Mar 10
9
Have you been looking at the Insulin Index Diet site, if so, you may have noticed several articles pointing out the hormone insulin does not just transport sugar, it also transports fat. In fact, insulin is about 300 times more efficient at taking free fatty acids out of your bloodstream than it is at taking out sugar! Because diabetics require more insulin to remove sugar from their bloodstream than non-diabetics, they tend to gain weight. Being fat doesn’t make you diabetic. Being diabetic makes you fat!
But the Insulin Index Diet can help you lose weight a little more easily than most other approaches. You won’t read about this diet in any book … because it works quite well and you won’t need to buy any special products, attend meetings, or go on another diet a year later.
Here are the basics:
More about what you eat than how much you eat. The Insulin Index Diet is more about what you eat than how much you eat. The idea behind this diet is that certain foods trigger greater release of insulin than others. The more insulin released after eating a particular food, the more completely fatty acids are going to be cleared out of your bloodstream. All other things being equal, you lose more weight when you can keep your insulin levels low.
Which foods trigger high release of insulin? Courtesy of the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, and researchers Suzanne H. A. Holt, Jenni Brand-Miller, and Peter Petrocz of the University of Sydney (Australia), here is a ranking of how much insulin is secreted in response to a 240 calorie (1000kJ) portion of each food. The higher the number, the more insulin release it triggers.
Breakfast Cereals (served with low-fat milk):
- All-Bran™ 4299
- Porridge (raw rolled oats, microwaved) 5093
- Natural muesli (raw rolled oats, dried fruits, nuts) 6034
- Special K™ 8038
- Cornflakes™ 8768
- Sustain™ 8938
- Honeysmacks™ 9102
Carbohydrate-rich Foods:
- White Pasta 4455
- Brown Pasta 4535
- Brown Rice (boiled) 6240
- Rye Bread 6659
- French Fries (McCain’s oven fries) 7643
- White Rice (boiled) 8143
- Wholemeal Bread 11203
- White Bread 12882
- Russet Potatoes (boiled and peeled) 13930
High-Protein Foods:
- Eggs (poached) 4744
- Cheddar Cheese 5994
- Beef Fillets (trimmed of visible fat and grilled) 7910
- Lentils (served in tomato sauce) 9268
- Ling Fish (steamed) 9350
- Baked Beans (heated canned beans) 20106
Fruit:
- Apples 8919
- Oranges 9345
- Grapes 12293
- Bananas 12445
Snacks and Candies:
- Peanuts 3047
- Popcorn (microwaved) 6537
- Potato Chips 8195
- Ice Cream 12348
- Yogurt 15611
- Mars Bar™ 16682
- Jellybeans 22860
Bakery Goods:
- Doughnuts with cinnamon sugar 12445
- Croissants 13097
- Iced Chocolate Cake 14305
- Water crackers 14673
- Cookies (chocolate chip) 15223
The idea here is the foods that cause the lowest secretion of insulin are the foods that are least likely to cause the accumulation of body fat. Calorie for calorie, foods with the highest insulin score are the most likely to cause weight gain. The foods with the lowest insulin score are the least likely to cause weight gain.
The effect of these foods on weight gain is independent of their effect on blood sugar. If you are in the early stages of type 2 diabetes, your pancreas can still produce enough insulin eventually, to clear glucose out of your bloodstream. These numbers indicate how much insulin the pancreas will produce, and how much fat will be stored in the process.
Protein is not always beneficial: The chart shows that some protein foods cause greater release of insulin than some carbohydrate foods. Steamed fish, for example, causes more insulin to go into your circulation than potato chips. You will also notice that combining fat and carbohydrate into chocolate chip cookies, for instance, greatly increases insulin release and greatly increases the storage of body fat.
How you can lower the insulin index: There are two ways you can keep the insulin index down. One is to consume a kind of fiber called beta-glucan. This is the fiber found in oat bran. Anytime you eat the fiber in oat bran, your pancreas releases less insulin. Less fat will be stored.
The other way is simply to avoid combining carbohydrate and fat. Blood sugars are actually lowered when you combine carbohydrate and fat, but fat storage is increased. If you choose to eat something sugary, and that’s something diabetics should do rarely, you need to make sure it’s low-fat. It’s OK to combine protein and fat, or to combine protein and carbohydrate, but you should never combine carbohydrate and fat. The combination of carbohydrate and fat in food stimulates the release of insulin to store fat in fat cells.
Does dieting by the insulin index really work? A test of the Insulin Index Diet in Mexico found that eating reduced portions of lower insulin index foods resulted in about 21 pounds (9.4 kg) of weight loss in six weeks. Eating reduced portions of higher insulin index foods resulted in about 16 pounds (7.2 kg) of weight loss over the same period. That’s five extra pounds in six weeks of dieting.
It’s hard for diabetics to lose weight, and every helpful change in diet counts. Combining foods in the right way and avoiding foods that give your pancreas a workout is a start toward meaningful weight loss.
