1 August 2009

Making the Most of GI News

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4 comments:

Gopalen's Blog said...

Hi. I live in India. I tried foxtail millet and find that i have good control of glucose. i stopped eating rice and wheat and substituted with foxtail millet. How I came across fox tail millet is interesting. I was looking at the low GI foods in the GI list and found that Laddu (a sweet eaten in India) made with amaranth seeds, fenugreek seeds and foxtail millet and soaked in Sugar Syrup ha only a GI of 24. I looked up the GI for amaranth and found it to be very high. Fenugreek is bitter and cannot be added in big quantities. So, I thought it must be the Foxtail Millet that is doing it. Try eating it for one meal. It fills you up and gives good numbers when you test. GI list has no listing for this millet, which I guess should be less than 20.

GI Group said...

Thanks very much for this information on foxtail millet. We have forwarded it on to Prof Jennie Brand-Miller and the GI testing lab as well. Really appreciate your taking the time to post this comment. We will do some more research on this.

Unknown said...

Your "News Brief" story on artificial sweetners and diabetes was of concern to me. The article implied that since there were high a percentage of obese and diabetics in the population using artificial sweetners then the sweetners possibly cause diabetes.
This inference concerns me as a wrong conclusion of facts and data.
Obesity is a known established cause of diabetes; diabetics wish to avoid high glycmic (sugar) foods and therefore migrate to artificial sweetners.
Also artificial sweetners are common in commercial "diet/sugar free" foods, commercial diets, etc sought after by persons wishing to "loose weight"!

Healthy non-dieting people normally do not seek out artificial sweetners therefore a statistical bias could and should be expected in any populace sampling of consumers of artificial sweetners.

Hence it would be expected the more appropriate conclusion
to be that more obese, diabetic and dieting (overweight) people use artificial sweetners than healthy normal weight (BMI) people.

I'm a diabetic and I use artificial sweetners which if I was a non-diabetic I would not use!
And by the way my BMI is 23.5.

Steve - USA

GI Group said...

Hi Stephen, Thanks for taking the time to post your thoughts. Just to clarify matters, News Briefs are summaries of research that's published in leading peer reviewed journals or presented at leading scientific meetings.

So this isn't 'our article', it's a report on a US study that found that artificial sweetener use is associated with obesity and the researchers suggest that artificial sweeteners may modulate metabolic rate through enteroendocrine cells, therefore contributing to the development of diabetes and/or obesity. This hypothesis needs further testing they say.

Here at GI News we absolutely agree that more research is warranted.

As Dr Alan Barclay says: ‘This is not the first study to show this effect. We don’t really know if it is just a spurious association because this particular study is a cross-sectional study, so it may simply be that people who are overweight/obese or have diabetes use more artificial sweeteners to try and reduce their calorie intake. On the other hand, it may be that some artificial sweeteners are adversely affecting the regulation of appetite. Aspartame, for example, contains the large neutral amino acid phenylalanine that may have an effect on our brain. The same coincidental increase in obesity started when aspartame was introduced into Australia too.