The glycemic index is the measurement of how quickly a particular food you eat turns into sugar and how quickly is it absorbed by your body and resulting in an increase in blood sugar. Every person is different and reacts differently to different foods. Thus, the reaction may vary. When we talk about sugar, we mean everything that will eventually be converted to glucose by our body. Thus vegetables also have a glycemic index. These have a very low index as they have a high amount of fibre and are non-starchy. Those foods which don’t have any carbohydrates in them have close to zero glycemic indexes. To give you a round-off figure, a high glycemic index is considered to be above 70. A medium glycemic index is between 56 to 70. A low or good glycemic index is anything below 56.
Glycemic index of foods
Now, the glycemic index is a measurement of how quickly a particular food you eat turns into sugar and how quickly is it absorbed by your body and results in an increase in blood sugar. Thus, glycemic means blood sugar. Now there are different values of different foods but this is not a scientific number, it is just based on trial and test methods. Every person is different and reacts differently to different foods. Thus, a person may be affected a lot by a particular food and another might not be. Thus, you should not focus that much on the values but this is just to have a broad picture of how the food may react.
Another important fact is that we also eat different kinds of food together. Potatoes can be eaten with other carbs like rice and butter or wheat bread. Thus the kind of foods you eat together also has an impact on the glycemic index. For example, if you combine foods with fibre with high glycemic index food, the glycemic index of the overall dish may come down.
When people count the numbers, glucose is taken as a reference as the glycemic index of glucose is supposed to be 100. This is the pure sugar which circulates down your system. Then comes sucrose or table sugar which is half glucose and half fructose is ranked at 68 as fructose is absorbed slowly.
High glycemic foods
Things like wheat bread, baked potatoes and french fries have a higher glycemic index which means they raise your blood sugar more. When we talk about sugar, we mean everything that will eventually be converted to glucose by our body. And everything we eat gets converted into glucose.
Glycemic index of vegetables
Thus vegetables also have a glycemic index. These have a very low index as they have a high amount of fibre and are non-starchy. Those foods which don’t have any carbohydrates in them have close to zero glycemic indexes. This means they don’t impact your blood sugar that much.
High glycemic index and low glycemic index
To give you a round-off figure, a high glycemic index is considered to be above 70. A medium glycemic index is between 56 to 70. A low or good glycemic index is anything below 56.
Thus, you should try to eat those things which have a low glycemic index because then the potential of the food raising your blood sugar also becomes very low.
Comments are closed.