What is the glycemic index?
It is a method of classifying carbohydrates according to the effect they have on blood sugar (or blood sugar). Regularizing this rate is a prerequisite for preventing or controlling certain diseases, especially diabetes.
More than 20 years ago, researchers at the University of Toronto, Canada, chose about 50 carbohydrate-rich foods to study their effect on blood glucose. They adopted the glycemic index to measure a person's blood sugar, 2 or 3 hours after eating a carbohydrate-rich food, compared to the blood glucose level of a reference food - sometimes white bread, sometimes pure glucose - providing the same amount of carbohydrates.
A food quickly digested and absorbed by the body has a high glycemic index because it quickly increases blood sugar . Conversely, a food that is slowly assimilated by the body has a low GI. Foods can have a low GI (less than 55), medium (55 to 70) or high GI (over 70). More than 750 GI values for various foods have been published.
The importance of the glycemic index on health
It has long been thought that very sweet foods - fruits, pastries or chocolate - are bad for diabetics because they digest quickly and raise blood sugar levels. It was also believed that complex carbohydrates
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It allows to evaluate the effect of foods on blood sugar by not taking into account only their GI. The GI indicates the speed at which a carbohydrate will turn into sugar, but not the amount of carbohydrate that goes into the composition of the food, which is also important. Watermelon carbohydrates, for example, have a very high GI, but because this fruit has very little GI, its glycemic load remains acceptable. The case of watermelon is however not frequent. When the GI is low, the glycemic load is usually low, but when it is medium or high, it can range from low to high. A glycemic load of 20 or higher is considered high, between 11 and 19, average and, under 10,