Anecdotally...
When I was so sick recently and couldn't eat for a whole day, of course the thing I craved like mad when my appetite returned was Chinese fried rice. I think part of it was just because of the salt (I was also severely dehydrated) and the fact that rice is easy to digest and my tummy was still pretty shaky. Also the little scrambled egg bits in it sounded awesome to me for some reason.
We went to our favorite place and I put away that fried rice like you wouldn't believe. I think it was gone in something like 90 seconds, and it was a big heaping plate.
I felt sooooo happy and energized afterwards. But maybe that had more to do with the fact that I had been starving for something like 36 hours, and had suddenly gotten a huge infusion of glucose.
However I didn't really experience a crash like I thought I would.
In any case I am using an exceptional situation to talk about a generality, which is stupid. Good heavens I'm on a tangent. Apologies all around.
To actually address your question from a more general anecdotal point of view...
Until I switched to a more sensible carb ratio in my diet, I never noticed how sleepy carbs made me. Probably because I am an active person by nature anyway. But it wasn't until I went extreme (I did South Beach for a while) against the carbs, and then re-introduced them, that I noticed how much they wipe me out.
I'm not sure if this was because I had weaned myself off of them and so then just a little bit would hit me hard, or if it had always been that way and I'd just never noticed because I was so used to eating carbs and operating at that energy level all the time. I suppose it would be six of one/half dozen of another anyhow. I mean, the net effect was the same.
I find that if my carb intake is higher, I tend to get "the afternoon sleepies" more readily; I hit that slump between 2 and 4ish in the afternoon; that gastronomic witching hour that all the diet advice warns you about, in which everyone at the office gets a hankering for a Snickers or something, or they'll slip into a coma at their desks. When my carb intake is lower, I breeze right through that phase. I may still get hungry, but I'm not craving "energy" so much as just feeling like my stomach is empty and needs a couple handfuls of nuts and a slice or two of cheese or something.
I am not Asian, by the way.
So, for whatever that information is worth, there you go. It's an interesting question, Animus, and I have often found myself wondering the same thing.
