Tuesday, February 1, 2011

A glycemic load per calorie comparison

The Energy/Insulin ratio

Table one and two- A comparative ratio of calories per gram in a food to how it affects blood glucose levels per gram(glycemic load per gram).

Calorie per gram data is courtesy of http://www.netzingers.com/cgi-bin/calorie_lookup.php 
Glycemic load data is courtesy of    http://www.mendosa.com/gilists.htm

On the left we have foods with a low glycemic load per gram and on the right we have those with a high glycemic load per gram. So how do you get to the top ratings? A few ways. Have a low GL(glycemic load) and a medium to high amount of calories per gram, or have a high amount of calories per gram to compensate for a high GL. You can jump down the *** if you don't want to read the table and trust me to do the analysis.



A few interesting things pop out, firstly peanuts top the charts by a long shot. Carrots lie at both the top and the bottom of the left hand cart so there seems to be a large variation due to the type but they are low insulin and also sometimes low in energy.

(*** jump to this point if you trust my data and analysis but don't want to look at the numbers)

Cornflakes(and many of the breakfast cereals) again take the bottom spot for high blood glucose levles produced and low calories per gram. Blueberry muffins, Corn chips, wheat thins, and white flour are the only foods that top a 10:1 ratio on the right, which makes me think at least there may have been some reason that our ancestors detected and chose flour as a dietary staple.

So how should this information be taken?
I'd start by never eating anything in the lower right hand side ever. That means almost all breakfast cereals should be considered useless. I really don't see the point in eating them.

Everything else I would not alter my habits as my analysis to this point still paints an incomplete picture of what you are obtaining from a food.

No comments:

Post a Comment