Researchers from King’s College London have found that bread made with chickpea flour lowers blood sugar and makes you feel full longer after eating. The results of the research have been published magazine American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
Eating legumes is known to help maintain a healthy weight and reduce the risk of heart disease. Many of the benefits of these products are due to the fiber structure of the legumes, although conventional milling is believed to reduce the beneficial effects of the fiber structure.
New methods developed by scientists in food technology have allowed whole legumes to produce whole grain flour that retains its fiber structure. According to scientists, the technology will provide a new way to fortify flour-based products with beneficial nutritional properties to improve health.
For example, adding whole-cell chickpea flour to bread significantly increased the satiety signal from the gut to the brain, meaning that people felt more full after eating the fortified bread.
In addition, after eating 30% chickpea bread, the subjects’ blood sugar levels were 40% lower than after eating white wheat flour bread. The authors showed that this effect was due to the slower breakdown of starch in the cell meal during digestion.
But the study was carried out with the participation of healthy people, so in the future scientists will conduct additional studies with other samples.