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How Glycemic Index And Glycemic Load Are Calculated - Personal Trainer Explains

By Jonathan Wong

Republish: EasyPublish™ Published: 08Oct2009 Word count: 508 Viewed: 401 time(s) Get Free Content For Your Site

As a Singapore personal trainer and fitness bootcamp coach, I am often asked questions about nutrition and diet, and one of the most common ones is about Glycemic Index and Glycemic load.

Have you ever wondered how we get Glycemic Index and Glycemic Load of various foods? Here's how it's done!

Getting the Glycemic Index value for a food is a slow, painstaking process. Each food has to be tested on a number of volunteers and each volunteer has to be tested several times. Coming up with each value takes at least two days.

The basic steps for all foods are the same.

First, a healthy volunteer fasts overnight. The next morning, he or she will have 50 grams of white bread, or water into which 50g of glucose has been dissolved. Either food is assigned a value of 100. Blood samples are taken regularly over the following two hours, in order to measure the rise and fall of glucose.

On another day, the same volunteer will fast then eat the test food - candy, ice cream, fruit or whatever - enough of that food to get 50g of carbohydrates. Blood samples are then drawn regularly over the next two hours, in order to measure blood glucose levels. The more strongly that food affects blood sugar (and insulin) levels, the higher a value is it given.

The Glycemic index for that food for that particular volunteer is then calculated by dividing the blood sugar response to the test food by the response to white bread of pure glucose.

In order to account for individual differences in how people process food and respond to glucose, glycemic indexes are often the average numbers from 8 to 10 volunteers.

Getting the glycemic load of a food is a little bit simpler. It is the glycemic index multiplied by the amount of carbohydrates actually consumed. For instance, a carrot has 4 grams of carbohydrates and a glycemic index of 131, has a glycemic load of about 5, indicating that carrots don't cause any substantial fluctuations in your blood sugar and insulin levels.

Just think about it - that means that for the volunteers to have ingested 50g worth of carrot-carbohydrates, they had to eat more than a pound of pure carrot!

So remember, if you're using the GI as the main tool for making your healthier food choices, don't forget to check (among other things) the actual amount of carbohydrates in that food!

If you're curious about the GI value of a food that is not on the GI index value tables published in health books or on the web, it's possible to pay for that food to be tested. In fact, several universities or research laboratories offer such a service. A quick search on Google will bring up several options.

There we have it, a quick and simple explanation of how GI and GL are calculated. Remember these are important considerations for our personal training and Singapore fitness boot camp clients because it affects their food choices and thus, their fat loss, weight loss and muscle building results.

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