MOST Asians eat a healthy diet. However, it may be surprising to learn that there is an increased risk of diabetes, heart disease, and weight gain in Asians largely due to the high carbohydrate diets that we consume and the type of carbohydrates we consume.

This fact may sound confusing but scientific evidence from clinical trials in prestigious laboratories in the US and UK advocate the consumption of what is known as a low-Glycemic Index diet (GI). A low-GI diet has become the new nutritional revolution in Australia, Scandinavia, Canada, and more recently, the UK.

The GI of foods depends on many factors, including particle size, cooking, food processing, other food components present (e.g. fat, protein, dietary fibre), the proportion and type of sugars and starch, and the structure of starch. Photo: The Star/ANN

So what is a low-GI diet?

Carbohydrates can be divided into three main groups - simple sugar molecules, medium length chains of sugar molecules, and very long and complex combinations of sugar molecules. The Glycemic Index concept came about when scientists studied how the body breaks these different types of carbohydrates down when they are included in the diet.

The Glycemic Index (GI), first introduced by Jenkins and colleagues in 1981, is the classification of the blood glucose-raising potential of carbohydrate foods. It is defined as the incremental area under the blood glucose curve of a 50g carbohydrate portion of a test food expressed as a percentage of the response to 50g carbohydrate of a reference food (usually glucose solution) tested on the same subject on a different day.

The principle is that the slower the rate of carbohydrate absorption, the lower the rise in blood glucose level and the lower the GI value.