Blood Glucose Handling

When you eat, the sugar (or glucose) in that food goes into your bloodstream. You might have heard of the terms high GI and low GI. GI stands for Glycemic Index. The Glycemic index or GI of a food is determined by how fast the glucose from a food gets from your gut to your bloodstream. So, if a foods glucose gets into your bloodstream quickly it is considered a High GI food, and if it gets into your bloodstream more slowly it is considered a Low GI food.

Low GI foods - you can eat as much as you want, whenever you want.

High GI foods - you can eat them every three days. This allows for your insulin to spike and then slowly come back to normal before you spike it again. If you continually spike your insulin, it leads to insulin resistance.

Now, when the concentration of glucose in your blood rises a hormone called insulin is secreted into your bloodstream to help your body move the glucose out of your bloodstream and take it to your tissues and cells where it is used as fuel or stored as fat to be used by your body later.

The foods we are talking about here are carbohydrates – vegetables, fruits, grains and so on.

Think of it like there are three groups of carbohydrates. The first group are carbohydrates that are high in carbohydrate and low in nutritional value. These foods are lollies and sweets – confectionary.

Then there is the second group which are foods that are still high in carbohydrate but have good nutritional value. These are foods like your starchy vegetables like potato and corn, and also your grains, including breads, pastas, rice.

The third group of carbohydrates are foods that are low in carbohydrate and very high in nutritional value. These are foods like broccoli, cauliflower, spinach, kale, and so on.

The higher the GI - the more insulin that you release. The more insulin you release the higher the risk of type 2 diabetes, and now research shows insulin resistance is a leading cause in Alzheimer's disease.

When a person is consistently eating High GI foods – those foods that release glucose quickly into your bloodstream, the person’s body has to secrete large amounts of insulin. As time goes by your body becomes less and less effective at taking the glucose from your blood to your cells and tissues, and so your body has to secrete large and larger amounts to do the same job. This is called Insulin Resistance.

At the early stages, the symptoms of insulin resistance can be elusive, often associated with difficult-to-diagnose blood-sugar problems, fatigue, intestinal bloating and loss of concentration.

It can escalate and start to manifest as an array of more serious problems, including obesity, and various diseases such as diabetes, cancer and heart disease, that are all part of a set of diseases that are now well recognised by modern medicine and referred to as Metabolic Syndrome. Research has now linked Insulin resistance with Alzheimer’s disease as well.

So, as you can see, moving you away from the risk of Insulin resistance and all of its horrible consequences is a good thing.

What will that mean?

Within this part of your program we are starting you on low GI foods and slowly each week incrementally increasing the GI of the foods to find out where your tolerance is by testing various indicators.

We are trying to figure out what YOUR body considers High GI and Low GI.

Once we have found what your body considers High GI and Low GI - in other words, what you can and can't tolerate, we now can set some guidelines for the foods you eat on a regular basis versus the foods that you must eat less frequently.