While the glycemic index doesn't tell the whole story, it is more actionable in today's environment than "eat whole foods, avoid sugar." There are plenty of whole foods that are little better than sugar, and some processed foods that are not horrible. Plus, if you don't have the luxury of eating whole foods for each meal, the glycemic index can help you choose the lesser among evil alternatives. That something is imperfect does not make it useless.
When you focus on a flawed measurement you get distorted results, proportionate to the amount of flaw. GI is only moderately correlated with "good foods". I predict focusing on it will end up causing more harm than good. When you can pour oil onto a food to improve it's rating, that's an easy rating to game.
I don't think I'm correctly understanding your argument. To me, it seems that you are saying that ignorance of the effect that a food has on your blood glucose levels is superior to knowledge of that effect. That seems silly to me, so I assume I must be interpreting your position uncharitably. Can you help me understand your stance on this information a little better?
- meal GI can be lowered by simply consuming more protein/fat based foods, or high grain foods alongside the food.
- Studies of GI look at each food in isolation
- GI ignores the insulin index which surprisingly is not correlated that well with glycemic index, meaning there is more biologically at play than simply GI
- Lower GI is not correlated that well with healthier choices
Like everything else, it's not a silver bullet. "Eat unprocessed food that runs, swims, flies or grows" is a simpler diet plan and more likely to be good for us because that's what we evolved to eat, not how quickly does one food in isolation get metabolised compared to 100grams of dextrose.
> - meal GI can be lowered by simply consuming more protein/fat based foods, or high grain foods alongside the food.
I'm not refuting your GI point but the combination of foods does have an impact on how they are digested. E.g. want to fatten a cow? Give it plenty of water with its food.
Other combinations such as wholemeal bread & fats are better than fats without wholemeal.
Denatured flour will re-absorb vitamins & minerals from the other foods on the plate.
Color me skeptical of fattening cows via water. Got any references? I'm guessing you mean simply storing more water with every gram of glucose in the muscle rather than fattening.
The problem is that this is yet another revolution which reverses the conclusions and advice of the previous one. It's not a revolution like modern physics, which qualified and re-explained classical mechanics. It's more like the French revolution. Off with the heads of the anti-fatists, salute the anti-carb flag... until the next reversal which will surely reject the conclusions of the current one.
The situation is much like with artifical intelligence in the early days - trying to boil the problem down to a few simple rules. Until we are willing to accept the huge complexity involved in the problem we do more harm than good. There is no single useful scale on which to judge foods. (See lukesandberg's comment and link below.)
In the meantime I recommend you eat like a caveman.
I looked at the list, and now I'm more confused. Can you explain how ground pork can go from the bottom of the list to the top just by breading it? (0 to 95). How does adding <10% bread (by weight) do that?
Pork, ground or patty, cooked 0.0
Pork, ground or patty, breaded, cooked 95.0
Great question. I can't say for sure. I can try to back-of-the-envelope it, though. Normal glucose is below 100mg/dL, and you have 5L of blood. This means you only have ~5g of glucose in your blood at any given time, so a very small amount of glucose absorbed as a bolus could conceivably have a strong effect. This is/should be fairly tightly regulated by insulin, so I can't say for sure that this isn't simply a lab error, but it does seem plausible.
I think the "imputed values" are not measured (i.e. filler). It is just showing "without carbs" or "breading". There are probably better sources for this data.
