Diabetes diet education is an important part of health education, and is the key to diabetes prevention and treatment. The traditional food exchange is the classic method of diabetic diet treatment and nutrition education, which is simple and easy to implement. Glycemic index and glycemic load as relatively new concepts have been widely used in Western countries.
In 1981, Jenkins et al. introduced the concept of Glycemic Index (GI), and found that some foods can be easily absorbed as glucose after ingestion, resulting in elevated blood glucose, e.g., the glycemic index of soybean products differs greatly from that of white bread, with the former being 15, while noodles and cookies are both 85. According to the glycemic effect of foods and their glycemic index, we classify carbohydrate-rich foods into three classes. High GI foods, i.e. GI > 70, medium GI foods, i.e. GI between 55 and 70, and low GI foods, i.e. GI < 55 (see Table 1 for details). The GI value allows us to know which foods can be selected more appropriately and which foods should be selected less or avoided. < p=""> GI makes up for the shortcomings of the food-for-food method, but when people applied GI, they found that GI can only reflect the rate of carbohydrate absorption in food and the magnitude of its effect on blood glucose, not the total amount of carbohydrate contained in a certain amount of food, and thus cannot be used as a basis for dietary calorie matching; thus Salmerón et al. of Harvard University in 1997 put carbohydrate The concept of glycemic load (GL) was proposed by Salmerón et al. of Harvard University in 1997, combining the “quality” and “quantity” of carbohydrates: GL=GI×carbohydrate content (g)/100. GL can be used to quantify the glycemic effect of the actual food provided or the overall dietary pattern, and in combination with GI values, can reflect the amount of available carbohydrates in a typical serving of a given food and therefore more closely resembles the actual diet. For example, sweet doughnuts and watermelon both have a high glycemic index of 76 and 72, respectively, but they react differently after ingestion, with the former producing fatigue and blood glucose instability after consumption, while the latter does not. This is because watermelon does not contain much sugar. In general, foods with glycemic index below 50 and glycemic load below 10 are foods that are less likely to cause blood sugar fluctuations. Therefore, we suggest that diabetic patients should mainly eat foods with low glycemic index and low glycemic load, and eat less foods with medium glycemic index and medium glycemic load, and try not to eat foods with high glycemic index and high glycemic load.
Food name GIGL food name GIGL food name GIGL bun 88.116.3 potato 6618 pear 36 rice 83.216.3 corn 6814 apple 367.7 bread 8810 sweet potato 7712 fresh peach 28 pumpkin 7513.5 yam 51 grapefruit 253 soda crackers 7212.7 carrot 7113.6 milk 28 millet 71 buckwheat 59 Watermelon724.6