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People don't have glycemic indices. Foods have glycemic indices. In a normal person with a functional pancreas, no amount of sugar or high-glycemic foods will
by RPLong 8y ago
People don't have glycemic indices. Foods have glycemic indices.
In a normal person with a functional pancreas, no amount of sugar or high-glycemic foods will cause hunger. It's just not possible. This is because the body naturally releases insulin and the hunger goes away (so does the blood sugar).
The reason people become insulin-resistant is because they eat too much, and put on weight. High-glycemic-index foods are implicated in weight gain because they are high-calorie foods. The added insulin means that the body is also absorbing them more readily. Insulin causes people to gain weight; in fact, one of the side-effects of insulin injections for diabetics is... weight gain! That's because insulin's sole purpose in the body is to make it absorb calories and deliver it to cells.
All that is to say that you're conflating effect for cause. Weight gain causes diabetes, which causes sugar cravings. Sugar doesn't cause diabetes, and it only causes weight gain if you eat too much of it. There are whole societies on earth that eat almost nothing but high glycemic index foods: the rice farmers of Bangladesh; the mango farmers of Central America; the rural people of Morocco who mostly eat dates; and so on.
Sugar doesn't cause diabetes or weight gain. Weight gain causes diabetes, which in turn causes sugar cravings.
- edoo 8y agoI misspoke, replace glycemic index with insulin and I'm right. For example if you eat 200 calories of ice cream vs broccoli. The ice cream will be absorbed so fast into your system that you will get hungry again before you actually need more calories. Every insulin spike is a notch towards metabolic syndrome. It is the crazy insulin spiking that leads to diabetes.
- RPLong 8y ago"Every insulin spike is a notch towards metabolic syndrome." Completely disagree with this. The best available evidence suggests that it is visceral fat, not insulin itself, that causes insulin resistance. There is an underlying autoimmune malfunction at the heart of it. But because people with diabetes often crave sugar (because their bodies fail to absorb it), people have conflated cause and effect.
- edoo 8y agoThere is a growing body of research in this vein. You can find several recent studies like this if you are interested enough. This one in particular has 20% of the subjects no longer needing blood sugar medication after 10 weeks. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/31/low-carb-diet-helps-control-diabetes-new-study-suggests/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/05/31/low-carb-diet-he...