Food Diets

Carbohydrates can constitute a great problem for those wanting to lose weight. It is hard to differentiate between good carbs and bad carbs and many people find themselves confused, not knowing anymore whether to eat carbs or not. The glycemic index or GI is here to help because it ranks carbs depending on the effect they have on our body. As long as the GI is under 55, it means that those carbs are good for the body and are recommended to be consumed by those who attempt to lose weight. They don’t suddenly increase the level of glucose in our blood and they release the energy gradually, keeping us alert for a longer period of time. High glycemic foods are actually messing with our body because the blood sugar raises and drops significantly during short periods of time.

This being the case, a natural question comes to everybody’s lips: how to incorporate low GI foods into the daily diet and are there low GI diet recipes for weight loss? The answer is a definite yes. There are plenty of low GI diet recipes for weight loss and some of them are incredible easy to make at home. You can choose from a variety of recipes and you can prepare yourself delicious meals, whether we are talking about breakfast, lunch, dinner or just a snack.

Take for example oatmeal pancakes. They are one of the easiest things you can do in your own kitchen and even a complete novice can do them. All you have to do is mix half a cup of oatmeal with 6 egg withes and a tablespoon of fruits spread (whatever fruits you please). Once you have done this, spray a pan with oil and cook the pancakes for about five minutes on each side. They make a great breakfast that will provide you with energy for the entire morning.

There are also low GI diet recipes for weight loss that can be prepared for dinner or for lunch such as baked fish stew. You can use whatever type of white fish you desire and you need about 1 lb. Also take 4 carrots, 12 new potatoes and an onion and chop them. Place the fish in a cooking dish sprayed with oil after you have cut it in pieces, put the vegetables around it, add salt, pepper and also around 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and bake everything for an hour. You can serve it with cheese on top of it and with fresh parsley.

Low GI diet recipes for weight loss are suitable for every meal and are also delicious. Enjoy!

When it can come snacking when you happen to be on the lower GI diet, you desire a thing that is certainly speedy for making and swift to consume and more importantly delicious. You can find a quantity of possibilities readily available to you within the market right now that are minimal adequate about the glycemic index to enable you to snack and hold your blood sugars standard if you may have diabetes and so on.

The primary food items that is often a great selection to get a snack likewise as to get a meal could be the utilization of oats. Porridge oats are low ample to the index and are a really healthy and balanced selection mainly because they do not just offer you fibre but also present carbohydrates. For this motive, that you are ready to possess the very best of both worlds with out harming a diet plan or your sugar ranges. Porridge oats eaten early from the morning will level out your blood sugar, which if commences away as well substantial can abandon you sluggish and tired throughout the day. If that you are a person who likes to possess your oats sweet, you could possibly desire to contemplate the use of artificial sweeteners rather then utilizing sugar or honey. By purely adding excess fibre for your oats by using recent fruits for example berries (blueberries have amazing wellbeing benefits on their own so are usually a prime option) or even a banana, you will be able to vacation fuller for more time time intervals.

The moment choice that you just may desire to contemplate for your snack is the humble orange. Several persons consider that watermelons being total of “normal water” are superior available for you when the actuality is always that oranges are truly far better… Consuming the orange compared to actually drinking the juice which can be also reduced for the index is preferred here since it’s the bulk that would make you fuller for for a longer period in lieu of the liquid. That deemed, other fruits which might be also reduced and excellent for snacking are: apples, bananas, plums, peaches and pears. All of these may also cure your sweet craving which is usually a bonus very.

The 3rd food stuff that qualifies being a lower GI snack is popcorn. Popcorn is usually a whole grain which involves much more fibre than basic crisps and ice lotion, so stops the hunger quicker. Popcorn is low in fats, low in sugar, and some would argue minimal in flavour with no the lashings of caramel, chocolate or salt, but it’s not. Lightly spray the popcorn with lower excess fat spray after which it sprinkle with cinnamon, nutmeg, or an artificial sweetener when you like it sweet, or seasonings including garlic powder, chili powder, paprika and many others when you like it savoury. Just due to the fact it is really healthful isn’t going to indicate it does not taste good! Just remember when that you are consuming popcorn should be to keep away from store purchased that is typically substantial in salt or sugar at the same time as butter. Quickly make your popcorn and get pleasure from it the GI way.

The fourth of our snack food items are peanuts. Peanuts are very low for the chart staying a legume (as it splits in two parts) instead of truly a nut as say a macadamia nut (which can be a single entire piece). Peanuts are not simply low within the glycemic index, but they have other terrific rewards such as being complete of vitamin E which may be documented as getting an anti-oxidant that may reduce the risk of cancer, in addition as staying a great resource of Coenzyme Q10 which protects the center should you experience from clogged arteries. Peanuts will not be just substantial in fibre but are also excessive in protein and large in mono-unsaturated fats which is reported to lessen the danger of cardiovascular disorder likewise. They can be increased calorie laden so as all food – moderation may be the critical. We aren’t on the other hand talking about salted peanuts, but fairly recent simple peanuts.

The final snack that will assist you to to help keep individuals blood sugars on goal and are around the reduce end from the glycemic index chart can be a tiny salad. You can locate smaller salads inside shops at the same time as making your personal salad to acquire with you to function or education. Get together some lettuce, tomato, peppers and add to that some quinoa with vinaigrette dressing and you might have a quality salad. In case you choose to add some meat on your salad usually opt for lean pork or beef as this will likely aid aided by the volume of protein that you are ingesting. You’ll be able to add eggs, cheese, vegetables and much more to your salad which will assist to maintain you complete for more time time durations. When working with a dressing for the salad, select oils or vinegars but should you ought to have dressing, be sure you decide on 1 that is certainly very low in calories.

Click Here to GO Low Carb Scarsdale Diet Recipes

While the Low GI Diet is one of the most effective diets around and the easiest for many people to stick with over the long term, some people have found it difficult to come up with low GI Diet recipes they can fit into their diet plans. Below are two low GI Diet recipes that can be easily fit into your plan and prepared right at home.

For a great main entrée consider this recipe below for grilled salmon served with elegant baby spinach leaves.

Grilled Salmon

Ingredients
Baby spinach leaves, lightly rinsed
2 oz watercress
16 cherry tomatoes, halved
4 salmon fillets, trimmed and boned
1 tablespoon olive oil
4 cloves garlic, halved
balsamic vinegar, for drizzling
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Cannellini Bean Sauce
14 oz can cannellini beans, drained and rinsed
1 garlic clove, crushed
1½ tablespoons freshly squeezed lemon juice
2 tablespoons chopped fresh thyme
2 teaspoons olive oil
sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

Directions

First, start by preparing the cannelloni bean sauce. Place the beans, lemon juice, thyme, oil, garlic and 2 tbsp of water in the blender. May add salt and pepper to taste. Blend until the mixture has formed a smooth sauce. You may need to add a bit more water. Move the mixture to a saucepan and heat it on low heat for 5 minutes. Stir frequently until the mixture is very hot.

While the mixture is heating, cook the salmon. Start by placing the garlic in a non-stick frying pan and heating it for about 1-2 minutes. Next, add the salmon and cook for another 5 to 8 minutes. Be sure to turn the salmon halfway through the cooking process.

Next, drizzle the spinach leaves with some balsamic vinegar and toss them well. Place the cannellinni sauce on each plate along with a few additional spinach leaves. Top everything with the salmon. You may wish to add some olive oil for additional seasoning. Serve alongside the salad immediately.

Don’t forget to top your meal off with this luscious and creamy low GI diet recipe for yummy ice cream. It takes only 15 minutes to prepare and is ready to eat after another 2 hours in the freezer.

Mango Orange Ice Cream Dessert

Ingredients
4 large oranges, halved
2 large mangoes, peeled and stoned
2 tablespoons finely grated
unwaxed orange zest
3 tablespoons low-fat natural yoghurt
3 tablespoons low-fat
crème fraîche
2 squares plain chocolate, grated

Directions

Begin by scooping out the fleshy part of the fruit from the oranges, but making sure you have left the skins of the oranges intact. Place the flesh of the mangos and the oranges in the blender along with the orange zest, crème fraiche and yogurt. Blend the mixture until smooth; may take a few minutes. Next, spoon the blended mixture into a freezer safe container. You may need to stir the mixture from time to time to break up any ice crystals that have formed. This dessert can be served in a bowl or you may choose to spoon it back into the orange halves for an elegant presentation. If you choose to serve it in the orange halves, you may need to return it back to the freezer for another 30 minutes or so. Garnish with grated chocolate for an even more decadent dessert.

With a little creativity and imagination it doesn’t have to be hard to follow the low GI diet. These low GI diet recipes are just two examples of how easy it can be to dine well and still lose weight on the diet plan.

If you need to better manage diabetes or lose weight consider the Low GI Diet Plan. It provides numerous advantages such as reducing the risk of life threatening illnesses along with the ability to lose weight and maintain weight loss.

How many different dietary plans are there? There are so many around that it’s no wonder that we are confused, as we try and fail to make a difference. Some of them tell us that we should eat only protein, while others tell us that this is completely the wrong approach and we need to stock up on carbohydrates. Wherever you look, it seems as if everybody has a different opinion. One of the better diets revolves around the concept of the glycemic index. We’re told that foods toward the bottom of this index are more preferable and that we can avoid the worst effects associated with high blood sugar levels here.

Many different dietary plans have been developed around the glycemic index rankings. One of the better known versions is the South Beach diet. Not only will such a diet help us to control weight fluctuations, but it can help us to avoid diseases such as diabetes, or to control the symptoms if we already suffer.

Above all else, we must develop a dietary plan around the individual’s needs. Each one of us has to go through this process to find out what is ultimately the best for us and we have to try and exclude a number of different diets as we do so. This is a bit of a process, for sure, and you might benefit from seeking out the advice of a registered dietitian.

The glycemic index-based diet is preferable as it helps us to regulate the effect that certain types of carbohydrates have on our bodies. Not all carbs are the same and some are digested more quickly than others. When they are digested quickly, high blood glucose levels can result – part of the glycemic response. When this happens, fat reserves are created, together with higher levels of insulin – not a good combination, and to be avoided if possible.

When we consider the glycemic response of the carbohydrate, we have to consider the origin of the food, whether it is processed and how we have prepared and cooked it. These are important considerations, as a particular food can have very different effects when it is cooked, as opposed to being raw.

Right at the bottom of the glycemic index are the best foods of all. It’s here that we find the nutrition filled fruits, vegetables and beans that we must put at the core of our glycemic diet plan. As always, study the index carefully and don’t assume anything. Certain foods are not as good as others and ripened bananas or cooked carrots can be found at the higher ends of the scale.

Your dietary plan should focus on complex carbohydrates and vegetables at the low end of the glycemic index, balanced against the right amount of lean protein. Chicken and fish are preferable sources of protein and fish in particular has a number of other health benefits due to its particular properties and Omega-3 fatty acids. Moderate your diet and by all means enjoy it, so sprinkle in some of those simple carbohydrates from time to time, as well.

The Sports Diet book is a tool to help develop better athletes. This book tells explains how to understand and combine foods to improve body fat levels for better stamina, increase strength and muscle mass and improve overall health to prevent injuries and sickness.

Here is the author’s story. Alex Semenik is a former professional football player who has helped over 30 division one athlete’s move from High School to college. He has also trained professional athletes like Mike Tyson (Former Heavyweight Champion of the World), Mike Brown (Chicago Bears/Kansas City Chiefs), T.J. Beam (N.Y. Yankees) and a handful of others over the years.

Alex does not consider himself the smartest guy out there promoting books but he does have a talent for finding the best sources of information. He is real good at taking this sometimes complex information and making it easy to understand and use for athletes.

Over the years he has talked with some of the best trainers and doctors on the subject of training athletes. He has personally written checks and talked face to face with top names like Charles Poliquin, Dr. Morris Silber and Ian Danney.

From this information he has been able to apply it to the athletes he has trained personally to get great results. The great thing for interested athlete is that he has taken all this information that has cost him personally thousands of dollars and countless hours and packaged in an easy to read and best of all LOW PRICE package.

One of the interesting concepts he talks about is the Glycemic Index (GI).

The Glycemic Index or (GI) is a helpful tool. Not all carbohydrate foods are the same. Different carbohydrates can act differently in our bodies. The glycemic index shows you the difference by measuring carbohydrates from how they affect your blood sugar levels. Choosing low (GI) carbs is the key to your improvement of body composition.

If you choose low glycemic carbohydrate foods you will be less hungry, less tired and feel better all day long. This will lead to you being able to exercise, study, work and perform other daily tasks better.

Low glycemic carbohydrates help your body by making small movements in your blood sugar and insulin levels. This is important for your long-term health by reducing your risk of heart disease and diabetes and is the key to long term optimal body fat levels.

Insulin is a hormone your body makes when you eat food. Insulin is made much more when carbohydrates are eaten. Carbohydrates are broken down into blood sugar to be used by the body.  Insulin is made by your pancreas organ to help your body use the blood sugar introduced to the body correctly.

Insulin can make you store body fat and gain weight if too much is produced. High glycemic carbohydrates will make your body produce lots of insulin. Low glycemic carbohydrates help the body by not making a lot of blood sugar quickly. This helps the body so that it does not have to make a lot of insulin. If the body does not have to produce a lot of insulin at one time it will not store fat. This is why it is important to choose low (GI) foods.

The (GI) gives you a measurement of how quickly a food will raise your blood sugar level? This can be helpful. For example, if your blood sugar is low and keeps dropping during exercise, you would prefer to eat a carb that will raise your blood sugar quickly. On the other hand, if you would like to keep your blood sugar from dropping during a few hours of mild activity, you may prefer to eat a carb that has a lower (GI) and will give long lasting energy. If your blood sugar tends to go up after breakfast, you may want to select a cereal that has a lower (GI).

The (GI) has a measuring system of 0-100 points. It is best to eat foods that are less than 50 points to prevent weight gain. By having a good understanding of the (GI) you can reach your goals.

This is just one of the interesting concepts that is available in the Sports Diet book. Any athlete looking to get ahead should strongly consider researching this book.

Carbohydrates can constitute a great problem for those wanting to lose weight. It is hard to differentiate between good carbs and bad carbs and many people find themselves confused, not knowing anymore whether to eat carbs or not. The glycemic index or GI is here to help because it ranks carbs depending on the effect they have on our body. As long as the GI is under 55, it means that those carbs are good for the body and are recommended to be consumed by those who attempt to lose weight. They don’t suddenly increase the level of glucose in our blood and they release the energy gradually, keeping us alert for a longer period of time. High glycemic foods are actually messing with our body because the blood sugar raises and drops significantly during short periods of time.

This being the case, a natural question comes to everybody’s lips: how to incorporate low GI foods into the daily diet and are there low GI diet recipes for weight loss? The answer is a definite yes. There are plenty of low GI diet recipes for weight loss and some of them are incredible easy to make at home. You can choose from a variety of recipes and you can prepare yourself delicious meals, whether we are talking about breakfast, lunch, dinner or just a snack.

Take for example oatmeal pancakes. They are one of the easiest things you can do in your own kitchen and even a complete novice can do them. All you have to do is mix half a cup of oatmeal with 6 egg withes and a tablespoon of fruits spread (whatever fruits you please). Once you have done this, spray a pan with oil and cook the pancakes for about five minutes on each side. They make a great breakfast that will provide you with energy for the entire morning.

There are also low GI diet recipes for weight loss that can be prepared for dinner or for lunch such as baked fish stew. You can use whatever type of white fish you desire and you need about 1 lb. Also take 4 carrots, 12 new potatoes and an onion and chop them. Place the fish in a cooking dish sprayed with oil after you have cut it in pieces, put the vegetables around it, add salt, pepper and also around 2 tablespoons of lemon juice and bake everything for an hour. You can serve it with cheese on top of it and with fresh parsley.

Low GI diet recipes for weight loss are suitable for every meal and are also delicious. Enjoy!

Many experts today are touting the benefits of a low GI diet plan. The glycemic index (GI) of a food is a measurement of how quickly it is converted into blood glucose by the body. A diet that consists of primarily high GI foods leads to obesity and diseases like type 2 diabetes. Low GI foods help regulate blood glucose levels and may help you lose weight because you feel full longer when following a low GI diet plan.

Quality not Quantity

When you follow a low GI diet plan, you are more focused on the quality of carbs you eat rather than the quantity. This is not necessarily a low carb diet although the diet does restrict refined or highly processed carbs. Healthy carbs that have a low glycemic index value can be eaten in unlimited amounts. You won’t have to count calories or carbs but you will have to check the glycemic index value of all the foods you eat.

The Foundation

Unlike the USDA food pyramid that is based upon a foundation of grains, the glycemic index pyramid is based upon a foundation of fruits and vegetables. Raw vegetables should make up a large portion of your diet. You are encouraged to make at least 50% of each meal raw vegetables. If raw varieties are not available you should substitute frozen rather than canned. A low GI diet plan allows you to eat your fill of healthy vegetables and pushes grains to the top of the pyramid where they should be eaten sparingly. It should be noted that potatoes and corn are considered starches and not vegetables so these should not be eaten excessively.

Stay Balanced

The goal of a low GI diet plan is to keep blood glucose levels regulated throughout the day. This helps keep hunger at bay and is therapeutic for diabetics. To further this goal, you should eat a balanced meal that contains protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Further, eating protein along with a vegetable for a snack will help you feel full for a longer period of time. Plan to eat three meals a day and up to two snacks. Skipping meals causes your blood sugar to fluctuate and causes your appetite to increase.

Things to Avoid

Fresh is best even if you have to shop two to three times a week to keep stocked with food. Processed foods are full of sugar and refined grains and are generally high GI foods. Avoid eating at fast food restaurants and take a healthy lunch from home with you to work. Refined foods should be eliminated or eaten rarely. These cause blood sugar levels to quickly elevate and then crash. This causes you to feel hungry, tired, and irritable. Always choose whole grains and eat those sparingly. You should also control your beverages on a low GI diet plan. Water is the drink of choice; nonfat milk and seltzer water are also allowed. Soft drinks should be avoided. Juice should be consumed sparingly. Eat the whole fruit instead as it takes longer to convert to blood sugar than drinking straight juice.

Determining What to Eat

When you go on a low GI diet plan, you will need a list or chart to refer to. In general, you can keep in mind to focus on raw vegetables, lean meats, and beans. Specifically you will need to look up the GI value for each food when creating your menu. There are many places to find such a list. One place to look is in print books you can buy or check out from the library. You can also print lists from the internet or look up each food individually on nutritional data sites.

Benefits

A low GI diet plan may be able to help you lose weight quicker by keeping your blood sugar regulated and avoiding spikes and dips. When you lose weight you will have a whole host of health benefits that will improve your cardiovascular system and give you more energy so you will look better and feel better too.

Some diabetes guidelines set low glycemic manage goals for patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus (such as a hemoglobin A1C level as low as 6.5% to 7.0%) to avoid or delay complications.

Our review and critique of recent large randomized trials in patients with type 2 diabetes suggest that tight glycemic control burdens patients with complex treatment programs, hypoglycemia, weight gain, and costs and offers uncertain benefits in return.

Read more on Diabetes Natural Cure and Diabetes Herbal Supplements and Dibonil Liquid for Diabetes

We believe clinicians should prioritize supporting well-being and healthy lifestyles, preventive care, and cardiovascular risk decrease in these patients.

Type 2 diabetes mellitus has reached epidemic proportions in the United States. Cardiovascular morbidity and mortality are mainly high in this patient population. Improved glucose control, especially early in the course of diabetes, can slow or avert complications, preserve ß-cell function, and improve long-term outcomes.

Not all carbohydrate foods are created equal, in fact they behave quite differently in our bodies. The glycemic index or GI describes this difference by ranking carbohydrates according to their effect on our blood glucose levels.

Choosing low GI carbs – the ones that produce only small fluctuations in our blood glucose and insulin levels – is the secret to long-term health reducing your risk of heart disease and diabetes and is the key to sustainable weight loss.

Within the last decade, new treatments and glycemic goals have created an opportunity to better manage this prevalent, chronic infection. Defects of insulin resistance and deficiency leading to type 2 diabetes can now be directly targeted with available therapies.

Though there is a link between hyperglycemia and cardiovascular risk, there is less evidence that glucose lowering is linked with reduction in risk.

Patients with type 2 diabetes whose glycated hemoglobin levels be reduced from 8 to 7% in the United Kingdom Prospective
Diabetes Study (UKPDS) did not exhibit a reduction in cardiovascular events, although a subgroup of patients treated with metformin had a lower risk of cardiovascular events.

Randomized controlled clinical trials (RCTs), completed during the past several years or currently underway, are important the scientific basis of contemporary diabetes care.

Home Remedies for Glycemic Control

Keep your mind blank in bed, try and not imagine about your problems while falling asleep.

If you are having a trouble sleeping properly at night, avoid naps during the day. Naps are great but they will make it harder for you to fall asleep.

Get comfortable pillows and mattress, your bed shouldn’t be too soft or too hard and your pillow just right.

Quit smoking and avoid drinking alcohol as they deplete your bodily fluids and may cause sleep problems.

Sleeping pills are not your best bet as they come with side effects- snoring, sleep apnea, dulling the brain and even lowering the IQ and may make you feel drowsy the next day.

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After giving birth one of the first questions many new moms ask is how to lose weight after birth. Let’s face it. It’s no fun and not very flattering to top it off to have to wiggle into maternity pants AFTER the birth

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I know this doesn’t make any grammatical sense but over the years my clients and I have come to refer to this diet as the ‘How To Lose Weight Diet’. It’s a long story but the bottom line is that the How To Lose Weight Diet works because it’s more a set of principals rather than restrictions.

If you want to know how women lose weight and how it compares to men you will be surprised that there are very little differences! These tips will have you seeing results in only weeks

Do you Know How to Lose Weight Fast? Losing weight isn’t about dietary supplements or fads but a mindset that you can use to turn your body into a calorie burning machine. This can be done by anybody with motivation and willpower. Interested? Read on

After giving birth do not be surprised if you would gain some weight and do not be surprised either that like others who just gave birth you would also be looking for ways on how to lose weight after having a baby. But don’t worry because there are a lot of ways available for you to get back to your old weight and body size

With the temptation of all these new junk foods coming out on the market all the time it is understandable that it can be difficult to lose weight. New donut ice cream chip flavors or even new fast food products like a new hamburger are constantly being pushed down our throats – literally. Or you may find that you were able to lose the weight initially but then gain it all back. I am going to teach you how to lose weight in a week without pills with 5 simple unconventional tips

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Is the glycemic index (GI) the wrong way to assess the insulin-related effects of food?

The glycemic index measures blood sugar response per gram of carbohydrate contained in a food, not per gram of the food, and leads to some odd numbers. For example, a parsnip has a glycemic index of 98, almost as high as pure sugar. If taken at face value, this figure suggests that dieters should avoid parsnips like the plague. In fact, parsnips are mostly indigestible fiber, and you would have to eat a few bushels to trigger a major glucose and insulin response.

This high number results because the glycemic index rates the effects per gram of carbohydrate rather than rating the effects per gram of total parsnip. The sugar present in minute amounts in a parsnip itself is highly absorbable. The high glycemic index rating of parsnips is thus extremely misleading. Books such as The Glucose Revolution take care of issues like this on a case-by-case basis by saying, for example, that you can consider most vegetables free foods regardless of their glycemic index. But in fact the same considerations apply to all foods and distort the meaningfulness of the scale as a whole.

This is taken into account by a different measurement, the glycemic load (GL). The GL is derived by multiplying the glycemic index by the percent carbohydrate content of a food. Therefore, it measures the glucose/insulin response per gram of food rather than per gram of carbohydrate in that food. The glycemic load of a parsnip is 10, while glucose has a relative load of 100. And remember our potato problem, that terrible goblin of GI diets? The glycemic load of a typical serving of potato is only 27, not such a goblin at all. These kind of numbers make a lot more sense.

So is there direct evidence suggesting low GI diets support weight loss? It is certainly possible that focusing on low glycemic-index or low glycemic-load foods will help you lose weight, even if the theoretical justification for the idea is weak. However, there is only preliminary evidence to support this possibility. The studies commonly cited, although promising, are too preliminary to prove much.

In one of these studies, 107 overweight adolescents were divided into two groups: a low-GI group and a low-fat group. The low-GI group was counseled to follow a diet consisting of 45% to 50% carbohydrates (preferably low-GI carbohydrates), 20% to 25% protein, and 30% to 35% fat. Calorie restriction was not emphasized. The low-fat group received instructions for a standard low-fat, low-calorie diet divided up into 55% to 60% carbohydrates, 15% to 20% protein, and 25% to 30% fat. Over a period of about 4 months, participants on the low-GI diet lost about 4.5 pounds, while those on the standard diet lost just less than 3 pounds.

However, this study does not say as much about the low-GI approach as one might think. The most obvious problem is that the low-GI diet used here was also a high-protein diet. It could be that high-protein diets help weight loss regardless of the glycemic index of the foods consumed as claimed by the proponents of high-protein diets.

The study was also flawed in that participants were not assigned to the two groups randomly. Instead, researchers consciously picked which group each participant would join. This major flaw introduces the possibility of intentional or unintentional bias. It is quite possible the researchers placed adolescents with greater self-motivation into the low-GI group, based on an unconscious desire to see results from the study. Modern medical studies always use randomization to prevent this kind of bias.

Finally, researchers made no effort to determine if participants followed their diets. It might be that those in the low-fat diet group simply didn’t stick to the rules as well as those in the low-GI diet group because they found the rules were more challenging.

In another study, 30 overweight women with excessively high insulin levels were put on either a normal low-calorie diet or a diet that supplied the same amount of calories but used low-GI foods. The results over 12 weeks showed that women following the low-GI diet lost several pounds more than those following the normal diet.

Another small study involved overweight adolescents in which a conventional reduced calorie diet was compared against a low-glycemic load diet that with no calorie restrictions. The results showed that simply by sticking to low GI foods, without regard for calories, the participants on the low GI diet were able to lose as much or more weight as those on the low calorie diet.

However, conclusions based on observational studies are notoriously unreliable due to the possible presence of unidentified confusing factors. For example, because there is an approximate correlation between fiber in the diet and glycemic load, it is possible that benefits, when seen, are really due to fiber intake instead. Factors such as this one may easily obscure the effects of the factor under study, leading to contradictory or misleading results.

Intervention trials (studies in which researchers actually intervene in participants’ lives) are more reliable, and some have been conducted to evaluate the low-GI diet. One such study followed 30 people with high lipid levels for three months. Low-GI foods were substituted for higher-GI foods during the 2nd month, while other nutrients were kept similar. Improvements were seen in total cholesterol, LDL cholesterol, and triglycerides, but not in HDL. A close analysis of the results showed that only patients who had high triglycerides at the beginning of the study showed benefit. Another controlled trial found that a high carbohydrate, low glycemic load diet optimized lipid profile as compared to several other diets.

Another approach to the issue involves analysis of effects on insulin resistance. Evidence suggests that increased resistance of the body to its own insulin raises the risk of heart disease. One study found that use of a low-GI diet versus a high-GI diet improved the body’s sensitivity to insulin in women at risk for heart disease. Similar results were seen in a group of people with severe heart disease and a group of healthy people.

The evidence that a low-GI diet will help you lose weight is not yet very impressive. Its theoretical foundation is weak, and it appears to be using the wrong method of ranking foods regarding their effects on insulin. However, there’s no evidence showing a low-GI diet causes harm. If you find that you lose weight with a low-GI diet, stick with it.

However, while the most popular low-GI diet books (The Glucose Revolution, Sugar Busters) recommend a diet that is generally reasonable and should be safe, it is easy to design some fairly extreme low-GI diets. For example, a diet consisting of nothing but lard would be a very, very low-GI diet, since the glycemic index of lard is 0. While it no longer seems that saturated fat is as harmful as once thought, a pure lard diet is probably not a good idea. If you run across a diet book that recommends achieving a low glycemic index by consuming an extreme diet, approach it with caution.