![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
FATS AND THE GLYCAEMIC INDEX The Glycaemic Index was developed in 1981 by Dr. David Jenkins, a Professor of nutrition at the University of Toronto as a tool to better understand how the body responds to carbohydrates. It is essentially a ranking of a catalogue of foods from 0 - 100 that tells us whether a food will raise blood sugar levels dramatically, moderately, or a little. Foods with a score of 60 or less are considered to have a low GI, whilst foods with a score over 60 are considered to have a high GI. Refined dietary sugars almost always turn into fats and starches can also turn into saturated fats. This is the process by which carbohydrates enter the bloodstream as sugar. This sugar is energy for your brain and body. If it is not used up absolutely immediately it cannot just hang around in your blood stream doing nothing. What does your body do? It secretes the storage hormone insulin in response to your carbohydrate intake. This insulin then stores glucose in the muscle and liver as stored glycogen, ready for immediately energy use. There is a limit to how much glycogen that you can store within your muscle - obviously limited by the size of your skeletal muscle tissue. Glycogen storage for a 150lb athlete is radically different than a 300 lb Mr Olympia competitor - who definitely can store much more. Of course once your muscle glycogen and liver are full up to the maximum, the glucose must be converted into energy to be able to stored for a later date. So what happens within the body is that your glucose is converted into fat and the insulin itself, that was used as the hormone, is converted into triglyceride and stored in your fat cells for use as energy of a later date. When you eat a carbohydrate rich meal your body responds by secreting the hormone insulin form the pancreas. Insulin signals the fed-state and stimulates the storage of fuels such as glucose. The greater the rise in blood-sugar, the more insulin produced. Glucose is stored as Glycogen in the liver and the muscles. This storage facility however has a limited capacity, any excess glucose that cannot be stored as glycogen enters the adipose (fat) cells of the body and stimulates the production of triacylglycerides. Consequently, if an individual's blood-sugar constantly fluctuates above the maximum storage capacity the excess glucose that they ingest will be stored as fat. Foods with a high GI factor raise blood-sugar levels very high very rapidly and are therefore likely to push glucose levels above that that can be stored by the body as glycogen. High GI foods are therefore likely to promote the storage of fat. Foods with a low GI factor raise blood-sugar levels slowly and steadily, just enough to keep supplies of glycogen topped up without stimulating fat synthesis. There have been some studies that suggest that adding a little fat to the carbohydrate rich meal will actually slow the digestion and absorption of the sugar. This is because fat is not actually digested in the intestines but via the stomach and through lymph tissue. Fat is like an emulsifying rich, thick substance that binds to the carbohydrate and causes it to be broken down much slower. Although this seems to work with lower GI foods and a limited amount of fat. This does not mean that adding more cheese slices to your burgers is going to slow the release and limit the fat storage by any means. A far more critical factor to understand is how your body reacts with the digestion of carbohydrates and fats together in relation to the storage hormone insulin.
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||
![]() |
|||||||||||||||||||||













