South Beach Diet Understanding Terminology

When reading about the South Beach Diet in the Internet or in books, you might come across lingos that only professionals know. You cannot fully understand the essence of the resource article or the diet itself because of these darn words that alienate you. Don't fret because this article will help you understand some jargons so that you get the better picture of what the South Beach Diet is all about.

The principle of the South Beach Diet is to reduce food items that make you overweight. You may ask, "What are these foods?" Well Dr. Agatston, the founder of this weight-loss program, referred to sugar as the perpetrator causing your weight gain. Food that have high glycemic index must be removed from your diet because these make you eat more hence making you gain more weight.

You will understand this philosophy better when you know terms like carbohydrate, sugar and glycemic index.

Carbohydrates and Sugar

These are organic compounds made up of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen arranged in a specific manner. Carbohydrates are important because they supply the energy needed by the body. Carbohydrates are composed of monosaccharides also called simple sugars. One example of a monosaccharide is glucose that serves as the important energy source for all the body's activities.

One monosaccharide can combine with another to form a disaccharide. A concrete example of a disaccharide you are familiar with is sucrose or table sugar, that white grainy stuff you put in coffee to make it sweet. Sucrose is composed of one glucose unit and fructose unit. Between the two, fructose is sweeter and occurs naturally in honey and fruits. The reason why sucrose is sweet is because fructose is placed where it's easily accessible to our taste buds.

Monosaccharide units can also form polymers also known as polysaccharides. These are considered complex carbohydrates and examples are fiber, starches, and glycogen. Fiber and starches are found in plants like vegetables and fruit whereas glycogen is the storage form of glucose in animals.

Glycemic Index

When we ingest food items rich in carbohydrates like licorice or fruits in the likes of apples, these are broken down into monosaccharide units by enzymes in the digestive system and these units are glucose, fructose and galactose. Glucose is the monosaccharide unit actively absorbed in the intestinal cells and transported to different parts of the body via blood circulation.

This mechanism is the basis for developing the glycemic index (GI), which ranks different food items rich in carbohydrates compared to a standard food in their ability to increase blood glucose levels. In most cases, white bread is used as the standard food. The ranking is in a scale of 0 to 100 measuring how much blood sugar rises after consuming these foods. There are three levels for classifying dietary carbohydrate based on GI and these are: low, intermediate, and high.

Low GI foods have less than 55 scores and these produce only a modest rise in blood glucose levels. Examples are soy milk, peanuts, most vegetables and fruits like apple. On the other hand, high GI foods with scores surpassing 70 cause blood glucose levels to rise quickly after eating. Examples of high GI foods are white bread, corn chips, doughnuts, rice cakes and other foods comprised of simple sugars.

South Beach Diet promotes the intake of low GI foods because they are considered to control weight by controlling the appetite and delaying hunger. The rule of thumb in SB Diet is to always select foods that are low in GI.

Now that you know these terminologies, you will surely enjoy reading more about the South Beach Diet.