What is carbohydrate glycemic load?

Good carbs include fruits, vegetables, whole grains, legumes, nuts, and soy products in their natural, unrefined forms. Because these good carbs are unrefined, they are naturally high in fiber as well. The fiber fills you up before you eat too much. For example, it’s hard to get too many calories from eating apples or whole grains, because these foods are naturally high in fiber, which causes you to feel full before you consume too many calories.

Also, the fiber in good carbs causes your food to be digested and absorbed into your bloodstream more slowly. This helps keep your blood sugar in a normal range.

The glycemic index is a measure of how much a given food will raise your blood sugar - in other words, how rapidly a carbohydrate in food turns into sugar. Good carbs have a low glycemic index, whereas bad carbs have a high glycemic index.

Another way of expressing this is called “glycemic load,” which also takes into account a typical serving size as well as how quickly the food is absorbed. Some people believe that glycemic load is a better indicator of how foods will affect your blood sugar than glycemic index is.

For example, a carrot has a high glycemic index but a low glycemic load. Why? Because the carbohydrates in carrots are absorbed very quickly, but there aren’t many of them.

Glycemic load is the amount of carbohydrate in a serving of food multiplied by that food’s glycemic index. So even though the glycemic index of a carrot is about the same as that of a baked potato, the glycemic load of a potato is much higher because a potato is very dense in carbohydrates, whereas a serving of carrots doesn’t contain many carbohydrates. As a result, eating a baked potato causes a sharp rise in some people’s blood sugar whereas a carrot does not.

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