A new study reports that a low-contrast between what we eat and what we eat it on — like red pasta on a red plate or white pasta on a white plate — can lead us to eat a lot more. Like 22 percent more than when we eat on high-contrast dinnerware.

Not that I would recommend that any of us who have diabetes eat any color pasta on even the most awful plate. Even yellow pasta on a violet plate might not be a wise choice for those of us who are trying to keep our blood glucose levels in check.

For most of us who have diabetes, managing our weight is probably the key way to manage this disease. Fully 85 percent of us have a body mass index, or BMI, above normal, according to a survey by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

That makes the color of the plates and bowls we eat from even more important than it is for most Americans. “Only” about two-thirds of Americans struggle unsuccessfully with their weight.

Fooling ourselves is generally not smart. But even though we might know that we are fooling ourselves with our choice of dinnerware, it can work to our advantage.

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Those of us who have diabetes know that it takes about a quarter of an hour for us to digest our food after we eat, so we don’t feel full until then. The basic idea is to wait a little while before we grab seconds.

This is especially important at this holiday season of celebration and overeating and when our meal includes even a little carbohydrate. That’s because eating carbs can actually make us hungry. This counterintuitive reaction is something that I have written about at HealthCentral.com in my article, “How Eating Can Make You Hungry” at http://www.healthcentral.com/diabetes/c/17/18362/eating-make-hungry

But waiting “a little while” is not precise enough. Most of us have a hard time gauging the passage of time. Others can’t stop checking the clock when they are thinking about eating.

My idea is to time the wait with my kitchen timer.

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When I started to read Wheat Belly by Dr. William Davis, my first thought was that it didn’t go far enough. The book’s main message is to avoid wheat and we will be much healthier. Not only will we lose weight, but we will also be able to manage our diabetes much better.

But just wheat? Not all grains, which the paleo diet eliminates? Not starches, the enemy of low-carb?

No Wheat!

When I began to follow a very low-carb diet after reading Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution by Dr. Richard K. Bernstein and Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, I eliminated almost all starch from my diet.

Almost all. Eventually, I did eliminate all wheat, but not until I had followed a very low-carb diet for several years.

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People with diabetes know that carbohydrates will raise our blood glucose levels. But we think that one form of carbohydrates — fiber — is benign.

It isn’t.

Dr. Robert C. Atkins was a pioneer in seeing the benefits of a very low-carb diet in his books like his 1972 bestseller, Dr. Atkins’ New Diet Revolution. But the organization that he left behind, Atkins Nutritionals, sells all sorts of goodies packed with what it calls “Net Carbs.” They say that we don’t need to count the amount of fiber you eat:

“When you follow the Atkins Diet, aka the Atkins Nutrition Approach, you actually count grams of Net Carbs, which represent the total carbohydrate content of the food minus the fiber content. The Net Carbs number reflects the grams of carbohydrate that significantly impact your blood sugar level and therefore are the only carbs you need to count when you do Atkins.”

But fiber does count. Depending on the source and type of fiber that it is, each gram of fiber provides us about 2 calories, which is about half the amount that non-fiber carbohydrates provides.

This is what the best source, the Institute of Medicine, indicates. This group and its parent organization, the National Academy of Sciences, are hybrid governmental-private organizations. The U.S. government created these private organizations to advise it on scientific and technological matters. “While it is still unclear as to the energy yield of fibers in humans, current data indicate that the yield is in the range of 1.5 to 2.5 kcal/g,” the IOM says.

Still, the members of my Very Low Carb for Health Diabetes Support Group in Boulder, Colorado, wanted to check for ourselves. Chris Quemena at Quest Nutrition Inc. sent me a case of 12 Peanut Butter Supreme Quest Bars for us to test.

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More than 11 years ago I first publicized how cinnamon could help people with type 2 diabetes to control their insulin resistance. Since that time more studies have come out. Some of them indicated that cinnamon might not help, and I wrote here five years ago that I had second thoughts about it.

Now, I have third thoughts.

A meta-analysis published yesterday shows that cinnamon — especially cinnamon extract — produces a modest but statistically signification reduction of fasting blood glucose. The study, “Cinnamon Intake Lowers Fasting Blood Glucose: Meta-Analysis,” appears in the September 2011 issue of the  Journal of Medicinal Food, and the abstract is online.

The authors are Paul A. Davis of the Department of Nutrition, University of California, Davis, and Wallace Yokoyama of the Western Regional Research Center, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Dr. Davis kindly sent me the full-text of the study on my request.

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Before our diabetes support group meeting on Saturday I never thought that I was obsessive. But Michael convinced me that I am.

Like me, Michael has type 2 diabetes that he tightly manages. But Michael is a university professor here in Boulder who is awfully smart.

“We walk a fine line between discipline and obsession,” Michael began. He noted that several members of our support group, including me, are picky about the kind and amount of food that we eat.

Barry, one of our members, mentioned that he rarely eats out any more because finding food that meets his standards is getting too hard. Barry said that he makes his own ice cream and pizza at home, but the ice cream is sugar-free, and he makes the pizza without any wheat or other grain.

I also rarely eat out, and I have pared down my meals to a basic minimum, usually eggs for breakfast, salad for lunch, and fish for dinner with little else. Still, I complained that keeping off the weight I lost a few years ago is incredibly difficult. If I were to eat what most people would consider a normal amount, I would be sure to gain back many pounds.

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Some of my friends who are new to the world of diabetes keep surprising me. The question that surprises me the most is, “Why was my blood glucose level high today?”

In reply I always ask what they ate. Their answer almost always includes starch.

Sometimes we make managing our diabetes sound a lot more difficult than is has to be. Managing it isn’t simple, particularly if you have to use insulin, but it’s not very complicated either.

You don’t have to read a book about diabetes to understand the basics of keeping your blood glucose levels within bounds. Books can help, and in fact I am the co-author of a book on What Makes My Blood Glucose Go Up…and Down? About half of that book covers the same ground as this short article. It can help when you are ready to explore the details of diabetes management.

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Don’t go from the nourishment of nuts to chowing down on carbs. That’s the opposite of what I mean by the title of this article. I mean to suggest that substituting nuts in your diet for some of your carbs makes sense.

A study that will appear in the August issue of Diabetes Care, a professional journal of the American Diabetes Association, shows that eating nuts every day can help us manage our type 2 diabetes and prevent its complications. This research reports that eating just two ounces of nuts as a replacement for carbohydrates proved effective in managing our blood glucose and lipid levels.

Dr. Cyril W.C. Kendall of the University of Toronto, who is the corresponding author, sent me the full-text of the study, “Nuts as a Replacement for Carbohydrates in the Diabetic Diet.” The abstract of the study is online.

The lead author of the study is Dr. David J.A. Jenkins. That name is what brought the study to my attention because he created the most powerful tool to evaluate carbohydrates.

That tool is the glycemic index, which his 1981 article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition kicked off. Slow to gain traction here, the GI seems nowadays to be everywhere.

When I learned in 1994 that I had diabetes, I began following the glycemic index, and my first book lauded it. Since then, however, I have gone beyond that diet. And Dr. Jenkins also seems to have done so.

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Our bodies are more sensitive to carbohydrates in the morning. That’s why Dr. Richard K. Bernstein recommends that we eat half as many grams of carbs for breakfast compared with lunch or dinner.

“I usually advise patients to restrict their carbohydrate intake to no more than 6 grams of slow-acting carbohydrate at breakfast, 12 grams at lunch, and 12 grams at supper,” he writes in his book Dr. Bernstein’s Diabetes Solution. He knows from experience that carbs at breakfast will raise our blood glucose level more than at meals later in the day, but his book doesn’t tell us why that is a fact.

This difference has puzzled me for years. But now I understand.

I am in San Diego for the 71st Scientific Sessions of the American Diabetes Association. Yesterday a late-breaking poster here explained it for me.

The poster, “Morning Hyperglycemia: Breakfast or Dawn Phenomenon,” tells us more about the dawn phenomenon than we ever knew before. In the past we understood that it began about 4 a.m. and ended about 8 a.m., the typical start of breakfast. The new study by Dr. Allen King, an endocrinologist practicing at the Diabetes Care Center in Salinas, California, and two of his associates there, had 37 subjects skip their breakfast to see what happens.

The subjects used a basal insulin, Lantus, and a continuous glucose monitor. The CGM showed that in fact the dawn phenomenon doesn’t stop at 8 a.m. The dawn phenomenon does rise at 4 a.m., but it peaks at 10 a.m. and doesn’t return to baseline until 1 p.m.

“The dawn phenomenon contributes a major share to the ‘breakfast’ meal hyperglycemia,” they write.

One of my most popular posts here, “Taming the Dawn Phenomenon,” has 99 comments as of today. That post has many suggestions by me and others about how to keep our blood glucose levels in check.

Now, we know that minimizing carbs at breakfast is another arrow in our quiver.

This is a mirror of one of my articles that Health Central published. You can navigate to that site to find my most recent articles.