Using the glycemic index to stave off holiday weight gain

As the holiday season gets underway, you might wonder why you feel compelled return to the office cookie tin or to sample the party’s dessert platter more often than you probably should. The glycemic index—a measure of how fast carbohydrates are turned into sugar—offers an answer (see “How the glycemic index works”). The cakes, cookies, and candies tempting you have a high glycemic index. As I write in the December Harvard Women’s Health Watch, foods with a high glycemic index are likely to provide a rush of energy, but leave you hungry and craving food within a few hours, setting the vicious cycle of holiday overeating in motion. Your indulgences may be due less to a failure of will than to the strong forces of human biology. Why high glycemic index foods make you hungrier and heavier Dr. David Ludwig, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Harvard-affiliated Boston Children’s Hospital, and his colleagues have discovered some clues to why people on a high- glycemic index diet find it harder to lose weight and keep it off. In 2012, the team determined that people who had lost 10% to 15% of their body weight burned fewer calories, and so were more likely to gain weight back, if they ate high-glycemic foods instead of low-glycemic foods. In 2013, they found that after people consumed a high glycemic index meal, they were hungrier, had lower blood sugar, and had more activity in the area of the brain that is associat...
Source: New Harvard Health Information - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Diet and Weight Loss Healthy Eating glycemic index Source Type: news