Low Glycemic Index Meals Improve Performance

[holli81]

Here's a little food for thought:

Low gycemic index foods help you control cravings, and reduce your risk of diabetes (one of the biggest epidemics sweeping the world). If that isn't enough, it also improves your physical performance! Although I don't have access to the full article, the available abstract sets up the study and gives the conclusion that low glycemic index meals 45 minutes before a workout improve performance and stamina. You can check it out at the available link:

http://hk.humankinetics.com/IJSPP/viewa ... mxeuXLq4dp

For those of you that aren't sure what the glycemic index is, it is a measure of how your body responds to food i.e. how much your blood sugar goes up. For example, white bread will increase your blood sugar more than whole wheat bread. I found a good website that explains this a little more as well as gives a complete list of foods and where they rank with their glycemic index. The author is from Australia, so some of the brand name foods are not available here, but you get the gist.

http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm

In light of this, I know I will definitely pay more attention to what I am eating, especially before working out!

-Holli

[jared]

The glycemic index is definitely a great way to make sure you stay healthy. For anyone that's looking at values for the glycemic index, this is what the numbers mean (from the website above):

A GI is 70 or more is high, a GI of 56 to 69 inclusive is medium, and a GI of 55 or less is low.

There's another aspect to the GI Index, however, that most people don't take into account. There's a Glycemic Load (GL) that gives a complete picture because it tells you how much of the GI carbohydrate is in the food.

The glycemic load (GL) is a relatively new way to assess the impact of carbohydrate consumption that takes the glycemic index into account, but gives a fuller picture than does glycemic index alone. A GI value tells you only how rapidly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar. It doesn't tell you how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of a particular food. You need to know both things to understand a food's effect on blood sugar. That is where glycemic load comes in. The carbohydrate in watermelon, for example, has a high GI. But there isn't a lot of it, so watermelon's glycemic load is relatively low. A GL of 20 or more is high, a GL of 11 to 19 inclusive is medium, and a GL of 10 or less is low.

Therefore you might have a food with a medium or high glycemic index that has a low Glycemic Load, which still makes it a good food to eat (i.e. not much of the high glycemic index). My favorite example from the list is:

Beer, Toohey's New (Tooheys Pty Limited, Australia)7 66±7 GI 5 GL

I'm sure we're all happy now that a medium-high glycemic index for beer is okay because it has a low GL. J'ason, you can now continue drinking...