glycemic diet, and there was also evidence that the patients who followed a low-glycemic diet showed a more significant increase in insulin sensitivity.

So part of eating a heart-healthy diet involves eating low-glycemic carbs and other heart healthy foods more often! So what are heart healthy foods in the first place? This could mean following a low-carb diet with fewer overall calories. It could also mean that you replace high glycemic foods with low-glycemic foods more often. 

Some low-glycemic carbohydrates to add to your diet include: 

• Whole grains

• Nuts

• Barley

• Legumes (beans and peas)

It’s also worth taking a look at the kinds of fruits and veggies you’re eating since those aren’t all created equally either. For example, Idaho potatoes can be healthy in moderation and depending on how they are cooked, but they rank higher on the glycemic index than other vegetables like carrots, broccoli, and Brussels sprouts. The same applies to fruits. Certain fruits, like watermelon and bananas, tend to affect your blood sugar more quickly. Some low-glycemic fruits that may be more heart-healthy include apples, pears, blueberries, and dried apricots.

It’s important to note that your eating pattern is important here, not just the individual foods you eat. Just because something is low-glycemic doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be the healthiest food option out there, or vice versa. What matters most is the consistency and frequency with which you eat those low-glycemic foods in comparison to higher-glycemic foods, and whether or not you pair them with other good nutrients like lean protein and healthy fats.

Conclusion and What to Remember

Taking care of your heart is an involved process, and one of the first steps you can take is to watch your diet. If you are concerned about your cardiovascular health and longevity, it’s well worth taking a look at your diet and overhauling it with plenty of heart-healthy food options with a low glycemic index.