GI/GL - A Hopefully Constructive Discussion
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Butter reduces the GI of a baked potato I believe.0
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Butter reduces the GI of a baked potato I believe.
I think you're right. My insulin resistant friend has mentioned that she combines her carbs with fat sometimes.
I read through the two studies you posted. I took away two things. The first being that the research on this is all over the place, especially since some of the studies were on insulin dependent diabetics, some on non-insulin dependent diabetics, and some on healthy individuals. I found the one on healthy individuals most useful, since I'm not diabetic.
The reason I found that most useful was because the glycemic impact of the meals was significantly LESS than predicted by the calculated impact of the combined glycemic index of the foods. This had not necessarily been the case in some of the other studies, but those might have been carried out on diabetics.
Verrrrrrry interesting stuff.
The second was that combining high glycemic foods with lower glycemic foods results nets medium glycemic impact.
Thanks again for looking those up.
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Thank you! Fabulous stuff. Just what I was looking for.
I thought the GI stuff was sort of a thing of the past, but I noticed it's creeping back slowly and being mentioned quite often. I don't know where it showed up again that people are latching onto it.
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There's an Australian university in love with GI. It's also becoming a get-out when faced with carbohydrate restriction a response might be "carbs are fine if you stick to the low GI ones".
For searching "blood glucose response to mixed meal" turns up interesting things like vinegar having an effect. Also remember that in British English it's spelled "glycaemic"0 -
I don't understand how GI fits in with calories.0
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There's an Australian university in love with GI. It's also becoming a get-out when faced with carbohydrate restriction a response might be "carbs are fine if you stick to the low GI ones".
For searching "blood glucose response to mixed meal" turns up interesting things like vinegar having an effect. Also remember that in British English it's spelled "glycaemic"
I've come across that Australian university before. Their tables pop up a lot in searches. I was looking up the GI on some foods for some discussion on here before.
And I remember looking up some studies on vinegar for one of the 5 billion vinegar threads on here and stumbling across some of those that mentioned that too. Still? Couldn't make me drink the stuff/put it on my salad. I just loathe it.
My take away is that it still matters most for diabetics.
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I don't understand how GI fits in with calories.
It doesn't. Some of the studies were done on satiety, but they were what I call "cooked". The meals the particpants were given were designed to be as high GI as possible and then ... oh! Gotcha! Now they're hungry after and free feeding. The thing is? One of the authors of that study is also one of the authors of the study that recently made the rounds saying "calorie counting doesn't work" and eating low GI does.
But...
Yarwell posted a very, very interesting paper on the whole issue of satiety, that is well worth a read. It is a very, very complicated issue. People in a controlled experiment were basically told something would gel in their stomach when it in fact didn't, and yet they reported feeling fuller AND their ghrelin responded as if they were. Conversely, an energy dense drink that was thin and watery and not creamy? Did not fill them up, but the same drink (same calories), altered to have creamy and thick characteristics did fill them up. Super interesting stuff.
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mamapeach910 wrote: »My take away is that it still matters most for diabetics.
Mostly - yes, it is they who are likely to suffer the worst consequences if blood glucose excursions are higher and prolonged.
A young active insulin sensitive person will wack down the BG increase pretty quick. It makes you wonder about the constitution of the GI test panels and self testing might be advisable where there's a concern.
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mamapeach910 wrote: »My take away is that it still matters most for diabetics.
Mostly - yes, it is they who are likely to suffer the worst consequences if blood glucose excursions are higher and prolonged.
A young active insulin sensitive person will wack down the BG increase pretty quick. It makes you wonder about the constitution of the GI test panels and self testing might be advisable where there's a concern.
It was interesting to note that the study done on healthy individuals who had meals combining high GI foods with lower GI foods, which, tbh, is how most people usually eat full meals, resulted in a LESSER than expected GI impact.
That finding might warrant further investigation.
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wombat has a nice app that will tell you the glycemic load for the day with all of the foods that you have on your food plan. It has both GI and GL. The app's name is Low GI0
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i have not looked at this in a while,but i will throw it out there:
It is about insulins bad reputation, interesting read:
http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=319
i find if amusing that people want to talk about carbs spiking insulin but totally leave out that protein does as well.0 -
Yes - for instance, if you eat white rice on its own - then you are subjecting yourself to the load of the white rice. If you eat white rice with a protein and a vegetable, then it's all based upon the weighted average of the foods. It's always based upon the weighted average of all the foods - with variance but it's never just "the rice" if consumed with other foods of lower GI.0
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I never got to grips with GI
marking my place so I can read through when I have time0 -
i have not looked at this in a while,but i will throw it out there:
It is about insulins bad reputation, interesting read:
http://weightology.net/weightologyweekly/?page_id=319
i find if amusing that people want to talk about carbs spiking insulin but totally leave out that protein does as well.
This was desperately needed on another thread yesterday. I'm going to save it and just post it without comment every time someone wrongly blames insulin.
Thank you!
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Hollwood_Porky wrote: »Yes - for instance, if you eat white rice on its own - then you are subjecting yourself to the load of the white rice. If you eat white rice with a protein and a vegetable, then it's all based upon the weighted average of the foods. It's always based upon the weighted average of all the foods - with variance but it's never just "the rice" if consumed with other foods of lower GI.
See my post above about the study done where the finding on healthy individuals wasn't the weighted average though... it was significantly LESS than expected. Very intriguing.
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i find if amusing that people want to talk about carbs spiking insulin but totally leave out that protein does as well.
Not sure anyone was talking about insulin, but protein a) doesn't add to the carbohydrate load so no blood glucose from that and b) also stimulates a glucagon response that results in *fanfare* no net change in blood glucose.
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mamapeach910 wrote: »See my post above about the study done where the finding on healthy individuals wasn't the weighted average though... it was significantly LESS than expected. Very intriguing.
If you add protein to a carbohydrate you get more insulin response which ought to pull down the glucose faster in healthy people. This is where combining foods for diabetics comes from too.
There was a recent study where something odd happened like the high carb low GI diet had worse outcomes, will go look for that. After all, it's outcomes that matter more than BG responses.
Edit: Here it is "In this 5-week controlled feeding study, diets with low glycemic index of dietary carbohydrate, compared with high glycemic index of dietary carbohydrate, did not result in improvements in insulin sensitivity, lipid levels, or systolic blood pressure. In the context of an overall DASH-type diet, using glycemic index to select specific foods may not improve cardiovascular risk factors or insulin resistance."
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mamapeach910 wrote: »See my post above about the study done where the finding on healthy individuals wasn't the weighted average though... it was significantly LESS than expected. Very intriguing.
If you add protein to a carbohydrate you get more insulin response which ought to pull down the glucose faster in healthy people. This is where combining foods for diabetics comes from too.
There was a recent study where something odd happened like the high carb low GI diet had worse outcomes, will go look for that. After all, it's outcomes that matter more than BG responses.
Edit: Here it is "In this 5-week controlled feeding study, diets with low glycemic index of dietary carbohydrate, compared with high glycemic index of dietary carbohydrate, did not result in improvements in insulin sensitivity, lipid levels, or systolic blood pressure. In the context of an overall DASH-type diet, using glycemic index to select specific foods may not improve cardiovascular risk factors or insulin resistance."
Now that is a very interesting finding. They said something in there about other factors like potassium (and some other stuff) affecting the whole thing, I wonder what part that had to play.
What I'm gathering from a lot of what you've posted is that most of the stuff that makes it to the media (and hence the boards) on this is nonsense.
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mamapeach910 wrote: »I learned more about how the studies had been done to find out the GI/GL of foods, and well, I wasn't just sitting down and eating a potato. I was eating it on top of my lentil shepherd's pie, or under some lentil chili or twice baked with some cottage cheese.
Have any studies EVER been done on the impact of any of the high GI/GL foods when eaten in combination with other foods?
I'd love to see some more actual science on how people REALLY eat.
I 100% share your frustration with this way of approaching food, which seems to really distort everything because it ignores how people eat (and sometimes focuses on GI when GL is what matters, if it does, even for foods eaten alone).
Maybe some people eat potatoes alone, but I've never run into anyone who does. Personally, I always eat them with protein and fat, as part of a meal, so have never found them (or rice, for that matter) to be unsatisfying. Quite the opposite.
On the whole, I think I dislike the GI/GL approach for individual dieters, since it seems to invite people to think they SHOULD have certain reactions to certain foods (and I do think a lot of dieting is psychological) and to ignore when they don't. Now, I do think that some foods can be non satiating, of course, and that learning what fills you up and what doesn't is a smart thing to do, but I think that's something people can figure out for themselves better, rather than reading a list and deciding that, say, apples will make them hungry (likely based on a misunderstanding of GI for GL).
Personally, once I thought about it I realized that my habit of eating a plain bagel for breakfast was why I got hungry an hour later (and felt like I needed an energy pick me up). Eating it plain (which I'd thought was better) was counterproductive (and it was easily replaced with a more balanced and more tasty breakfast).
Similarly, just oatmeal and fruit (despite it being minimally processed) doesn't work well for me, I need fat and protein in greater amounts.
On the other hand, I'm not sure the reason we find lots of snack foods not satiating/easy to over eat in certain contexts has much to do with the GI at all, and in some cases they may not even have especially high GIs, if lots of fat are in them. I think that's more about taste and the way we eat them and psychological factors, and is another reason why I think focusing on GI is misleading.
Personally, I think it comes down to environment. If we ate a huge amount of higher GI foods, like bread (even whole grain bread doesn't score that well) or white rice or potatoes, in an environment where we were active, food was either scarce or culturally regulated, and lots of other higher fiber plant-based foods were consumed, we'd have no issue, regardless of the GI of our diets.
But if you did nothing to the current environment but mess with the snack food and rice and such to artificially increase GI, I don't think it would do a thing to decrease obesity. It's a much broader issue.0
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