Glycemic Index 101Go One Step Further with Glycemic Loading
Chapter 13: Remembered back in Chapter 3 when we talked about how a banana rates on the Glycemic Index scale? It was a 53, which meant that it fell in the medium range of the GI. Now, what if you ate two bananas? Does that mean you have doubled its Glycemic Index and now the rating is double or 106? No, the GI rating always remains constant or the same, but you have doubled the amount of carbohydrates and sugars that your body now needs to process. On the other hand, if you ate one banana now and after about four hours, when the first banana has completely digested, you ate another banana, your system would not have to work twice as hard. This may seem a little confusing at first, but it is just common sense. Likewise, if you only ate half a banana you would be decreasing the amount of sugar or glucose that your body would have to process, but the Glycemic Index would still be 53. The Glycemic Load takes the GI a little further and is a formula that figures the relationship between the Glycemic Index and the amount of carbohydrates that is in each food. When testing was done for all of the foods for the GI, the measurement that was used was almost always 50 grams. In some cases, that was a lot of food. Considerably more than a person would typically eat as a serving. Although, this was necessary in order to keep the test results consistent, it can sometimes make it a little confusing to understand. Let me see if I can explain it a little better. The control food for all of the GI testing was 50 grams of pure glucose, which is a carbohydrate. So that means that every item of food that was tested had to compare and be equal to 50 grams worth of carbohydrate. That doesn’t mean that they weighed enough carrots until it was 50 grams in weight, it meant that they had to eat enough carrots until they had consumed 50 grams worth of carbohydrates in the carrots. That’s a lot of carrots! Just to make it even clearer, a half a cup of cooked carrots only has 8 grams of carbohydrates. That means that each test subject had to eat over 3 cups of cooked carrots in order to equal 50 grams of carbohydrates! Eating 3 cups of cooked carrots all by yourself in one sitting would be like eating a large bag of those peeled baby carrots as a single serving. In contrast, the Glycemic Load will take the information gathered from the GI and calculate it to reflect a more reasonable serving size. And in so doing, the rate number will be substantially reduced and many items that are on the high end of the Glycemic Index will make more sense The Glycemic Load gives you a more realistic overview of each food on the GI and allows you to practically apply this information into your daily diet. Later, in chapter 15 we will discuss the easy formula and how you can calculate the Glycemic Load for any food that you eat.
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