Whether you want to lose weight, maintain your current weight or just have a healthy diet that will reduce your chances of suffering from a number of chronic diseases, it is worth paying attention to your blood sugar levels. It is wildly fluctuating blood sugar levels that stimulate your body to store excess calories as fat, and are one of the factors that can increase your chances of developing diabetes and cardio-vascular problems.
You may have come across the idea of the Glyceamic Index, or GI, as a measure of the impact of a particular food on your blood sugar levels. The GI tells us how quickly the sugar in a food is turned into glucose in our bloodstream, and so a meal of high GI foods causes a rapid rise in blood glucose, followed by a rapid fall as the body fights to get levels back to normal. The downside of GI values is that they refer to the quality of sugar in a food, not the quantity. The Glyceamic Load, or GL, on the other hand, takes into account the GI of a food as well as the quantity of sugar it contains, to give a much more usable value.
Low GL foods contain slow released carbohydrates which, because they take time to convert into glucose, cause a gradual release of sugar into the blood stream. This makes it much easier for the body to keep blood sugar levels in balance, and gives you more sustained energy levels throughout the day.
If you want to follow a low GL diet you can find advice and GL values in Patrick Holford’s The Low GL Diet Made Easy or The Low GL Diet Cookbook. Alternatively the following simple guidelines will get you going, and hopefully feeling the benefits of balanced blood sugar.
- Avoid refined grains and sugar.
- Reduce portion sizes of carbohydrate foods like bread, rice and pasta.
- Reduce your intake of very starchy root vegetables, in particular potatoes.
- Combine protein such as meat, fish, tofu, eggs or beans with carbohydrates, as this slows down the release of the sugars
- Reduce dried fruit, but go crazy on summer berries – strawberries, raspberries and blueberries are all very low GL
- Eat as much non-starch vegetables as you like – everything from asparagus to watercress.
Tags: blood sugar, gi, GL, glyceamic index, glyceamic load
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