When meat wasn’t available, prehistoric humans had to rely on the miniscule amounts of sugar their digestive systems could extract from crude vegetation such as unripe fruit, roots and bark to survive. These provided vitamins, minerals and fiber but little in the way of calories. The sugar they consumed was encased in cellulose and fiber and slow to digest. Humans didn’t have the technical capability to mill grains or refine sugar. Rapidly digested– so called “refined”– carbohydrates, such as flour products, rice and sugar, were absent from their diet. Bottom line: The glycemic load of their diet was very low.
About 10,000 years ago–only recently in the span of human existence–humans figured out how to crush up wheat, barley and rice kernels, separate their starchy cores from the husks and use it for food. Because starch is cheaper to produce than other foods, it’s now the largest source of calories for most humans.
What about sugar–the kind we add to things to sweeten them up? For hundreds of years, sugar was a rare commodity only the rich could afford. In the 1800s, refiners began producing it in large quantities, and folks began adding it to more and more foods. As a result of the unnaturally large amounts of starch as well as sugar we eat, we modern humans ingest hundreds of times more sugar molecules than prehistoric humans did. Consequently, we produce many times—maybe five to ten times—more insulin than our ancestors did. All that insulin combined with insulin resistant muscles drives calories into fat–especially belly fat–and brings on diabetes, heart disease and polycystic ovary syndrome. The good news is that reducing the glycemic load of your diet can reverse these problems.
The Ideal Glycemic Load
What should your glycemic load be? Research points to a daily glycemic load—the sum of the glycemic loads of the foods eaten throughout the day–of approximately 500 as being the point below which weight loss occurs and above which the risk of obesity and diabetes rises. (Note: Glycemic load here is expressed as a percentage of the glycemic load of a slice of white bread, randomly assigned a value of 100)
A Simple Way to Do It
You could add up the glycemic loads of the foods you eat during the day and try to keep it under 500, but there’s an easier way. Simply limit yourself to two half-size servings of flour products, potatoes or rice a day. (Note that a full serving of bread is two slices, so you can count a single slice as a half serving.)
To see why this works check out the list of glycemic loads of common foods. You’ll see that if you limit yourself to just one serving–or two half servings–of starch per day you can eat all the fruits, vegetables, meat, eggs and dairy products you want– within reason–without exceeding a daily glycemic load of 500.
Should you cut out starch altogether? My advice is not to try. Your taste in food is imprinted into your brain when you’re very young. Starchy foods like bread, potatoes and rice are among the first foods your mother fed you. Although you have a natural craving for them, you’ll probably find that you can satisfy that craving with a couple modest servings a day.
