But before I make my grand claim, I want you to picture yourself in the express lane of your favorite grocery store. You and a friend are running late to a potluck, so you're picking up a quick snack to take on the way. Explicitly violating the advice of my last post, you've made a New Year's Resolution and have decided to eat healthier, so you glide past the chips and pick up a bag of pretzels, with the bold claim on the bag "As always, a low-fat snack." You meet up with your friend, who has opted for the Double-Stuf Oreos, which, incidentally, *are* on sale 2/$5. What would that party do without you bringing a healthy choice? As you stand behind her in line, smugly pitying her lack of nutritional know-how, the spirit of Charlie Sheen overcomes you, and you think to yourself, "Winning."
I don't mean to boil your tiger's blood, but you couldn't be more wrong.
You see, some uber smart people have discovered a way to measure a food's impact on your blood sugar, and they are discovering that, ultimately, that impact makes all the difference between health and disease, weight gain and weight loss, satiety and crazy food cravings, and a host of other important factors. The number they assign to a food, known as the glycemic index, tells you how much and how rapidly your blood sugar spikes and falls after you consume it. Then, a second number, known as the glycemic load, is calculated based on how many carbs are in the food and how much you eat of it. I could tell you how they do it, but then I'd have to kill you. So, basically, let's leave it at this: the higher the number, the worse the food is for your blood sugar, your waistline, and, ultimately, your health.
Healthy foods like, let's say, cantaloupe, have a glycemic load (GL) of about 5 for a cup of melon balls. Things like Fruity Pebbles, on the other hand, have a GL of about 17 for that 3/4 cup serving dieticians have deluded themselves into believing that people are limiting themselves to. You don't have to be a GL Jedi to figure out cantaloupe trumps Fruity Pebbles on the healthy scale. What may surprise you, though, is that Oreos cream pretzels by about this same margin. (Did you get it? Cream? And they're cream-filled?) Just ten innocuous-looking pretzel twists have a GL of 32 --a number no health guru wants to ever see--while two Oreos come in with a fairly inconsequential number of 10. So, you could gorge yourself on six Oreos and still spike your blood sugar less than you would by eating ten pretzels. And, believe me, I've eaten way more than ten pretzels in my day. (And probably way more than six Oreos, too, but that's another story.)
Honestly, my point is not to tout Oreos as the next diet superfood. They're full of fat and sugar, and nearly devoid of protein or fiber. I could never recommend them as a complete snack. My point is that, even though food like pretzels don't look as bad as Oreos or even Fruity Pebbles on the outside, we need to learn to spot health food pretenders, too, and learn what really makes a food good or bad for you. In case you haven't noticed, pretzels are sugar-free, while cantaloupe has like 14 grams of sugar. But it's natural, and affects your blood sugar waaay differently than those pretzels do.
I hope in the next few posts to give you more tools to start diagnosing the food choices you make in light of the glycemic index and glycemic load. But for now, go enjoy something safe, like cantaloupe. Or some Fruity Pebbles. Or some Oreos. Heck, anything but pretzels.
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