Most experts will readily agree that although the health benefits of following a low glycemic index (GI) diet, it can at times be a little confusing, so you need all the help you can get to make sure that you follow it correctly! Foods can rank ‘differently’ on the GI list according to how the food is grown, cooked or even how it is processed. It is also true that foods are digested by the body at different speeds, according to our own metabolism, how much we eat and what we eat the foods with.

The Glycemic Load

The glycemic load GL is a little bit complex! Basically it was developed by nutritionists and it is a way in which all the available carbohydrates can be assessed. In short it looks at not just what you eat, but how much you eat and the foods that you are combining a particular food with.

Here comes the science bit: to assess the GL of a food, find out the GI of that food. Then you divide the GI by 100 (say the GI is 10, divided by 100 you are left with .1) Then you multiply the amount you are going to eat by its weight (use grams, these are easier to work with). So before our calculation resulted in .1 and you are eating 100 grams of a food, then the GL is .1 x 100 which is 10!

Good and Bad Glycemic Loads

A GL that is less than 10 is good; anything that is between 11 and 19 is rated as medium and above 20 is high, so these foods should definitely be avoided. Understanding glycemic loads is a lot trickier than simply following the glycemic list, but it does make sense to at least try to assess the glycemic loads for foods, because it is more accurate than using the glycemic index list alone.

However, as with many things, it is probably better to take things slowly. If you start off from scratch using the (GI) list and then assessing your GL, you may find the whole process cumbersome and too taxing.

It is probably better to start off choosing foods from the GI list that are low ranked initially. Then after you have got used to this way of eating, then you can start to assess your GL.

The glycemic index list is still a useful tool in ensuring a healthy lifestyle/way of eating, but the further understanding of foods that assessing the glycemic load gives us, helps give us an even deeper understanding of foods and how they affect our bodies