Don't Be a Chicken – Eat Some Turkey

Dear Health Conscious Reader,

Thanksgiving is here, so let’s set the record straight: Eating a few extra helpings of turkey will not make you fat.

It’s the stuffing and the potatoes that pack on the holiday pounds. The bottom line is insulin and how much your body makes. Starchy foods like bread and potatoes send your blood sugar through the roof, triggering waves of fat-producing insulin.

So how can you tell the difference between foods that spike insulin and those that are less harmful?

You can use a simple system based on the glycemic index to figure out a food’s “glycemic load.” The lower the glycemic load the better the food is for you, so your insulin won’t shoot off the charts and send you on your way to a fat-filled holiday season.

Let me explain…

The glycemic index is a ratio that compares your blood sugar levels after eating a given food to the blood sugar level you would get from eating the same amount of regular sugar – glucose. In other words, it’s a scale used to compare eating a certain food to eating sugar.

So a food with a glycemic index of 50 means that eating it will give you 50 percent of the blood sugar you’d get if you ate the same quantity of straight sugar.

Your “glycemic load” is simply the glycemic index divided by 100 times the grams of carbohydrates consumed in a typical serving. So, if the food you’re eating has a glycemic index of 50, that would be .5 times the grams of carbohydrates per serving – let’s say that’s 5 grams – for a glycemic load of 2.5.

Calculating Glycemic Load:

Glycemic Index of Carb/100 X (Amount of Carbs in Grams) = Glycemic Load

In the chart above, we’ve done the calculations for you. The “serving size” column represents a typical serving size for that food and not the grams of carbohydrates per serving.

The glycemic index and glycemic load are similar, but the glycemic load takes into account how much of that food you’re typically going to eat (how many carbohydrates are in it) and this is a more important measure.

What this means for you is that by looking at the glycemic load of a baked potato, you can see that it’s going to spike your blood sugar more than other foods that are high on the glycemic index scale. Strawberries, on the other hand, have a high glycemic index but their glycemic load turns out to be low.

For Thanksgiving, you’ll see on the chart that turkey and green beans have glycemic loads of zero because they don’t contain any carbohydrates, so go ahead and load up on them.

Potatoes have a glycemic load of 29, so keep your portion size to a minimum. Cranberry sauce also has an extremely high glycemic load (48), and will send your blood sugar through the roof, so if the cook in your family is going to make you eat some, just have a little taste.

Feel like a glass of white wine with dinner? Go ahead – the glycemic load is zero.

As you see in the chart, you can eat certain foods, even ones that taste sweet but have a low glycemic load – and avoid the real insulin producers.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Al Sears, MD