Low Glycemic Load Foods - Your complete guide to what is a low glycemic load food

Low glycemic load foods

Low glycemic loads foods are those foods with a glycemic load (GL) of 10 or less. Most fruits and vegetables, whole-grain breads, pasta, milk, yogurt, cheese and nuts can be classed as low glycemic load foods.

How will eating more low glycemic load foods help you?

Research has found that low glycemic load foods have a number of important benefits, including:

Helping you lose weight. Your body will digest low glycemic load foods more slowly, making it easier to control your hunger. The result is that you eat fewer calories without feeling hungry. Adding low glycemic load foods to a meal will also lower the glycemic load of the whole meal.
When your diet contains more low glycemic load foods, you’ll have more energy. That’s because your blood sugar levels are kept constant and you avoid the highs and lows that you normally get with high glycemic load foods.
Studies have also shown that people who eat low glycemic load foods have a lower risk of certain diseases, such as cardiovascular disease and type II diabetes.

In other words, as well as helping you look and feel better, low glycemic load foods are good for your health too.

To shed the pounds, burn fat, and tone up, following a diet that contains plenty of low glycemic load foods is one of the best ways to do it.

What is a low glycemic load food?

The glycemic index (also known as the GI) ranks foods according to their effect on your blood sugar levels – the higher the number, the greater the blood sugar response. So a low GI food will cause a small rise, while a high GI food will trigger a much larger rise.

The glycemic load is a relatively new way to assess the impact of a given food on your blood sugar levels. The glycemic index only tells you how quickly a particular carbohydrate turns into sugar. But it doesn't tell you how much of that carbohydrate is in a serving of that particular food. If you want to know how that food affects your blood sugar levels, you need to know both.

To establish the glycemic index of a food, researchers use a portion size containing 50 grams of carbohydrate. The problem is that a Snickers® bar contains roughly 37 grams of carbohydrate. A serving of cooked carrots has only eight grams of carbohydrate. Yet the glycemic index of both foods is roughly the same.

That’s why you should focus on low glycemic load foods, rather than simply those with a low glycemic index, if you want to lose weight.

To calculate the glycemic load and work out which low glycemic load foods you should eat, simply multiply the grams of carbohydrate in a serving of food by that food's glycemic index.

Cooked carrots, for example, have a glycemic index of 56. A typical serving of cooked carrots contains roughly 8 grams of carbohydrate. To calculate the glycemic load, multiply 8 by 0.56. This gives a glycemic load of 5. The Snickers® bar has a glycemic index of 57. One bar contains 37 grams of carbohydrate. Thirty-seven multiplied by 0.57 gives a glycemic load of 21.

Despite the fact that the glycemic index of both foods is virtually identical, the glycemic load of the Snickers® bar is four times higher than the cooked carrots. This means that the cooked carrots would count as a low glycemic load food, despite the fact they have a high glycemic index.

Low glycemic load foods have a glycemic load of 10 or less. A glycemic load of 11 to 19 is medium, while a glycemic load of 20 or more is high.

If you’re someone who’s always on the go and you don’t have time to eat low glycemic foods as often as you’d like to, meal replacement bars like Promax Diet Bars can really help. They’re rich in high-quality whey protein and low in both fat and carbohydrate. Tests show that they also have a low glycemic index, which means you can use them as part of your low GI diet.

Each Promax Diet Bar contains the same amount of lean protein you’ll find in a chicken breast, and the same amount of healthy fibre you’ll get from bread or breakfast cereal. They’re also packed with a number of fat burning support nutrients, including green tea extract, CLA and guarana.

Best of all, each Promax Diet Bar is smothered in a layer of deliciously smooth dark Belgian chocolate. In fact, the bars taste so good that you won’t want to cheat on your diet.

How Maximuscle can help you?

Maximuscle is Europe's Number 1 sports nutrition company and offer a complete range of products that are not only low Glycemic Index, but are safe, incredibly effective and designed to work fast. With the UK's best selling and research proven all in one muscle-growth range in Cyclone, and the UK's Number 1 selling Protein range in Promax, Maximuscle offers many award winning products, as well as expert information and advice on everything from training tips to dietary advice and how to get the very best out of your training.