at Tue, 17 Feb 2004 21:26:19 GMT in <%FvYb.339715$xy6.1679297@attbi_s02>,
[email hidden] (Julia Altshuler) wrote :
Quoted message said:My googling skills need help. I've gotten interested in Atkins, South Beach and the glycemic index.
I was hoping for an online source that would list the glycemic index for a whole bunch of foods.
All I've found are examples where they mention 20 fruits, 20 vegetables and as many meats or
cereals or beans. I want a web page where I can look up any common food and find out how it rates.
Also, the portion size is never mentioned...
Here is the best and most definitive list available:
diabetes.about.comngilists.htmOpen ↗
You need to be aware that there is no comprehensive list of every common food's GI - simply because
not all foods have been measured. It's too new of a research area at this time. With the current
interest in high-protein low-carb diets, I'm sure the list will grow rapidly at this time.
One of the problems about portion size is that with GI, the fact of the portion size itself has an
impact on the measured GI. In other words, you don't get the same GI for different portion sizes.
Smaller portions give a higher GI, because the body digests it much faster. Since GI is related to
digestive function, it's a lot more complex than, say, carbohydrate count which is a static
measurement. So you have to take GI figures very relatively, very much with a grain of salt, and
very aware of the fact that there may be wild fluctuations from the predicted values in *your* case,
because everybody's digestive metabolism is different and how you assimilate different foods will be
different.
Thus GI figures aren't something you can take simply as a flat truth. The best way to use the list
is as a rough guide. Then, experiment with different foods and see what actually works for you, in
terms of the reaction you experience after each. Generally, a high GI is associated with a fast,
sudden boost of energy followed by a total collapse, where a low GI doesn't give you either the
immediate boost or the dramatic letdown. Be careful in how you observe. For instance, unless you're
the type of person who wakes up invariably feeling very refreshed, low-GI foods are going to feel
very bad in the morning, because they give no boost that gets you up- to-speed. A higher-GI food
will probably make you feel essentially normal in the morning right away, because the quick release
will put your body in a fully-awake energy state. So it can be easy to conclude that the high-GI
food isn't having much impact on energy level, simply because you now feel normal, but you weren't
accounting for the fact that you were still waking up. And you might think that the feeling of the
low-GI food was some sort of high-GI "crash", probably imagining it had to do with what you had the
night before. In a similar vein, you need to be careful in the evening because you might not
actually notice what the real effect was before going to bed.
And it gets even more complicated from there. Exercise will increase the metabolism, making high-GI
foods seem really extreme. Time between mealtimes will have a big effect. If you have wide spaces
between mealtimes, the last meal will be completely digested by the time you have your next one. As
a result, the effective GI of the foods you now eat will be higher, because the body isn't still
busy digesting other stuff. Of course, this itself depends on what you had before. If it was low-GI,
maybe it's *not* completely digested.
Hopefully this gives you the idea. GI is a *rough* guide, which you need to use with caution and
careful research. You can't just blindly plug a number into a formula and get a result that
matches reality.
--
Alex Rast [email hidden] (remove d., .7, not, and .NOSPAM to reply)
