What’s so Hard about the Glycemic Index?

When I learned about the glycemic index right after I got my diabetes diagnosis a dozen years ago, it seemed so logical. It still seems to me that it is the most logical and sensible way for people with diabetes to eat.

That’s why I have such a hard time understanding why so many people think that it is hard to follow.

“For the average person trying to teach themselves it would be very difficult,” Lois Maurer, a registered dietitian, Certified Diabetes Educator, and AADE board member, told me. “We don’t want to overwhelm them.”

Frankly, I find that she insults the intelligence and motivation of people with diabetes. Lois says that only the most motivated people – women with gestational diabetes – have enough motivation to follow the glycemic index.

Instead, I agree with Dr. Tom Dorsch, an endocrinologist in Peoria, Illinois. He says that the argument that the glycemic index is hard to understand and might create confusion is “about as lousy an argument as you can come up with.

“It seems to me that teaching people how to count carbohydrates and add all this up in your head is a whole lot more confusing than when you say that when you eat a piece of watermelon your sugar is going to go up higher than when you eat an apple. I understand all the scientific problems with it, but then to toss it out and then to say it’s no good is beyond me,” Dr. Dorsch concludes.

That’s why I simply don’t understand the barrage of emails I have been getting lately. For example, “I don’t understand the GI chart – the numbers that is,” Donnie wrote.

Nancy wrote that “I know that you said carbs make your blood sugar go up, but you can’t cut them out, and that is where you talk about the glycemic index and glycemic load, which I really can’t understand.”

What’s so hard about it? The higher the numbers the faster the food is digested and therefore the higher your blood glucose will spike, which those of us with diabetes want to minimize. That certainly seems simple to me.

Maybe the glycemic index was easier to understand a dozen years ago. My CDE mentioned the glycemic index right after a doctor diagnosed my diabetes in February 1994, but she couldn’t tell me anything about it and I determined to learn what I could about it.

Even then I knew that the Internet was the best place to turn for information about diabetes in general and the glycemic index in particular. So in March 1994 I got an Internet account to read the diabetes newsgroups and mailing lists about diabetes. That was before there were any diabetes websites – to say nothing of diabetes blogs like this.

It was on the first diabetes mailing list, called Diabetic, that in April 1994 I stumbled on the first solid post about the glycemic index. That’s when a woman with type 2 diabetes posted a list of the glycemic indexes of 37 foods. At the time she posted her list we had never communicated, but we were married in 1995. So the interest in the glycemic index runs in the family.