Glycemic Index: The Math You Didn't Sign Up For (But Kinda Need to Know) - So Frickin' Mini

Hey, Donna.

How you doing today?

I'm good, Megan.

I think I have a good topic for another mini episode.

What do you think?

I'm up for it.

What.

What's on your plate?

Oh, you're gonna be so.

I was gonna say horny.

I'll keep it to horny.

You're gonna get so excited about this one.

I want to talk about glucose index.

You mean glycemic index.

I want to talk about glycemic index.

All right, I see that we do need to talk about glycemic index.

Um, I think we do.

That's a good topic to start with.

And why do we need to talk about glycemic index in general?

What.

What's your take on it?

Well, I think, first of all, when I dove into this topic years and years ago when I was just, you know, in school, I realized that there was a some math involved, which made me hate it immediately, and that there's also two different factors that need to be looked at, meaning more math, which then made me completely ignore the topic.

So I don't.

I don't do math.

I don't think math and food need to be going combination.

So.

Yeah.

And I also think that some people don't necessarily need to understand it so much, while other people should really look into what it means and how it can better their health.

So I wanted to talk with my glucose nerd about it.

So in case this is the first time you're hearing about us, my name is Megan and I used to work in the diabetes care industry for 17 years.

So I love talking about diabetes, I love talking about glucose, and Donna and I can geek out on this for a long time anyway.

So because we only have 10 minutes, let's dive into it.

Glycemic index is a very useful concept for a lot of people, especially for people who do not like math.

And I know that sounds counterintuitive, but once you understand where foods lie on this glycemic index, you don't have to think so much.

You don't have to count calories and carbs and stuff like that.

You just basically adapt your eating to a different way of eating based on where these foods hit in the glycemic index.

So it is a ranking of carbohydrate containing foods based on how quickly they raise your blood sugar.

So the example that was always given to me was a piece of white bread, and I'm talking like American style white bread.

Not like white sourdough.

No, mostly not food and a bit of Wheat.

Yeah.

So super fluffy white wonder bread style thing has a glycemic index of a hundred.

It almost instantly turns into sugar, even starting in your mouth.

Right.

So it's super fast.

And as opposed to something like a brown rice, which people also say, oh, that's carbs.

But brown rice has a much lower glycemic index because it takes your body a lot longer to process it and therefore your glucose doesn't rise as much.

And the reason why I think this is a good topic to talk about right now, at least in my social media feeds, there's all this discussion about perimenopause and menopausal women struggling to lose weight because they don't keep their insulin levels consistently boring and low.

Right.

And when you have these high glycemic index foods and you don't have anything to buffer them or slow them down, then your insulin goes through the roof, your glucose goes through the roof, and then this is a really bad way to try to lose weight because you're working against your body.

Did I say that in the most plain way possible without sounding too nerdy?

Yeah, I think so.

Well, you did definitely sound super nerdy, but that's fine.

I have some questions, but I.

Well, my, my first question is how does that actually work when we know that food combinations are actually.

Right.

Manipulating that as well.

Right.

So the index is really based on if you have just that food and it's telling you, like if you just eat a piece of white bread with nothing before, this is the way your body's going to react.

So it is very much an off the shelf number.

Anytime you combine foods in order of eating foods, having a glass of water with some psyllium husk in it beforehand is going to affect all these kinds of things.

There's a lot of different factors.

Right.

But like I said at the beginning, it's mostly about looking at the list and going, oh, okay, if I switch out my white bread for a whole wheat sourdough bread?

Because fermented sourdough bread has a much lower GI than a white bread.

And I like both of those breads.

But why not go for the lower gi?

Because then you compound the effects of eating, for example, eating a salad first, having your protein, having your vegetable, and finishing with a really nice, wonderful slice of whole grain sourdough bread to sop up all the beautiful juices with a big bunch of butter and salt on it at the end of the meal.

Because all that food you ate beforehand is also slowing the digestion down, which Makes a dramatic difference rather than just eating a piece of bread with nothing before it.

Right.

Okay.

You just made me hungry.

Okay, understood.

Now, can I ask what the difference is between the GI and the gl, the glycemic load, because that's a bit of a different number there.

Which, then that's where, that's where it lost me.

This topic completely lost me when it gave me two numbers for one thing.

So if you want to think about it, the glycemic index is the quality of the carbohydrate that you're eating.

And the glycemic load takes into account the glycemic index, but it also takes into account portion sizing, how much or the quantity of carbohydrates that you're eating to predict its impact on your blood sugar.

So that's kind of going where you were talking about, what about all these other things that I'm eating and how are, this is all, you know, coming, coming out in my system at the end.

So the formula for glycemic load is actually pretty easy.

It's just the glycemic index number times the number of available carbohydrates divided by a hundred.

And the idea, then you can say, oh, okay, if I eat 50 grams of rice or if I eat 100 grams of rice, obviously that is going to have a different impact on your body because you're eating more carbs.

So it's just another way of understanding and helping you with portion sizing as well.

Right.

It's in, it's in an effort to help people, especially who, people who are pre diabetic or diabetic, get a better understanding of the quality of food that they're eating and how their body reacts to it.

The whole point is not to, every day when you sit down to eat, pull out your glycemic index and calculate what your load is going to be.

Maybe that's at the beginning when you're just figuring out, oh, this is what I would eat normally, how is this affecting my, my glucose?

For somebody who doesn't want to wear a cgm, a continuous glucose monitor, or who doesn't want to do their blood glucose all the time, but just wants to have a lifestyle upgrade, you know, And I wouldn't even call it a diet, but just like kind of shifting the different foods into your diet that will help you keep your blood sugar more steady all through the day.

And in general, the people who need to think about that are people who have insulin resistance.

And you might not know you have insulin resistance.

It doesn't always show up as prediabetes.

You can have a bit of insulin resistance without knowing.

Best way to know is if you have like a cgm.

And then you can for two weeks track what your body's doing.

But also people who have pcos, people who have energy crashes, people who get really tired in the afternoon after having a big lunch.

You might want to look at leveling out your blood sugar a little bit with this kind of idea.

So it's mostly like, the more you know, the more you can adapt your.

Your lifestyle.

Got it.

So a couple of things that I wanted to touch.

One is that we do know now that when you are insulin resistant, the one way that you can tell is that maybe you got to a point where your hip circumference is smaller than your kind of around the belly button circumference.

And so that's one of the kind of clues to go like, okay, I need to go and check this out.

I need to go talk to my doctor.

They need to check what's going on.

The second.

Oh, sorry, you wanted to say something?

No, no, I was going to say that's pretty much your visceral fat, if you've heard the term visceral fat.

Right.

That's what's going on around your organs, and that's the most dangerous kind of fat that's in your body.

Yeah.

So we don't want that.

The other thing that you mentioned, which brings me to my next question, is the CGMs.

So you're basically saying there are tools out there that can help us do this without the math.

Yes.

Yeah.

I mean, there are.

We've talked before about the Vari apple.

Um, there's.

And that was years ago.

And there's more apps that are coming out now.

Like, I just did a CGM with Stello from Dexcom, which is, I think, only available in the US where it's basically.

It is not for diabetics, it is for normal people.

Think of it as a heart rate monitor in the sense that you are just putting it on your body.

And these work for two weeks.

And over those two weeks, you record what you've eaten, like, with a picture.

You don't even need to, like, type anything in.

And then you can start to see trends.

You can start to see, okay, what I noticed, for example, when I was fasting.

So I'm like, okay, where, where's my blood sugar going when I'm fasting?

I found out that it was taking my body so much longer to lower my blood sugar.

It was consistent.

It was so super level.

It wasn't going up or down, but it was higher.

Right.

And then it took me almost 36 hours to get it to the point where I would say that I was starting to get into ketosis.

And I didn't know that without having a CGM on me, because I'm thinking, oh, you know, my body is.

Is in ketosis because I'm not.

My.

My blood sugar is level.

I'm not eating anything with carbs in it.

But no, because my body is so tuned into carb, using carbs as energy.

So, I mean, we're going into a completely different topic.

But I think the whole point is, is that understanding all of these different facets, especially if you want to lose that belly fat, if you want to stay healthy, if you don't want to have insulin resistance, so if you're not in a situation where you need to think about it, it's also just like, better life choices, you know?

Exactly.

That's what I was going to say.

We were talking about visceral fat.

You know, a lot of people, it's called the skinny fat.

Right.

It's like, we're skinny on the outside, but we don't freaking know what's going on on the inside.

And if our habits are not necessarily healthy or not supporting that, then.

Then there might be visceral fat, which is more dangerous and is surrounding our organs.

So we do want to take care of that.

We do want to make sure that we're just kind of doing things as best we can to support our body with our health.

Yeah.

Okay.

I think we gotta leave it there.

Okay.

But, yeah, that was a good quick chat about the glycemic load and glycemic index.

I knew you'd love it.

See you next time.

Bye.

Bye.