Is Puttu Good for Diabetes? Rice, Ragi, Wheat Puttu and the Kadala Rule

Is puttu safe just because it is steamed?

Almost every patient who tells me they have “switched to puttu” says the word steamed in the same breath. No oil, no frying — so it must be the safe breakfast. Half of that is true, and the half that is true matters: puttu brings none of the fat that a porotta or a pazhampori brings, and steaming is the gentlest thing you can do to a grain. But puttu is still rice. It is white rice podi layered with grated coconut and steamed in the kutti, and rice flour is about 80 g of carbohydrate per 100 g (USDA FoodData Central, “Rice flour, white, unenriched”). Steaming adds water and a coconut layer, not fibre. A small Kerala study that measured thirteen local breakfast foods with finger-prick sampling placed puttu, idiyappam and idli in the moderate band — better than tapioca and ripe plantain, which came out high, and no worse than chapathi. Moderate is where this whole answer lives: not a food to fear, not a food to be casual with.

How much carbohydrate is in one puttu?

This is the number nobody at the breakfast table has ever seen, and it is the one that sets your ten-o’clock reading. A standard home recipe — one cup of puttu podi with half a cup of grated coconut — fills the kutti and gives two large cylinders, at roughly 364 kcal and 67 g of carbohydrate each (recipe-card estimate, Veg Recipes of India; shop portions vary). Against cooked parboiled rice at 25.4 g of carbohydrate per 100 g (IFCT 2017, ICMR-NIN), the arithmetic is uncomfortable reading.

Every figure there is an estimate derived from published recipes and composition tables, not a measurement of your kitchen — the podi-to-coconut ratio and the size of the kutti move it in both directions.

What should go beside it — kadala, pazham or sugar?

This is where the Kerala evidence is genuinely interesting. Researchers at Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Kochi tested ten traditional and ten high-fibre Kerala breakfasts in healthy volunteers, matched at about 50 g of carbohydrate each, with finger-prick glucose out to two hours (Nivedita et al., Indian Journal of Nutrition, 2017). Puttu with banana and pappadam was one of the traditional plates; corn puttu with kadala curry was one of the high-fibre ones. At 120 minutes the two differed significantly (p=0.045), and the same held against cherupayar curry (p=0.037). The detail worth carrying home is a negative one: plain rice puttu with kadala curry showed no difference from corn puttu with kadala curry. The curry closed most of the gap by itself. That is the kadala rule in a line — what you put beside the puttu can matter as much as which flour went into it. Ten young healthy volunteers is a small study and not a trial in people with diabetes, so treat it as a direction rather than a decimal.

Is ragi, wheat or corn puttu better than rice puttu?

Yes, modestly, and the reason is fibre rather than anything magical. Whole finger millet carries about 11.2 g of fibre and 7.2 g of protein per 100 g against rice flour’s near-nothing (IFCT 2017, ICMR-NIN), and across the Amrita testing the higher-fibre versions of familiar dishes scored markedly better on fullness — 5.71 against 3.78 on the satiety scale, p<0.001 — which is how a swap like this actually works: you eat less of the next thing. Broken wheat, corn and ragi podi all sit in that camp; the ragi page has the detail. Two cautions. Flour ground talcum-fine behaves much more like white rice than coarse stone-ground flour does, so buy the gritty podi. And “ragi puttu” on a hotel board is often mostly rice podi with some ragi in it — ask the ratio, or make it half-and-half at home, where it does not spoil the dish at all.

What to say at the counter, and what to change at home

In a Marthandam or Kaliakkavilai hotel the exchange is short. Ask for “pakuthi puttu, kadala curry kooduthal” — half the puttu, extra kadala curry — or in Malayalam, “pakuthi puttu mathi, kadala curry kooduthal venam.” If chiratta puttu is on the board, take that instead: the coconut-shell dome is simply a smaller unit than the tube. And say “pazham venda, panchasaara venda” — no banana, no sugar — because in most shops both arrive unasked, and refusing them at the counter is easier than leaving them on the plate. At home, three changes cover nearly everything: mix the podi half-and-half with ragi or broken wheat, serve the kadala curry (or a payar thoran and an egg) onto the plate before the puttu, and steam one cylinder for two people. Then check your sugar two hours after your usual plate and after the changed one. That single pair of readings teaches you more about your own puttu than any list I can write.

Where puttu still goes wrong

Four ways, and the steaming is not one of them. Count creep — the second cylinder appears while you are still on the first, because nobody counts puttu the way they count idli. The sweet plate — puttu with ripe pazham and sugar, or the Tamil arisi vella puttu made with jaggery for Navaratri and Shivaratri, is a dessert built on rice flour, and jaggery is sugar with trace minerals attached, not a diabetic sweetener. When it comes as prasadam it stays on the plate: take a small piece, take it after a protein-heavy meal, and drop the rice at that meal — portion, not refusal. Fasting mornings — if a small puttu is your only pre-dawn meal during Ramadan or a Sabarimala vratham and you take insulin or a sulfonylurea, a plate with no protein in it can leave you low by mid-morning; your doctor adjusts the medication around the fast, never the other way round. And the childhood habit of puttu-with-banana-and-sugar, which is the single change with the largest return.

Sources

• Nivedita, Kumar H, Sundaram KR, Menon AS. “Glycemic Response and Satiety to Traditional and High Fiber Cereal Preparations of Kerala Cuisine in Healthy Volunteers.” Indian Journal of Nutrition 2017;4(1):154 — the puttu-and-banana versus corn-puttu-and-kadala comparison, the matched carbohydrate table, and the satiety scores. Ten healthy young volunteers, not people with diabetes.
• Kerala breakfast GI and GL study — eleven volunteers, incremental area under the curve; the source of the moderate band for puttu, idiyappam and idli, and of the high band for tapioca and ripe plantain. Small and unreplicated, so it sets direction, not a number to quote.
• IFCT 2017 (ICMR-NIN, Hyderabad) — cooked parboiled rice and whole finger millet, used for the rice-equivalent column and the ragi comparison.
• USDA FoodData Central, “Rice flour, white, unenriched” — the 80 g of carbohydrate per 100 g that every cylinder of puttu starts from.
• Jenkins DJA et al., Archives of Internal Medicine 2012 — 121 adults with type 2 diabetes; a low-GI diet including about a cup of legumes a day lowered HbA1c further than a high-wheat-fibre diet did. This is the trial behind the kadala rule.
• ICMR-NIN Dietary Guidelines for Indians, 2024 — 250 g of cereals and millets against 85 g of pulses a day at 2,000 kcal. Most puttu plates in this district invert that ratio.

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