Comment by will_pseudonym | Hacker News Reader

Comment by will_pseudonym | Hacker News Reader

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I've never understood the glycemic index stuff. It didn't seem to fit my experience. I just researched this, and I came upon this article: http://www.foodrenegade.com/glycemic-index-vs-glycemic-load/

I had never heard of glycemic load before today, and I'm always reading articles about nutrition science. It seems like fruit and veg have relatively high glycemic indices, but low glycemic load--which means that they're fine, which makes sense. Who here can imagine a doctor telling anyone on earth not to eat more carrots?

EDIT: I also found this article: http://www.calorieking.com/learnabouts/The-Glycemic-Index-Th... which had this quote: The glycemic load (GL) goes a step further than the GI by taking into account the amount of carbohydrate in a food. A weak point of the GI is that it fails to do this.

For example, carrots have a high GI of 47, but you have to eat a pound and a half of them for there to be a steep rise in blood sugar.

This completely meshes with my experience.

> Who here can imagine a doctor telling anyone on earth not to eat more carrots?

Completely tangential, but I can imagine doctors treating patients complaining of Carotenosis:

Carotenemia or carotenaemia (xanthaemia) is the presence of the orange pigment carotene in blood from excessive intake of carrots or other vegetables containing the pigment resulting in increased serum carotenoids. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carotenosis

For example, carrots have a high GI of 47, but you have to eat a pound and a half of them for there to be a steep rise in blood sugar.

carrots are full of water, not to mention roughage, so they don't have high caloric density per unit mass/weight

the glycemic load is precisely articulating the index number adjusted per unit mass to account for stuff like caroots or beets etc.

So basically if you ate de-hydrated fruit or vegetables that will load higher (per unit mass) than stuff full of water...because whater has no cals...so water and starch dilute glycemic index

The glycemic load is calculated by multiplying the glycemic index of a food by the amount of carbs in a 10 gram portion of the food.

In practice, you can dilute glycemic index using fat and protein in addition to water.

> In practice, you can dilute glycemic index using fat and protein in addition to water.

And people really don't understand this. For instance, you basically can't find full-fat yogurt in an American grocery store. Instead there's 20 kinds of non-fat yogurt packed with sugar, which have a much higher glycemic load than yogurt with the same amount of sugar and fat would. But they're all advertised as being healthy because they're non-fat. It's crazy.

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