Glycemic Load Diet

Find a better source for the Glycemic Load values because they don’t jive with ANY other source available that I’ve found, even considering the “americanized” adjustment or the factor of 10 adjustment the book author claimed to use for some reason.

The values used are used to malign perfectly healthy foods and promote other foods that may have beneficial values but not in excess.

The bottom line is if we didn’t eat an overly processed diet and didn’t work high-stress, overly sedentary lifestyles we wouldn’t need special diets to try to overcome problems that primarily increased over the last 30-40 years with lots of conflicting advice.

TL;DR Everything in moderation works for most. And exercise!

i will be ordering your book the glycemic load diet,

The glycemic index measures the ability of a food to rise blood sugar after you eat a it, the higher the GI, the higher the rise of sugar, therefore the higher the insuline response. The glycemic load only takes in consideration the amount of the food you it, as the amount of blood sugar depends also on how much you load yourself with it. The best general advice is to avoid high glycemic foods and to avoid eating more than 100 to 100 grams of carbohydrates a day, depending on age, sex, physical activity, desire of weight loss, etc. spikes ok insuline are atherogenic an lead to heart attacks, strokes and obesity.

Karin, the GI basically measures how much glucose you have in your blood after eating an amount of food that will contain a given amount of carbs (usually, 50g). That means that, for example, if you want to measure the GI of a food that contains 10% of carbs, you will have to eat 500g of this food (in order to eat 50g of carbs).

The GL measure how much glucose you have in your blood after eater a given amount of food. That’s it. This can be more useful to use because if you know the quantity of a food you will eat, it’s easy to measure its impact on your blood glucose; whereas if you use the GI, you have to take into account the % of carbs that is in the food before being able to calculate the impact the food will have on your blood glucose.

Some food can have a high GI but a low GL. For example, watermelon has a GI of 72 (which means that if you eat enough watermelon to reach 50g of carbs, it will raise your blood sugar 0.72 times as much as eating 50g of pure glucose; with glucose as the base with a GI of 100). But since watermelon has A LOT of water, you would have to eat a big amount of watermelon in order to eat 50g of watermelon carbs. So, if you eat only 100g of watermelon you will eat maybe only 5g of carbs. Therefore, the GL of watermellon is low (3.6) even if its GI is high.

In short, the glycemic load takes into account “the amount of food you eat”, while the glycemic index takes into account “the amount of food you would need to eat in order to reach 50g of carbs”. That’s a huge difference.

Hope this helped.

I just received the book today and I’m a third of the way through it. I’ve always felt better on a low-carb diet and did well on Atkins when I first started but it was too restrictive for long term. I’m really looking forward to starting this since lately I seem to be living on starch; cereal & toast for breakfast, pasta in soup or a sandwich for lunch & dinner depends on what’s available, maybe another bowl of cereal or a sandwich. I know I’ll lose & feel better when I get started on this.

This comment is mostly in reference to Sky’s post:This is the dumbest diet since the all-meat thing. guys, if you want to lose weight, it’s called SELF-CONTROL, FRUITS AND VEGETABLES. Bread; white or wheat will not make you any less obese!!! Small amounts of everything especially starches, with loads of produce are the best thing to do. Seriously. Stop trying to trick people.

This diet helps to eliminate the carbs that cause weight gain around belly which is deadly. “Apple” shapes, or people who carry their weight around their middle are increased for heart disease and my develop diabetes. This diet allows you to eat foods that eliminaate belly fat while still taking in the necessary nutrients. I have known a number of people who’ve tried this and have lost weight and lowered their cholesterol. I’m also not sure why you think startches are good for you… every doctor I know will tell you limit your “white” foods because they are unhealthy.

Found two errors on the home page of the Glycemic Load diet:

1. The GI measure that is used is a discredited one based on white bread as being 100. Different samples of white bread have different values, and hence this definition is useless. The correct definition is glucose as 100, since glucose is (usually) 100% absorbed by the gut.

2. The overall recommended limit of GL equal to 500 is way too high. Ketosis, the state in which fat is metabolized, is unlikely to be achieved at that high level. Experimentation is needed, but I would imagine that a limit of 100 to 200 GL per day would be more realistic. Remember, the goal is avoiding metabolic disorder, avoiding type 2 diabetes, and losing weight. I’ve achieved all that by limiting my total net carbs to about 30 grams. By using a proper GL measure, this number can safely be increased, but certainly not all the way to 500.