Glycemic Values of Common American
Foods
By Rick Mendosa
What
is the glycemic index and glycemic load of the most common American foods? Ever
since the “Revised International Table of Glycemic Index (GI) and Glycemic Load
(GL)” was published in the July 2002 issue of The American Journal of Clinical
Nutrition and on my Web site, this has been one of the questions most commonly
asked.
Carbohydrate content is the greater determinant of GL…
Until the editor of my forthcoming book asked me, I had begged off answering the
question. But since he is paying me for the answer, his request was persuasive
and you get the benefit of it.
Actually, the original list that I prepared for the book covered only the
glycemic indexes of about 50 of the foods that Americans eat the most. They are
divided into low, medium, and high, just like my editor requested.
It wasn’t until one of my faithful readers asked that I expanded this page to
include glycemic load values as well. I thought at first that I would be able to
simply combine the glycemic index and glycemic load values into one table.
But that turned out to be complicated. That’s because showing low, medium, and
high index and load values in the same table requires all of nine separate
divisions. A correspondent, Jon Landenburger, saw that the divisions would work
much better as a two-dimensional table. He sent it to me, and I am pleased to
include it in place of the one-dimension table I had originally prepared. The
numbers after each food are its glycemic load and glycemic index respectively.
This leaves the question of which is the more important—the amount of
carbohydrate in a food or its glycemic index? It is an obvious question, because
the glycemic load of a food is determined by multiplying its glycemic index by
its available carbohydrate content per serving.
In a letter to the editor published in the April
2003 issue of The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition I addressed that
question to the authors of the “International table of Glycemic index and
Glycemic load values: 2002,” which was published in the July 2002 issue of
that journal. The reply to my letter as published in the journal first
explaining the statistics, then concluded that the carbohydrate content is the
greater determinant of GL. But the GI value accounts for quite a bit of it
too.
Click Here for chart
Revised International
Table of Glycemic Index (GI) and
Glycemic Load (GL) Values—2002
