The glycaemic index revisited

[walkerwally1]

A new article posted by the Diet Doctor :

http://www.dietdoctor.com/how-different-foods-affect-blood-sugar-levels?utm_source=Diet+Doctor+Newsletter&utm_campaign=44c56e3fdf-Test&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_41db911777-44c56e3fdf-463190589

If you click on the link and select the article it will take you to a PDF of the article in the Journal of Insulin Resistance and a discussion of the effectiveness of the low carb diet for diabetes and obesity.  I'm still not ready to accept the GI for choosing food but still interesting points on why low carb is the best method to follow to combat diabetes and obesity.

[skb]

Went through the full text of the article, but I still don't buy it. Maybe I'm not like one of those n=9000.
I'd go by Eat to your Meter.

[walkerwally1]

Yeah, like I said, I still don't buy the  glycaemic index, at least it never worked for me, and eat to your meter is by far the best way to choose your diet.  The article was interesting to me because it shows another group of researchers that found the low carb diet works for controlling diabetes and obesity.  If nothing else it does get people thinking about staying away from high starch and carby foods.  I also liked the addendum :

A history of sugar and carbohydrate restriction in diabetes and health.
Prior to 1776 Diabetes had been widely considered to be a disease of the kidneys, best treated by replacing the sugar lost in the urine (tested by the urine's sweetness), with increased sugar in the diet – a regime which sounds ludicrous today.

1776 Matthew Dobson, a Liverpudlian physician, went a step further; he noticed that blood tasted sweet, too; thus, he discovered hyperglycaemia and realised that the metabolic fault occurred prior to the kidneys.

1797 Carbohydrate-restricted diets seem to have entered the consciousness of the medical profession in this year when John Rollo,a a Scottish physician to the Army, entered the debate surrounding the character and management of type 2 diabetes. Rollo, by boiling down urine to sugar, found that if the obese (232 pounds or 105 kg) Captain Meredith ate less 'farinaceous' (starchy) food, less urinary sugar was produced. Hence, Rollo pioneering a low-carbohydrate dietary approach, which eliminated frequent urination, reversed elevated sugar in both blood and urine and led to the loss of excess body weight.

1848 Claude Bernard, a renowned physiologist, investigates the role of the liver in blood sugar production, and dietary starches in particular, which both affect the milieu interieur (homeostasis) in diabetes.b

1863 William Banting, a relative of the Nobel Prize winner Frederick Banting, wrote the first commercial diet. His 'Letter on Corpulence Addressed to the Public'c promoted the low-carbohydrate approach. Prior to this, Banting had become so obese that he was unable to tie his shoelaces and was forced to walk downstairs backwards to ease the pressure on his knees. By the age of 65 when he weighed 202 lbs (92 kg) and hearing loss added to his co-morbidities, he consulted 'the celebrated aurist' William Harvey, who serendipitously had recently attended a lecture in Paris by Claude Bernard. Harvey, using Banting as his 'guinea pig', advised him to cut all starchy food from his diet, which had a dramatic effect, inducing a weight loss of over 3 stone (19 kg), accompanied by a transformation in his health.
1863–1956 Throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries, a reduced carbohydrate diet was considered to be the standard therapy for both diabetes and obesity and was recognised and taught by such eminent physicians as Nathan Smith,d James Salisbury,e Frederick Allen,f Elliott Joslin,g Alfred Pennington,h and Raymond Greene.i
1956 In highly controversial studies,j Ancel Keys published,k on cholesterol and heart disease.1 This overturned the prevailing idea about diet, which gave rise to low-fat diets as being beneficial, and arguably laid the foundation of the current obesity and diabetes epidemic. Only now is the low-carbohydrate dietary approach returning to prominence in
dietary therapy for diabetes.

It shows the long history of low carb diet has had and how only recently the medical "experts" have opted for drugs and low fat/high carb diets as the way to control diabetes with the result of the highest rates of obesity and diabetes world wide.

[skb]

I have Banting's Letter On corpulence somewhere. Maybe we'll add it to the Downloads block for September.

[Sweety]

Thanks Wally for that history behind diabetes care. Interesting 

[skb]

Here's a news article on the subject that sheds more light on the subject

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/312828.php