If you are diabetic, do NOT eat these Korean noodles!

diabetes do not eat this korean glass noodles japchae

November 2022 update: Yeah, these noodles are terrible!

In Korean, these noodles are called 잡채 (jap-chae). In English, I suppose they would be called glass noodles …? They’re brownish in color and kind of transparent.

But I love these noodles!! I could eat them all day. Unfortunately, if I do that, I will almost certainly die.

I already know that spicy Korean pork has a pretty minimal effect on my blood sugar (because I tested, tested, and tested), so to make this a meal I measured out 200g (a bit less than 1/2 a pound) of spicy pork and 200g of the glass noodles.

Here are the results.

Blood sugar reading before eating: 93

This reading of 93 was after work, so I hadn’t eaten in a long while.

Blood sugar reading after eating: 285

This reading was about an hour after I finished my glass noodles.

Also, OH MY GOD!!!! 285? Are you F-ing kidding me?

Just for the sake of science, and also because I had some more pork in the fridge, I decided to test my blood sugar the next day with just 200g of pork.

The results, as I knew they would be, were very mild. 97 → 116.

So yeah. There are various kinds of Korean food that are great for diabetics, but not this one! Do NOT eat glass noodles if you are diabetic. If you are a Korean with diabetes, 잡체 먹지마요!

UPDATE: I didn’t want to throw away these delicious noodles, so I decided to do another test. This time, I ate just 100g of the noodles.

The results? One hour after eating the noodles … 118 → 148.

That’s weird! 200g of these noodles (along with 200g of spicy pork) sent me from 93 to 285. I was expecting an increase of maybe 80-100 since I ate half the amount of my first test, but my blood sugar only went up by 30. I’ll have to try this again while the noodles are still edible.

do not eat glass noodles diabetes korean food
do not eat glass noodles if you are diabetic
Spicy Korean pork + glass noodles = delicious, but OMG SO BAD for the blood sugar.