I’ve given some simple guidelines for what to feed your body in order to make it as healthy as possible. But there is one simple nutritional aspect of each food that will allow you to determine the effect it will have on your body:
Glycemic Index
Simply put, the Glycemic Index (or GI, for short) of a food is how large of an Insulin response your body has to consuming it.
And if you’ve read Fat Doesn’t Make You Fat, you might remember that Insulin is what I (and people much smarter than myself) have blamed for making people fat.
Generally speaking, the more carbohydrates in a food, the higher the Glycemic Index of that food. Measured on a relative scale from 0-100, with 100 being pure sugar, this measurement is an excellent way to find out if a food should be avoided in order to maximize the health effects of diet.
Conventional wisdom tells us that any food with a GI below 55 is a “low GI” food. As you might expect, I break from this thinking as well. For instance, brown rice has a GI of 54. Wheat, 45. Bananas, 52. I would recommend avoiding all of these foods. (I use this site for these numbers, and although I’ve seen numbers from other sources vary, I think this is a great place to start searching and learning.)
I would also recommend choosing foods with a GI as close to ZERO as possible. But for the sake of being reasonable, I think you’d be in really good shape staying below 30.
Keep in mind, apples are a 38, carrots a 39, tomatoes a 38. And although I wouldn’t go so far as to call these unhealthy foods, on a low carb, anti-inflammatory diet, the less Insulin your body is pumping out, the better.
The way a food is cooked can also have an effect on the GI of that food. For instance, with vegetables in general, the carbs that are present are in some ways “offset” in your body by the fiber they contain. This concept of net carbs (carbs in grams, minus fiber in grams), has some value when trying to balance your diet with some more “carby” vegetables.
However, when you cook vegetables, the heat breaks down the fiber, increasing the net carbs by reducing this “offset”. The longer you cook them, the more “mushy” the vegetables get, the higher the net carbs, and subsequently the higher the Glycemic Index.
Ever noticed that steamed carrots taste a lot sweeter than raw carrots? This is fundamentally why that happens. The fiber in the carrots is broken down, and only the carbs (sugars) remain, essentially turning the relatively “healthy” carrot into what essentially amounts to a piece of candy.
“So what are the best foods to eat?”, you may be asking.
The easiest answer is that you should be eating MEAT.
Meat, without any sauces added, has a GI of ZERO. Why? Because there are no carbs in meat.
Almonds and some other nuts also have a GI at or near 0.
Combine this with the fat content of meat and nuts, and you’re likely starting to see how this all fits together.
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