Atkins put the dieter’s focus on cutting down on carbohydrates. Now the Glycaemic Index, a way of ranking carbohydrates according to how they raise blood sugar levels after eating, is touted as a more moderate alternative. Chris Lyddon reports.
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Glycaemic Index has already been hotly espoused in Australia, where much of the research behind the concept was done. A GI Symbol was launched there in 2002, telling shoppers at a glance the GI rating of a food. The symbol and the programme to support it were developed jointly by the University of Sydney, Diabetes Australia and the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation.
Professor Jennie Brand Miller, Professor of Nutrition at the University of Sydney and one of the co-authors of the book “The new Glucose Revolution,” which outlines the effect of GI on diet, is one of the directors of the company they formed to do the work. “A lower overall GI for diet appears to have benefits for weight management and cardiovascular health,” she said when the symbol was launched. “In an age of increasing obesity and rising diabetes rates, using the GI in food choice can make a vital contribution to better public health.”
The GI scale goes from one to one hundred. The most quickly absorbed carbohydrate is pure glucose, which gets a rating of one hundred. Low GI foods produce a smaller and more sustained rise in blood glucose levels. That helps people to lose weight.
According to the founders of Australia’s GI symbol programme, low GI foods include milk, yoghurt, most fruit, pasta, porridge, baked beans and breads which contain whole grains. At the other end of the scale baked or boiled potatoes, white bread and jelly beans are absorbed very fast and have a GI of 70 or over.
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By GlobalDataVital role in diabetes
Too much glucose in the blood is a feature of diabetes mellitus. According to British diabetes charity Diabetes UK, meals including low GI foods allow diabetics to absorb carbohydrates more slowly, maintaining even blood sugar levels between meals and can, therefore, help avoid hypoglycaemia, which is when the level of glucose in the blood goes too low. Slow acting carbohydrates may even play a role in preventing Type 2 diabetes in those at risk.
The index helps gives diabetics more choice in food, Simon O’Neill, head of information and education at Diabetes UK, told just-food.com. “At the moment it’s not something a lot of people with diabetes understand,” he said. Dieticians had tended to simplify. “One thing that dieticians have tended to put across is the idea that white is bad and brown is good,” he said. “With GI a lot of the myths are broken down.” GI is now included in the guidelines issued to dieticians, which meant it was being used more.
“GI itself has been around since the mid-1980s. It wasn’t widely used until six or seven years ago. In the mid-1980s there was a move away from carb-counting (for diabetics) to basing it on a healthy diet, which meant a much freer diet. We’re swinging back slightly. It allows people more control over what they eat. What GI has done is refined that. It’s now about trying not to eat a lot of high GI foods.”
“In Diabetes UK over half the enquiries we get are from people looking for more information about food,” he said. “You can’t eat everything, but it is a case of doing it in a sensible way.”
Supermarket giant gets involved
The usefulness of GI labelling for diabetics, was one reason why the UK supermarket chain Tesco got interested in the subject,” Tesco GI project leader Hamish Renton told just-food.com. “We got into this after we did our “Free From” range,” he said. “We discovered that if you do a good job for a niche group they reward you with their loyalty.” That range had been aimed at those with particular intolerances, particularly involving wheat and gluten, but also including some products which avoid dairy ingredients.
It is a big market. Diabetes UK reckons there are around 1.5 million diabetics in Britain, with possibly another million people suffering from Type 2 diabetes without realising it.
Tesco looked at products for diabetics and decided against the sugar free route chosen by some other companies. “We worked very closely with Diabetes UK. We tested over 50 products in the labs at Oxford Brookes University to establish their Glycaemic value,” he said. “This is the first time any supermarket in the UK has done this. Anyone can say an apple has a low GI. The real value added is labelling things like chicken tikka masala.”
“For diabetics it’s pretty critical that your blood sugar is controlled,” he says. “You’re looking at granary bread, rather than white bread. You’re looking at basmati rice rather than white rice. You’re looking at whole wheat pasta.”
Early next year there will be over 1,000 products in Tesco which will be low or medium GI. The advice Tesco is giving is to have one portion of low or medium GI with each meal. “If you have bangers and mash, the sausages would be low GI, by the mash is high GI,” he said.
It wasn’t a matter of replacing the Atkins diet. “We’re not taking a position on Atkins, but we do support and advocate that customers follow a fairly traditional balanced diet, which should be around 60% carbohydrates,” he said.
Watching GI could help weight loss. “On balance over time you will lose weight,” he said. “If you kick the day off with porridge, you won’t be hungry until lunchtime. If you kick off the day with crunchy nut cornflakes I guarantee you’ll be hungry in an hour. You’ve had a sugar spike.”
Eating low GI foods reduced the urge to snack between meals, he said. A pound of body fat was equal to three thousand calories, so cutting out snacks could make a difference.
Concern over complication
Dr Frankie Phillips, nutritionist at the British Nutrition Foundation, was concerned that GI was too complicated. “Nutrition is complicated enough without adding another number,” she told just-food.com. “If you take a food in isolation it can be very low GI, but that’s just because it doesn’t contain much carbohydrate. It’s quite a complicated story and it’s a bit of an oversimplification to say what a particular food’s GI is.”
“Diets based on GI do look sensible,” she conceded, but there was a preferable way. “The best way of losing weight is to cut down on calories especially fat,” she said. With bread the important thing was to try to go for wholegrain. “That’s not just because of GI. It’s because whole grain contains more phytochemicals.”
GI in slimming clubs
At least one person is applying the Glycaemic Index as the underlying principle behind a club for slimmers. Jenny Yeo has based her “G.I. Jenny” slimming club on the work of the University of Sydney. “Like most women I’ve spent a large part of my life trying to lose weight,” she told just-food.com. “I’d been interested in it for ages. There are more and more books coming out and I thought there are no slimming clubs.”
Jenny Yeo was a barrister before having children and had intended to go for a less pressured lifestyle. Now the clubs, based in Bedfordshire, just north of London, are keeping her busy.
Her system is informal with meetings based around discussion of food and diet questions. “Everybody just needs to be able to adapt their own diet,” she said. “I do recipes for people to use, and provide them with a folder of weblinks and articles.”
She helps people find their own way of using the index to control weight. There is one big advantage to this simple approach. “I do charge much less than normal slimming clubs,” she said.
