Diet of high glycaemic index may feed obesity
Reuters
Staying away from simple carbohydrates and eating plenty of fibre may help women avoid packing on pounds as they get older, a study by Danish researchers suggests.
Dr Helle Hare-Bruun of Copenhagen University Hospital and colleagues found that normal-weight women who ate a diet with a relatively high glycaemic index gained more weight, more fat, and more padding around the middle over a six-year period than women who ate a low glycemic index diet.
But larger, longer-term studies are needed to show how a low glycemic index diet affects weight regulation, Dr Mark A. Pereira of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis writes in an accompanying editorial.
Glycaemic index is a measure of how quickly a food causes blood sugar, or "glucose", to rise. Generally, foods with refined sugars and simple starches, like candy and white bread, have higher glycemic index than those with more complex carbohydrates and greater fibre content.
Hunger
Theoretically, a high glycemic index diet could make a person feel hungry faster and eat too much as a result, Hare-Bruun and colleagues note. But studies of the effects of dietary glycemic index on weight loss have had mixed results, they report in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition.
To see how dietary glycemic index might affect weight over time, the researchers evaluated 376 normal-weight men and women ages 35 to 65 years and followed-up with them six years later.
As mentioned, a high glycaemic index diet correlated with greater waist circumference, body weight, and percentage of body fat in women, the researchers found, and the effect was strongest among inactive women. But glycaemic index had none of these effects on men. The researchers suggest that gender somehow affects the influence of glycaemic index on weight gain. "A low glycaemic index diet may protect against increases in body weight and general and abdominal obesity in women," they conclude.
Diet of high glycaemic index may feed obesity