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Free foods

Many vegetables have few available carbohydrates in a standard serving. We call these the "free foods," not because your supermarket will give them to you without cost, but because they are essentially free of any impact on your blood sugar.

Another factor is that because servings of these vegetables are so low in available carbohydrates, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get volunteers to eat enough for a test. The standard test portion is 50 grams of available carbohydrates. With any of the free foods, test subjects would have to eat huge portions.

For convenience we can call any vegetable with fewer than 5 grams of available carbohydrate in a 100 gram portion is a free food. The rest of the portion is protein, fat, fiber, ash, and water.

You can find many of these vegetables in the USDA Nutrient Database for Standard Reference at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/cgi-bin/nut_search.pl. An even more convenient way to get this information is to download it to your computer as an Excel spreadsheet at http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/foodcomp/Data/SR15/dnload/sr15dnld.html.

Excluding those foods not commonly eaten in the United States, they are as follows. All are raw, unless otherwise stated. The numbers are the grams of available carbohydrate (that is, carbohydrate minus dietary fiber) in 100 grams of the portion of the food):

VEGETABLES:
Alfalfa seeds, sprouted 1.28
Arugula 2.05
Asparagus, cooked 2.63
Beans, green, cooked 4.69
Beet greens, cooked 2.56
Broccoli, cooked 2.16
Cabbage, cooked 2.16
Cauliflower, cooked 1.41
Celeriac, cooked 4.7
Celery 1.95
Chard, swiss, cooked 2.04
Collards, cooked 2.1
Cucumber 1.8

Eggplant, cooked 4.14
Endive 0.25
Fennel, bulb 4.19
Jicama, raw 3.92
Kale, cooked 3.63
Lettuce, butterhead 1.32
Lettuce, cos or romaine 0.67
Lettuce, iceberg 0.69
Mustard greens, cooked 0.1
Mushrooms 2.94-3.57 (except shitake)
Nopales, cooked 1.27
Okra, cooked 4.71
Parsley 3.03

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