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Insulin Resistance Information
Part 4: What should be done?
It was quite clear that insulin resistance was caused primarily by dietary carbohydrates. But the world's population being what it is, we cannot do without them.
The medical profession and nutritionists had been telling people to eat lots of carbs, but diabetics in particular were having great difficulty eating what they were told and managing their disease successfully. Something had to be done.
Professor Jennie Brand Miller and colleagues at the Human Nutrition Unit, Sydney University, Australia, measured the amount that blood glucose rose after a wide range of meals containing carbohydrates in an attempt to come up with a way to differentiate carbs that might be 'bad' and carbs that might be 'good'. The resultant list, which now contains some 750 foods, is called the Glycaemic Index (GI).
Today, 'GI diets' dominate diet book lists (my Eat Fat, Get Thin! was one of the first). It's an idea that has really 'taken off' in the early twenty-first century as nutritionists and dieticians see it as evidence supporting their advices. Unfortunately, it looks like making things worse, for the simple reason that many don't seem to understand its limitations.
The real problem is that we, as a species, are not designed to eat the carb-rich diet that we are told is 'healthy'. This is compounded by food manufacturers making foods that taste nice, but are nutritionally inadequate.
Over many centuries our bodies have developed the ability to recognise when they have had sufficient of a given nutrient. When they have, they tell us (if we listen) that they are satisfied, and we stop eating. Modern foods, particularly the prepackaged, processed foods, are manufactured with one aim: to taste 'nice', and please the palate. It doesn't seem to matter to manufactureres whether the foods they produce are nutritious or not. As a result well over 90% of all the foods in any given supermarket are unsuitable for human consumption. The major ingredients, being cheap and readily available, are carbohydrates in one form or another.
That is why insulin resistance is such a huge problem today.
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Latest update 1 August 2008
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