Protein, fat, and carbohydrates are classes of food that are known as macronutrients (as opposed to the micronutrients that are vitamins, minerals, and the like). The balance of these three macronutrients is critical for controlling blood sugar and insulin, and ultimately for sustaining energy.
Too many carbs and you’ve bought yourself a ticket on the blood sugar roller coaster. Too few (of the good, natural, “slow-burning” carbs such as vegetables) and you’ve got too little fiber in your diet, not to mention too few of the important vitamins, minerals, and phytochemicals that stoke your metabolism and ultimately allow you to experience high energy.
Sears argued that a diet composed of about 40 percent carbohydrates, 30 percent fat, 30 percent protein was the perfect balance, ideal for addressing all these concerns. His Zone program now seems so reasonable and conservative that it is hard to understand what all the fuss was about, but it caused nothing short of apoplexy in the moribund halls of the American Dietetic Association, a conservative 9and often irrelevant) organization that pushed its high-carb diet on the world as the solution to all our nutritional woes.
No matter. It now appears that the only serious argument with Sears’s prescription is that some people do well with (and may even need) far fewer carbohydrates than the 40 percent he recommends, an argument I suspect Sears himself would agree with if you asked him in private.
Eat Low Glycemic for Enduring Energy
Your job as a high-energy person is to eat in such a way as to keep blood sugar and insulin levels at a nice even, sustained level, so that you energy stays that way.
Not so coincidentally, choosing foods that keep blood sugar even and energy up – what we call low-glycemic food – is a great weight – management strategy. Remember, foods that make you fat are highly unlikely to give you a feeling of boundless energy.
So you’re going to want to eat low-glycemic foods, what some folks call “slow-burning carbs”. Simply put, low-glycemic foods are those that riase your blood sugar slowly, and not too high, Too high and your energy quickly spiks and then plummets.
So how do we know which foods are low glycemic?
Glad you asked.
FLAWED FOOD RATINGS
In the last few years, a scientific measure of just how high blood sugar is raised in response to food has become popular. It’s called the glycemic index. Researchers at the University of Toronto developed the concept in 1981 by testing 50-gram portions of all sorts of carbohydrates and rating how they “performed” in the blood sugar department against a standard of pure glucose, the reference food to which they arbitrarily gave the rating “100”.
Carbohydrates that were quickly broken down during digestion had the highest glycemic indexes, and those that had a lot of fiber and broke down slowly had a lot of fiber and broke down slowly had lower indexes. Generally speaking, we consider foods with a rating of 70 or higher a high-glycemic-index food, foods rated less than 40 are low glycemic, and stuff in the middle is, well, in the middle.
It would seem as if this is the perfect way to figure out which foods to eat for energy. If a food has a high glycemic index, avoid it. If it has a low glycemic index, consume it. This makes a lot of sense, but the problem is, it’s to completely true for three reasons.
Reason #1: The glycemic index is based on 50-gram portions of carbohydrate foods. But many foods we regularly consume have portion sizes way smaller or way larger than 50 grams, so the rating at 50 grams doesn’t really tell us much about how our blood sugar is going to behave when we eat the food. Carrots, for example, have a very high glycemic index, but again, that’s for a 50-gram portion of carbohydrate. There’s only about 3 grams of carbohydrate in a carrot. You’d have to eat a ton of them to raise your blood sugar significantly.
Reason #2: The glycemic index only tells you that happens to your blood sguar if you eat that particular food by itself. Add some olive oil to your high-glycemic cornflakes and the mix is much lower on the glycemic index. (Okay, that’s a stretch, but the same thing happens when you add cream or almonds. Fat lowers the total glycemic impact of a food, even one high on the scale such as cornflakes or white bread).
Reason #3: There are certain situations when you actually want high-glycemic foods, though they don’t necessarily apply to the average person. Athletes in training who practice twice a day actually do great replenishing with high-glycemic fruits and drinks; they burn the sugar right off in training. And there are plenty of high-glycemic foods that are extremely healthy (such as carrot juice) and plenty of low-glycemic foods (such as fried fish tacos) that aren’t.
MORE FOR YOUR MOUTHFUL
So the glycemic index is not a perfect measure. But luckly, scientistis figured this out and came up with a much better one. It’s called the glycemic load. Glycemic load is a much more modern measure of the effect food has on our blood sugar because it’s a measure that actually takes into account the real-life portion size of something you’re likely to eat.
Think of it this way: Let’s say you go into an exotic spice store and spot an unusual spice selling for $300 a pound. “three hundred bucks a pound!” you exclaim. “That’s expensive!” Well, that’s true. But knowing the price per pound wont’ tell you how such you’re actually going to pay at the cash register, which is what you really want to know. Who cares how much it costs per pound if you’re only buying ½ teaspoon of the stuff? You’re going to hit the checkout counter and find that the bill is only 55 cents!
Glycemic load is a much more modern measure of the effect food has on your blood sugar because it’s a measure that actually takes into account the real-life portion size of something you’re likely to eat.
Good Luck!
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