Measuring blood sugar

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Believe it or not, all carbs aren't the same, says Amanda Smith, clinical dietitian at Georgetown University Hospital.

With the recent low-carbohydrate craze, dieters avoid foods such as pasta and potatoes to limit fluctuations in their blood sugar. The glycemic index ranks carbohydrates by how much a person's blood sugar rises immediately after eating.

Ms. Smith usually uses the index when teaching diabetic patients how to adjust their diets, but recently, people on low-carb diets have been using the table for weight-loss purposes.

She says she doubts an entire diet should be designed specifically on the index's information.

"Everybody is different," Ms. Smith says. "Somebody may eat a baked potato, and it may not make their blood sugar go up as much as the next person."

Other health professionals think the concept of the index is too complicated to explain and put into practice.

Proponents of basing a diet on the glycemic index, however, maintain that eating foods lower on the list could provide many health benefits, including weight loss.

The glycemic index compares foods' carbohydrate content, gram for gram, says Dr. Thomas Wolever, a professor in the department of nutritional sciences at the University of Toronto.

Dr. Wolever helped create the table with Dr. David Jenkins, who is a professor in the same department at the university. Their goal was to make a table for diabetic patients, listing the foods that don't cause large increases in blood sugar.

At the time, glucose was used as the standard to which other foods were compared. Since then, tests have been done using white bread as the reference, but Dr. Wolever still prefers to use glucose. Dr. Wolever studied the blood sugar response of about 40 subjects and averaged the values of their tests to create the glycemic index.