A Low Glycemic Load Diet
Eliminating the Cause of Unwanted Weight Gain
For 30 years, the medical
profession has looked on helplessly as Americans have grown
fatter. Since the 1960’s the obesity rate has doubled.
The incidence of diabetes, which weight gain often triggers,
has quadrupled. We are experiencing a true national
epidemic.
Several things about our modern lifestyle encourage weight gain, most notably our sedentary ways. However, lack of exercise alone doesn’t explain why Americans have gotten fat in the last thirty years. The largest reductions in physical activity occurred in the first part of the twentieth century when Americans stopped farming and started driving automobiles, but average weight remained stable through the 1960’s. It wasn’t until the 1970’s that Americans started getting fatter. What happened thirty years ago that made the obesity rate suddenly skyrocket?
America was hit by a dietary tsunami. In the early 1970’s, medical organizations and government agencies, concerned about the rising incidence of heart disease, started pushing Americans to eat less fat and cholesterol. This coincided with a rise in popularity of vegetarianism and a period of severe inflation of food prices. The result was Americans began eating less meat, eggs and dairy produce and much more carbohydrate, foods the body breaks down to the sugar glucose.
Some carbohydrates, like fresh fruits and vegetables, release glucose slowly during digestion. Glucose trickles into the bloodstream over several hours. However, the so-called refined carbohydrates like bread, potatoes and rice, break down to sugar within minutes of hitting your stomach, flooding your bloodstream with large amounts of glucose all at once.
So what kind of carbs have Americans been eating more of?
Not fresh fruit and vegetables. We’re pigging out on
refined carbs, ones that inundate the bloodstream with
glucose. According to USDA statistics, Americans are eating
48 percent more wheat products, 131 percent more frozen
potato products (read ‘French Fries’), 186
percent more rice and 26 percent more sugar than they did in
1970.
What’s the problem with eating so much refined
carbohydrate? For millions of years humans lived on meat and
crude vegetation like roots, grasses and wild fruits in
varying stages of ripeness. There were no refined
carbohydrates. Only in the last ten thousand years, a mere
tick of the clock in the span of human existence, have these
foods become a significant part of the human diet. They are
truly unnatural foods, and when consumed in excess, they
cause serious health problems.
To metabolize glucose, the body needs insulin, a hormone produced by the pancreas gland. Refined carbohydrates require the pancreas to secrete much more insulin than our bodies were built to handle. Refined carbohydrates drive up your blood glucose to levels never experience by your ancient ancestors. And that’s a problem. Excessive insulin, whether given as medication or secreted internally by the pancreas, makes you fat.
Reducing Your Insulin Needs
How can you keep your body from over-producing insulin? Exercise is important. Regular physical activity increases your body’s sensitivity to insulin so your pancreas doesn’t have to make so much of it. You must also reduce your consumption of rapidly digested carbohydrates that drive up blood glucose levels.
Scientists have developed a way to measure the effects of various foods on blood glucose. Originally, they used a system called the glycemic index to classify various foods as to their effects on blood glucose. Recently they refined this scale into a much more useful tool called the glycemic load.
The glycemic load allows you to compare the effects of various foods on blood glucose levels to that of a standard, namely an average-size slice of white bread, which is assigned a value of 100. A medium size apple, for example, has a glycemic load of 78 which means it increases insulin levels 78 percent as much as a slice of white bread does. A bagel, on the other hand, has a glycemic load of 340, which means it raises insulin levels 340 percent as much as a slice of bread does.
