High Blood Glucose
High GI foods result in a high blood glucose response. High blood sugar leads to high insulin levels, which is undesirable for many reasons.
- Linked to overweight condition and obesity
- Linked to heart disease / Syndrome X
- Worsens diabetic control
Glycemic Index and Weight Control
Our body was designed to eat low GI foods. However, industrialization and milling of flour has changed the GI of the foods we eat. High GI foods result in a high blood insulin levels. Insulin is a hormone that helps store glucose and fat in the muscle and fat cells, hence leading to fat deposition rather than fat utilization. Excess glucose from a high GI diet will also be converted to fat.
Taking a low GI diet as the basis of your weight control is natural and does not require you to restrict your food calories or to starve yourself.
Low GI foods fill you up and keep you satisfied longer as they are digested more slowly, and help you burn more fat. They are the best way to satisfy your appetite without excessive calories.
Glycemic Index and Heart Disease
It is already established that there are certain risk factors for heart disease.
- Smoking
- High Blood Pressure
- Diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance
- High blood cholesterol
But these risk factors only account for 60-70 percent of cases. 30% of patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) do not have any of these risk factors. About 40-50% of patients with coronary heart disease have normal cholesterol levels. Of course, scientists are now discovering new risk factors such as homocysteine to account for the remaining 30-40% of patients with CHD.
Syndrome-X (Insulin-resistance syndrome)
Few of us are aware that Syndrome-X exists while silently affecting the majority of us to some degree, and one in four with Syndrome-X will go on to develop type 2 diabetes.
In addition, it carries the increased risk of cancer and heart disease at one end to fatigue and nervous-system disorders at the other.
This is due partly to our body’s inability to thrive on the kind of excesses in our diet plus the sedentary life we lead – especially the low fat, high GI carbohydrate diet we have followed for the last twenty years.
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| Syndrome-X |
INSULIN HORMONE
Glucose is burnt in your cells to produce energy. All the carbohydrates we eat will be broken down to glucose in the body. It can only get into your cells, however, in the presence of the hormone insulin. Without insulin, the glucose from your food cannot enter into the cells and cannot be used by the cells to be converted to into ATP – the cell’s basic unit of energy.
Insulin does not merely regulate your body’s use of glucose. It helps control appetite. It also orchestrates the flow of essential nutrients like amino acids and fatty acids, vitamins and minerals, into the 60 trillion cells of your body.
However, with high GI foods, there is excess of glucose in the blood. As a result, the high insulin your body produces in response will stimulate lipogenesis. What this means is that, instead of burning glucose in your muscle cells, the glucose is stored in the fat cells, producing more body fat.
When over time you continue to eat a high GI carbohydrate diet, you store more and more glucose and fat, and have less energy in your daily life. This leads to insulin resistance, and if you are sedentary, this will deepen the insulin resistance and Syndrome-X.
What Causes Syndrome-X
- Lack of exercise
- Nutritional deficiencies
- Poor nutrition
Syndrome-X is a collection of metabolic abnormalities that can increase your risk of CHD. Most likely a patient will have hypertension, impaired glucose tolerance, low HDL-cholesterol, and high triglycerides and total cholesterol. He or she is also likely to be overweight and have fat distributed around the abdomen. Resistance to the action of insulin is thought to be the reason for the syndrome of metabolic abnormalities. Low GI diets have been shown to increase insulin sensitivity in people with risk of heart disease.
High blood glucose levels in the blood will cause damage to the arterial walls (arteriosclerosis). Research done by Harvard University and known as the Nurses’ Health Study (ongoing, long-term study of 65,000 nurses) shows that high GI foods are associated with risk of heart disease even in people without diabetes.
