The Women Warriors

[RawMahdiyah]

What is the Glycemic Index (GI)?

The Glycemic Index ranks foods on how they affect our blood sugar levels. This index measures how much your blood sugar increases in the two or three hours after eating.
The GI is about foods high in carbohydrates. Foods high in fat or protein don't cause your blood sugar level to rise much.

A lot of people still think that it is plain table sugar that people with diabetes need to avoid. The experts used to say that, but the glycemic index shows that even complex carbohydrates, like baked potatoes, can even be worse.

When you make use of the GI to prepare healthy meals, it helps to keep your blood sugar levels under control. This is especially important for people with diabetes, although athletes and people who are overweight also stand to benifit from knowing about this reletively new concept in good nutrition.

Recent studies of large amounts of people with diabetes show that those who keep their blood sugar under tight control best avoid the complications that this diesase can lead to. The experts agree that what works best for people with diabetes - and probably the rest of us as well- is regular exercise, little saturated fat, and a high-fiber diet. That is excellent advice - as far as it goes.

The real problem is carbohydrates. The official consensus remains that a high-carbohydrate diet is best for people with diabetes. However, some experts, led by endocrinologists like Dr. Richard K. Berstein, recommend a low-carbohydrate diet, because carbohydrates break down quickly during digestion and can raise blood sugar to dangerous levels.

Many high carb. foods have high glycemic indexes, and certainly are not any good in any substantial quantity for people with diabetes. Other carbohydrates break down more slowly, releasing glucose gradually into our blood streams and are said to have lower glycemic indexes. Does a substantial quantity of these foods with lowers gylcemic indexes belong in your diet? Only your personal experience can answer that question.

Before the development of the GI beginning in 1981, scientists assumed that our bodies absorbed and digested simple sugars quickly producing rapid increases in our blood sugar level. This was the basis of the advice to avoid sugar, a proscription recently relaxed by the American Diabetes Association and others.

Now we know that simple sugars don't make your blood sugar rise any more rapidly than some complex carbohydrates do. Of course, simple sugars are simply empty calories, and still should me minimized for that reason!

Many of the glycemic index results have been surprises. For example, baked potatoes have a glycemic index considerably higher than that of table sugar.
Another pleasant surprise is pearled barley, which has a glycemix index of 36. That's much lower than any other grain. For example, brown rice has a glycemic index of 79, and wheat is even higher.



Glycemic Index List


Here are some of the most "important" of the 300 or so foods for which scientists have determined their glycemic indexes. The higher the index of a food the quicker it raises blood sugar.
The index uses white bread as a baseline with its index set as being equal to 100. Another index sets glucose as equal to 100. To convert to that list multiply the index number here by 0.7.


FOOD - INDEX


Yogurt, low fat, artificially sweetened 20
Soy beans 25
Rice bran 27
Cherries 32*
Fructose 32
Peas, dried 32
Barley, pearled 36
Grapefruit 36
Milk, full fat 39
Kidney beans 42
Black beans 43
Apricots, dried 44
Milk, skim 46
Lima beans, baby, frozen 46
Chick peas (Garbanzo beans) 47
Pear, fresh 53
Spaghetti, wholemeal 53
Apple 54
Navy beans 54
Plum 55
Pinto beans 55
Apple juice 58
Black-eyes beans 59
Kelloggs' All-bran 60
Peach, fresh 60
Orange 63
Macaroni 64
Lactose 65
Grapes 66
Pineapple juice 66
Rice, parboiled 68
Peas, green 68
Grapefruit juice 69
Carrots 70
Pumpernickel 71
Ice cream, low fat 71
Orange Jiuice 74 !
Special K 77
Banana 77
Sweet Potatoe 77*
Oat bran 78
Buckwheat 78
Sweet corn 78
Rice, brown 79*
Popcorn 79
Apricots, fresh 82
Honey 83
Rice, white 83
Split pea soup 86
Oatmeal 87*
Ice cream 87
Raisins 91
Beets 91
Sucrose (table sugar) 92
Pineapple 94
Grapenuts 96
Stoned Wheat Thins 96
Cornmeal 98
Wheat bread, wholemeal flour 99
Shredded Wheat 99
Melba Toast 100 !
Cream of Wheat 100
Millet 101
Wheat bread, white 101
Bagel, white 103
Watermelon 103
Swede (rutabaga) 103
Cheerios 106 !
French fries 107
Donut 108
Waffles 109
Total 109
Broad beans (fava beans) 113
Pretzels 116
Rice Krispies 117 !
Cornflakes 119
Potatoe, baked 121
Glucose 137
Parsnip 139
Dates 141
Glucose tablets 146
Maltose 150 !



Source: Jennie Brand-Miller et al., The Glucose Revolution: The Authoritative Guide to The Glycemic Index, The Groundbreaking Medical Discovery (New York: Marlowe & Company, in press).


RawMahdiyah