'Low GI' and why it matters
Most of us have heard or seen the term ‘low GI’, but I don’t think many people understand what it actually is.
Low GI stands for Low Glycemic Index. In essence, it measures the rate at which sugar is released into the bloodstream. A GI of 100 represents glucose, which is a sugar carbohydrate. All sugars are carbohydrates, though there are different types of sugars. For instance Fructose (i.e. high-fructose corn syrup in US coca-cola) is many times more sweeter than lactose (milk).
On to why the gycemic index is important. When you eat a food, you begin to digest it. Your stomach can only digest a certain amount of a sugar at a time and when the digestion process is fully saturated, we commonly refer to the rest as being ‘stored’. What this means is that the remaining sugar enters your bloodstream. The same occurs with alcohol for instance, the breathalyzer measures the alcohol content in your bloodstream. As with alcohol, high levels of sugar in the bloodstream led to health problems. These include diabetes, obesity, heart disease, cancer - even blindness.
Let me explain how it causes diabetes. Let’s say eat a high-glucose food. Your stomach is able to digest a small amount of it at a time, and because you’ve had a rush of it, the rest enters the bloodstream. Your body then removes the glucose from the bloodstream by producing the hormone insulin, which stores it instead as glycogen. This is called your insulin response. Type 2 Diabetes occurs when your body has an insulin resistance. What causes insulin resistance is that you keep rushing your body many times over with these high sugar foods, so much so that your body adjusts to it.
But what’s most important to address is the misunderstanding about what is a healthy food and what is not. The reason why diabetes and obesity has grown so drastically in the past few decades isn’t because people have suddenly become greedy with what they eat, it’s because they’re eating foods that they think are ok. Take white bread for example. Did you know that white bread has almost double the GI of a chocolate bar? And what’s worse, it’s not just 50g your eating as you would with a bar, with bread you’re eating probably 80g-160g in one go. And it’s not just bread either, it’s a lot of the foods you regularly eat, because the reason for the high GI is wheat.
About half a century ago, the world was facing impending famine, or so we thought. Population growth was rising exponentially, and so crops such as wheat were crossbred to produce extraordinary yield rates. This is known as the ‘agricultural revolution’. The modern wheat crop is extremely energy dense, and very different from what it was 10,000 years ago. It has more chromosomes now than that of a domestic cat! On a per-weight basis, white bread has more than 5 times the energy of coca-cola. Ths is why the Atkins diet is famous, because it avoids high-carbohydrate high-GI foods, which are typically wheat products. But almost everything the common person eats is a wheat product. Cereal, pizza, sandwiches, pasta, burgers, the list goes on!
You should be eating a low GI diet whether you want to lose weight or not, since it carries serious implications for your health.
