Some time ago, in one of our previous posts, we discussed the issue of the restriction of foods with high glycemic index. A widespread measure, especially in the sports world but, as we told you at the time, has many limitations.

Today we will return to this subject, but let’s do it from another point of view that will help us understand that this is not too reliable data, not as important as we think, do not do too much attention to the glycemic index.

Recalling concepts

The glycemic index (GI) represents the blood concentration of glucose generates a carbohydrate (CH) sometime after ingestion. This fact allows us to quantify the glycemic response, i.e. indicates the speed with which the sugar converted to glucose, reaches our bloodstream.

The food in question is usually classified as having a high GI, medium or low, generally defining foods with higher GI as the “worst considered” because glucose that food will be assimilated by our body with greater speed, which in principle does not matter.

But we mentioned a while ago, not everything is as simple as look at the GI of a particular food, but in this evaluation also play other important factors that will affect this, such as the percentage of sugar or GI final balance when combined with other foods. Even, according to studies, to the way of cooking food can vary this data.

Reliability in establishing the GI

In the past, to establish the GI of each food what was done was take a group of volunteers in the fasting state, which would be taken as a reference population, and through analytical blood went calculating blood sugar producing each hydrate consumed in a portion of 50 g and having spent a time of two hours. The reference data for this pattern would establish arbitrarily on white bread with a GI = 100.

Considering the glycemic response of the different hydrates supplied, the corresponding values of IG were set so that the highest corresponded theoretically to the “harmful”, i.e. those HC drastically blunted insulin levels in blood.

As a result of this increased insulin increased fat storage in fat cells and also a possible entry is generated hypoglycemic state, where we returned to eat HC to compensate for the drop in blood sugar.

Restrictions on the methodology

If we analyze how the procedure is established IG hydrate, we see that “limp” in several respects:

• First, the methodology for allocating these values is performed on volunteers in the fasting state, something quite unusual throughout the day. So here we see the first limitation, as a function of being in a state of fasting or not, the HC absorption can be significantly residential: IS PART OF A STATE OF FASTING IS NOT THE MOST USUAL.
• Another limitation of the methodology we have that during this process, the volunteer is assigned only 50g HC isolated, i.e. without accompanying any other food. As stated above, the combination of food during a meal will substantially modify the GI from which we start, because the combination with protein or fat will vary the final absorption of sugars: NO TO OBSERVE THE COMBINATION OF FOOD DURING FOOD.

Insulin spikes feared

One of the things that generally have very into account when the issue of GI is, are the fluctuations in blood glucose, insulin spikes that carry fat storage.

Generally, a sportsman and active person with good healthy habits not it will achieve these fluctuations as easily as people think, or at least not for the balance of GI.

As a conclusion we can say that fat storage need not be due to an insulin spike, it can be stored by other factors, nor the inability to get rid of blood glucose have to always be the result of the balance of GI.

As you can see not give too much importance to the GI, and say too much just because there is an interesting case where we should look it, and when we do double training sessions and interests reload muscle glycogen in the next 2-3h the first. At that time you must put itself simple carbs, high GI, but double workouts on the same day is not usually as usual.