Chapter 5 - The Glycemic IndexWant More Diabetes Info? Search HERE
Those who embrace the glycemic index as a guide for nutrition recommend that you “reduce the amount of potatoes you eat” and to “enjoy all types of fruit and vegetables.” Please refer to the chapter on The Food Pyramids. If you follow their advice to eat any potatoes at all, vegetables like carrots, tomatoes, peas or other high-carb vegetables, or fruits - always high-carbohydrate foods, your blood sugar can skyrocket if you’re a type II diabetic! These foods are simply dangerous in any amounts for type II diabetics. They contribute to the problem rather than to any alleviation of the problem. In fact, over time, they’ll make it even worse. Understanding the glycemic index can, however, give you some insight into the degree of undesirability of foods that do contain carbohydrates. The higher the glycemic index number of a carbohydrate-containing food, the more damaging it will be for the type II diabetic. So if you have access to a glycemic index chart for foods, you can use it to make sure that the vegetables, fruits and nuts that you choose are in the lowest possible ranking of the index – the ones that will cause you the least harm. The higher the index number, the higher the carbohydrate content, the higher the carbohydrate concentration in the food, the more rapidly the blood sugar rises in response and thus, the more overwhelming the corresponding insulin response, continuing to worsen the development of type II diabetes. However, staying with foods in the range of the very lowest numbers on the glycemic index is said to help your body’s cells to become more sensitive to insulin over time. And if type II diabetics absolutely must have carbohydrate foods, they certainly should be ones that are very low on the glycemic index. If you decide to choose your foods based on the glycemic index, it is still vitally important for you to know the exact effects that those foods will have on YOUR body, not just some hypothetical, generic chart. Use your urine testing sticks (see the chapter on Testing) and your glucose meter to measure the actual numbers that your food choices produce in your own, individual system in terms
|
