In the GI News Kitchen

American dietitian and author of Good Carbs, Bad Carbs, Johanna Burani, shares favourite recipes with a low or moderate GI from her Italian kitchen. For more information, check out Johanna's website. The photographs are by Sergio Burani. His food, travel and wine photography website is photosbysergio.com.



Spaghetti with parsley sauce.
No Italian household is ever without fresh parsley. It grows in the family vegetable garden or potted on a sunny terrace. Even in the dead of winter a vibrant bunch is kept at the ready in the refrigerated crisper. This simple sauce can be used with pasta, barley or rice, on crostini, in omelets, with chicken or fish. Your imagination is your only limitation. Here I’ve paired it with spaghetti. The recipe makes 1 cup sauce, but you only use ¼ cup for the 2 pasta portions served here so you have leftovers for another meal or two. Serves 2.

1 bunch fresh parsley, leaves only
2/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
2–4 large cloves garlic, minced
¼ tsp salt
2 tsp fresh lemon juice
½ cup freshly grated parmigiano-reggiano cheese
120g/4 oz spaghetti



Wash and pat dry the parsley leaves. Finely chop and set aside.
Combine the olive oil, garlic, salt and lemon juice in a medium-sized jar. Tighten the lid and shake to mix well. Add in the parsley and cheese, tighten the lid and shake again.
Cook the pasta according to package instructions until al dente. Drain the pasta and add ¼ cup of the sauce. Mix well and serve.

Per serve
Energy: 1696kJ/404cals; Protein 10g; Fat 21g (includes 4g saturated fat and 6mg cholesterol); Available carbohydrate 44g; Fibre 2g

Cut back on the food bills and enjoy fresh-tasting, easily prepared, seasonal, satisfying and delicious low or moderate GI meals that don’t compromise on quality and flavour one little bit with our Money Saving Meals including these recipes from The Modern Vegetarian by Maria Elia published by Kyle Books, London and from Forks Over Knives – The Cookbook by Del Sroufe published by The Experiment.

Spiced caramelised onion and beetroot bulgar pilau.
In this delicious recipe from Maria Elia’s The Modern Vegetarian, the earthiness and sweetness of beetroot blend perfectly with these spices and the bulgar and pine nuts add a unique texture. You could even try adapting it by sprinkling with pomegranates or a little pomegranate molasses. Serves 4.

3 raw beetroots
175g (6oz) bulgar
3 tbsp olive oil
3 onions, finely sliced
2 tsp cumin seeds
2 tsp ground cinnamon
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
pinch of chilli powder
1½ cups boiling water
pinch of sea salt
40g (about 1½ oz) toasted pine nuts
3 tbsp chopped mint
1 lemon



Preheat the oven to 190ºC/375ºF/Gas Mark 5.
Wash and scrub the beetroots, wrap in foil and roast until tender, about 30–50 minutes (depending on the size of the beetroot). Leave to cool, then peel and dice.
Tip the bulgar into a fine sieve and wash under cold water to remove excess starch.
Heat the olive oil in a large pan, add the onions and cook over a medium heat until caramelised, about 15 minutes, stirring frequently. Add the cumin seeds, cinnamon, garlic and chilli powder and cook for a further minute. Add the diced beetroot, bulgar and boiling water, then cover and simmer for 15–20 minutes, until the water has been absorbed. Season with sea salt, stir through the pine nuts, mint and a squeeze of lemon and serve hot or at room temperature.

Per serve
Energy 220kJ/ 400cals; 22g fat (includes saturated fat 2.5g); 10g fibre; 8g protein; 38g available carbohydrate



Recipe and image extracted with permission from The Modern Vegetarian by Maria Elia © (2012), $27.99, published by Kyle Books, London.

Rice salad with fennel, orange and chickpeas.
The mild anise-like flavor of fennel is well balanced by the citrus in this hearty salad. GI News tip: We saved time and made this with microwave brown basmati rice and a can of chickpeas. Delicious, and super quick. Serves 6.

1½ cups brown basmati rice (or 2½ cups cooked rice)
2 cups cooked chickpeas or one 15oz (420g) can, drained and rinsed
1 fennel bulb, trimmed and diced
1 orange, zested, peeled and segmented (zist and segments reserved)
¼ cup plus 2 tbsp (30ml) white wine vinegar
½ tsp crushed red pepper flakes
¼ cup finely chopped parsley


Photo copyright Cara Howe.

Rinse the rice under cold water and drain. Add to a pot with 3 cups cold water. Bring to the boil over a high heat, reduce the heat to medium and cook, covered, for 45–50 minutes or until the rice is tender.
Combine the chickpeas, fennel and orange zest and segments, white wine vinegar, crushed red pepper flakes and parsley in a large bowl while the rice cooks, and mix well. When the rice is cooked, fluff it up, add to the bowl and mix well.

Per serve
Energy 1170 kJ/ 280cals; 2.7g fat (includes saturated fat 0.5g); 7g fibre; 9g protein; 51g available carbohydrate

 
Forks Over Knives: The Cookbook published by The Experiment is available from bookshops and online. With over 300 recipes for plant-based eating throughout the year, it is companion to the hit documentary and the New York Times Number 1 best seller Forks Over Knives: The Plant-Based Way to Health.

Busting Food Myths with Nicole Senior

Nicole Senior

Myth: Tea and coffee are dehydrating.
Everyone assumes that caffeine-containing beverages such as tea and coffee dehydrate, but it’s an urban legend. Seriously high amounts of caffeine are needed before you lose more water than you drink in your cup of tea or coffee. Even if you had a really, really strong cup of tea or coffee, which is quite hard to make (and drink), you would still have a net gain of fluid. So the good news is that enjoying tea and coffee in moderation does contribute to your daily fluid quota. Dehydration is more likely if caffeine is taken in tablet form.



What’s moderation? For tea it’s around 3–4 cups a day. For coffee it’s around 2–3 cups of brewed coffee; if you have high blood pressure, cut that back to 1–2 cups. The key thing with coffee is to resist temptation to upsize. Use a regular cup and order regular-sized servings. If you make your own, use the single shot function on your espresso machine. Pregnant women and older children should try to stick to one to two cups of weak coffee or tea a day.

With tea and coffee watch the extras – the milk, sugar and biscuits or cake! Opt for low-fat milk and if you need the drink sweetened, add a little sugar, gradually using less – you may find you even prefer it without after a while.

Key info Tea and coffee are a source of essential fluids, as well as protective antioxidants that help look after heart and blood vessels. They are also social drinks that bring us together and
help us take time out. It makes sense to avoid caffeine drinks at night if you have trouble sleeping.

Long story short For good health you should drink plenty of water, but tea and coffee (in moderation) do count toward your total daily fluid intake. Water is essentially replacing fluid. Tea and coffee replace fluids and contain antioxidants, so they’ve got two things going for them.

Nicole Senior is an Accredited Practising Dietitian and Nutritionist and author of Food Myths available in bookshops and online and from www.greatideas.net.au

GI Symbol News with Dr Alan Barclay

Dr Alan Barclay

A diet of unintended consequences.
Whatever your health problem (being overweight/obese, or having type 2 diabetes or heart disease), what many fad diet solutions have in common, is advising you to severely limit or completely avoid the nutrient that is supposedly responsible for it.

Turning the clock back, carbohydrate was THE nutrient to avoid in the 1970s. In the 1980s and 90s, however, carbs lost the limelight as fats were fast-tracked to front position as THE dietary demon. Carbs in general made a brief comeback in the early years of the 21st century before THE problem (‘toxic’) nutrient of our time message zoomed in on sugars in general, and fructose in particular.

The problem with this One-Nutrient-At-A-Time approach, as I have discussed previously in GI News, is that we don’t eat single nutrients – we eat foods, that are usually a part of meals, and the meals we eat are at the very least partly determined by our social and cultural background. And this is why most people find it hard to stick to fad diets for prolonged periods of time – there are too many pressures from family, friends, and the societies we live in to consume a wide variety of foods. Enter our modern, high-tech food industry. They saw an opportunity and took it, creating low carb or low fat versions of our favourite foods when we asked for them.

The low fat boom The boom in low fat foods began in 1980s and continues today. We can choose low fat variants of everything from potato crisps to salad dressings. We can now have our proverbial cake and eat it. And because these were supposedly healthier versions of our favourite foods we could stick with this ‘diet’. We all know the consequences: rates of overweight/obesity and related conditions continued to rise.

The low carb boom When carbohydrate was subsequently re-anointed as THE problem nutrient to avoid at all costs, food industry again rode to our rescue producing low carb versions of breakfast cereals, pasta, cakes, cookies and more. Here at the GI Symbol Program, we measured the GI of several of these low carb alternatives and we were deeply concerned that they had values that were much higher than the regular counterparts, so much so that the glycemic load (or impact) was essentially the same: the lower carb content was counter-balanced by the higher GI. There were no net health benefits. Rates of overweight/obesity/type 2 diabetes continued to rise … and these foods didn’t help anyone manage their BGLs either.

The low sugar boom will be on your supermarket shelves soon Business is business. The food industry is now in the process of adapting our favourite foods to make them lower in sugars because it knows (through market research) that’s what their customers now believe is THE problem nutrient. The technology is there – most sugars can be relatively easily replaced by oligosaccharides and starches – perhaps with a non-nutritive sweetener like aspartame, sucralose or stevia thrown in to replace the lost sweetness. The net result will likely be of little nutritional benefit, however, as these oligosaccharides and starches are usually as equally refined, devoid of nutrients (other than kilojoules) and have a higher GI than the sugars they replaced. Like their low carb predecessors, they will likely be of no real health benefit. Based on the events of the past few decades, it’s highly likely that these ‘all new’ sugar free varieties will continue to contribute to the global obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic just like their low fat and low carbohydrate predecessors. History has the strange tendency of repeating itself.

It’s time to stop the nutrient blame game - to stop ‘going on a diet’, and to start to focus on healthy eating patterns like the (higher fat, moderate carb) Mediterranean diet or (low fat, high carb) Japanese (traditional Okinawan) diet. Principles from these tried-and-true dietary patterns like eating minimally refined vegetables, fruits, grains, nuts, seeds, legumes, lean meats/fish, yoghurt and other fermented dairy products, and oils (olive/peanut) can be adapted to suit most people’s personal, familial and cultural backgrounds. Nutrients are by definition essential – it’s how we eat them (and how many of them we put on our plates) that ultimately counts.

The GI Symbol, making healthy low GI choices easy choices



For more information about the GI Symbol Program
Dr Alan W Barclay, PhD
Chief Scientific Officer
Glycemic Index Foundation (Ltd)
Phone: +61 (0)2 9785 1037
Mob: +61 (0)416 111 046
Fax: +61 (0)2 9785 1037
Email: alan.barclay@gisymbol.com
Website: www.gisymbol.com

GI Update with Prof Jennie Brand-Miller

Prof Jennie Brand-Miller answers your questions.


I am 3 months pregnant. Should I monitor my weight? I don’t want to be left with ‘difficult-to-budge pounds after my baby is born. Well, not for too long!
As a routine part of care, your obstetric care providers will keep an eye on your weight gain but most will steer away from discussing it for fear of causing your embarrassment or needless anxiety. Of course, women often discuss the subject among themselves, especially if it’s faster and greater than they expected. Many will tell you that even after the birth they retained a few kilos, and found them difficult to budge.

While their experience is common, we want to assure you that weight gain during pregnancy is under your control and, indeed, it’s good practice for you to monitor it yourself, so that you gain the ideal, or optimal, amount. OK, so what’s ideal? The optimal amount of weight gain over pregnancy is one that results in a ‘desirable pregnancy outcome’. That means a healthy baby, born at full term (about 40 weeks, or 9 months + 1 week gestation) with a birth weight of 3–4 kilograms or 6 to 9 pounds (I have rounded the conversions for easy reading) In women from affluent countries like Australia and New Zealand, who start pregnancy weighing between 60 and 65 kilograms (132 to 143 pounds), the average weight gain over pregnancy is about 13 kilograms (28 pounds) and the average infant birth weight is 3.4 kilograms (7½ pounds). But these are averages only. You’ll be pleased to hear that there’s a range of weight gains that are considered ideal. The desired amount depends to a large extent on your pre-pregnant weight. For a woman who is underweight, a higher weight gain is desirable, while an overweight mum should gain less.

US Institute of Medicine guidelines for pregnancy weight gain (2009)
Your ideal total weight gain in kilograms
BMI less than 18.5 at the start of your pregnancy (underweight) – 13 to 18 kilos
BMI 18.5–24.9 at the start of your pregnancy (normal weight) – 11 to 16 kilos
BMI 25–29.9 at the start of your pregnancy (overweight) – 7 to 11 kilos
BMI 30 or more at the start of your pregnancy (obese) – 5 to 9 kilos

Your ideal total weight gain in pounds
BMI less than 18.5 at the start of your pregnancy (underweight) – 28 to 40 pounds
BMI 18.5–24.9 at the start of your pregnancy (normal weight) – 25 to 35 pounds
BMI 25–29.9 at the start of your pregnancy (overweight) – 15 to 25 pounds
BMI 30 or more at the start of your pregnancy (obese) – 11 to 20 pounds

Weight gain in pregnancy is an excellent predictor of the baby’s weight at birth. This, in turn, predicts how well your baby copes in the first days and months of life. That’s the reason for the proud tradition of announcing not only the baby’s sex but its birth weight as well. Like many things in life, however, there is a happy medium. If you gain too little, it can mean a small baby who has been born too lean with little body fat. Small babies, defined as those born weighing less than 2.5 kilograms (about 5 pounds), have a higher chance of having poor outcomes during and after birth. Paradoxically, they are more likely to become overweight as adults and have a great risk of high blood pressure and heart disease. On the other hand, a baby that grows too big or too fast also has poor outcomes. Excessive weight gain during pregnancy and high birth weight (greater than 4 kilograms/9 pounds) are both linked to complications at birth, such as emergency Caesarean delivery, physical injury and post-partum haemorrhage. Just as importantly, excess weight gain also predicts the future health of both mother and baby.

This is an edited extract from my new book (with Dr Kate Marsh and Prof Robert Moses), The Bump to Baby Low GI Eating Plan for Conception, Pregnancy and Beyond (Hachette Australia). You can visit us HERE.

We are delighted to let GI News readers know that a US edition is on the way. The publisher is Matthew Lore of The Experiment. Matthew has published many of our books in the past and we are very happy to be working with him on this. We will keep you posted re publication details.



GI testing by an accredited laboratory
North America
Dr Alexandra Jenkins
Glycemic Index Laboratories
20 Victoria Street, Suite 300
Toronto, Ontario M5C 298 Canada
Phone +1 416 861 0506
Email info@gilabs.com
Web www.gilabs.com

Australia
Fiona Atkinson
Research Manager, Sydney University Glycemic Index Research Service (SUGiRS)
Human Nutrition Unit, School of Molecular and Microbial Biosciences
Sydney University
NSW 2006 Australia
Phone + 61 2 9351 6018
Fax: + 61 2 9351 6022
Email sugirs@mmb.usyd.edu.au
Web www.glycemicindex.com

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GI News—September 2012

• Restoring physical activity into our computer-driven work, school and home environments;
• Why too much sitting is bad for you;
• Emma Stirling and the scoop on beetroot;
• Do spicy foods boost your metabolism?
• The winning edge: GI and sports performance. Dr Alan Barclay reports;
• Prof Jennie Brand-Miller on the risk factors for gestational diabetes and what you can do about them.

Although the evidence that too much sitting is hazardous to health is now quite compelling, many of us sit longer than we sleep these days. So, this issue we focus on moving more and more often not necessarily by going to the gym or pounding the pavements, but by restoring physical activity into our computer-driven work, school and home environments. ‘We also need to be more creative in designing and transforming our work and home environments and even our whole communities into spaces where physical activity is not just the easy but perhaps even the only choice,’ says Prof Arya Sharma. We love his suggestion that ‘perhaps, it is time to establish building codes for “active” buildings in the same manner in which we now have building codes for environmental friendliness.’

Good eating, good health and good reading.

Editor: Philippa Sandall
Web management and design: Alan Barclay, PhD
Contact email (for questions or permission to reproduce stories from this newsletter): info@gisymbol.com for technical problems or faults please contact smb.ginewstech@sydney.edu.au

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Food for Thought

Why sports and exercise are barely relevant and what really counts is occupational and household activity.
Guest contributor Prof Arya Sharma discusses a paper that suggests why attempts to encourage recreational physical activity are largely doomed to fail.


Prof. Arya Sharma

There is no doubt that reducing sedentariness and increasing physical activity can have enormous health benefits. This is why public health policies and health promotion bombard us with messages on how to get more active – unfortunately, much of the advice focuses on increasing engagement in recreational and volitional sports and exercise.

A paper by Chuck Ratzlaff from Harvard University, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine now suggests why attempts to encourage recreational physical activity are largely doomed to fail. This is simply not where most people’s physical activity happens – nor is it likely to happen. Most people simply do not like being physically active enough to want to do it – when given the choice, they’d much rather sit or lie down (which makes perfect evolutionary sense). It is therefore but natural, that about 80% of total daily physical activity in most people is associated with occupational and non-leisure (household chores).

Sporting activity formed a small fraction of overall physical activity compared with occupational and household activity (even more so in women) in Ratzlaff’s analysis of his recent population-based research measuring lifetime physical activity. If anything women have gotten even more physically active than before.

This not only means that most of us (even those, who do not seek out or participate in ‘recreational’ physical activity) are probably more active than generally assumed. It also means that perhaps the focus of public health measures to promote a more active ‘lifestyle’ may need to focus more on restoring physical activity in occupational and household settings.

Obviously, re-introducing physical labour into the workplace and household may prove far more challenging than simply appealing to people to go for a walk or run (to nowhere).

That workplaces, buildings and whole communities can be re-engineered to promote physical activity (whether you like it or not) is, for example, exemplified in the new Edmonton Clinic Health Academy at the University of Alberta, which incidentally, also houses our School of Public Health. Anyone entering this building is immediately faced with a wide open staircase (not stairwell!) – the elevators are rather hidden in a corner (and for some reason appear not to be accessible half the time). At any time there are people crowding the stairs. Most people will climb stairs when they have to – like it or not. (Simply putting up a sign pointing to the hidden stairwell on the other hand has little effect.)

The point is that we need to be more creative in designing and transforming our work and home environments and even our whole communities into spaces where physical activity is not just the easy but perhaps even the only choice. Perhaps, when it comes to building codes, it is time to establish codes for ‘active’ buildings in the same manner in which we now have building codes for environmental friendliness.

Despite all efforts (including tax breaks), we will probably not get the majority of the population to really ‘like and want’ to be physically active – most people would rather watch sports than do them (especially after a long day at work). This is why increasing occupational and household physical activity by 10% may have a huge population impact while increasing volitional sports and exercise by even 100% may do little (the multiple of zero is still zero!).

Check out Dr Sharma’s website HERE. You can also subscribe to his regular blog postings.