Who is the GI diet best suited to?
Anyone! The GI diet is very easy to follow and adapt to. Many followers say they don't even feel like they're on a diet at all! It's particularly suitable for people with underactive thyroid, people who have polycystic ovaries (PCOS) and type 2 diabetics. This is because following a low GI way of eating will help to slow down the release of energy from food and stabilise insulin levels, and all of the conditions above can benefit from better control of blood sugar and insulin levels. It can even help to prevent development of type 2 diabetes. But even if you don't have any of the conditions mentioned above you can still reap all the beneficial effects that a GI diet has to offer.

Is the GI diet only suitable for people who want to lose weight?
Not at all! Following a low GI way of eating can be beneficial for everyone, including people who want to maintain their weight, and people who want to eat healthily and reap the benefits that GI has to offer. It's also suitable for kids, as long as their calorie intake is not restricted.

Does low GI mean low carb?
Absolutely not! Low GI is about choosing carbs carefully, and restricting the 'bad' ones, but not omitting them altogether.

Some foods offer no nutritional benefit beyond calories. Sugar is an example of this. Apart from the calories, there's no nutritional reason to consume sugar, so you could label that a 'bad' carb. On the other hand, wholegrains — such as whole-wheat pasta, brown rice or oatmeal — provide many vitamins and minerals, fibre, and other substances that promote health. This puts them in the 'good' carb category.

But you have to watch how much you eat and keep your portions in check. Too much of any food, including whole grains, may provide excess calories. And excess calories from any source leads to weight gain.

The theory behind low GI diets is similar to that behind low-carb diets: high GI foods raise blood sugar and insulin levels and cause weight gain. So if you eat low GI foods, you'll lower your blood sugar and insulin levels and you'll lose weight.

How do I work out the GI value of a food?
You can't! This can only be done in a laboratory and is quite expensive to carry out. However, a lot of supermarkets such as Tesco, are now jumping on the GI bandwagon and getting some foods tested and labelling them if they are low GI, which makes life for GI followers easier. There are also some lists of foods that can be used for guidance on what foods are high, medium and low GI. For all other foods, you need to bear in mind GI principles when choosing them, for example always choose a wholegrain breakfast cereal over a sugar-coated one, and if you're buying ready meals have one with low GI pasta instead of one with high GI mashed potato. It's easy to lower the overall GI of your meal by adding other low GI foods such as veg and salad.

Can I only eat low GI foods on this plan?
That would be very restrictive, impractical and would eventually become boring! We recommend that you try to ensure the overall balance of your meals is mainly low GI, but it's fine to include some high and medium foods in there too. The GI number of a food is based not only on the carbohydrate content of the food, but it is also affected by other factors such as the fat and protein content, because these nutrients slow down the absorption of carbohydrate. For example, crisps and chips will actually have a lower GI than potatoes cooked without fat. Milk and other dairy products have a low GI because of their high protein content, and the fact that they contain fat.

Therefore if people were to confine themselves to a low GI diet, their diet would be unbalanced and possibly high in fat, which could lead to weight gain and susceptibility to heart disease. Therefore cutting out all high GI foods is not the answer.

A healthy low GI diet should be low in total fat, especially saturated fat, contain some lean protein, dairy products and more of the low GI carbohydrate foods such as grainy breads, pasta, beans and pulses, and fruit and vegetables.

Can I eat as many low GI foods as I like?
Unfortunately not! If you want to lose weight, you still have to take portion size into consideration. Also, as mentioned above, some low GI foods can be high in saturated fat so you should try to limit your intake of these, even if you aren't trying to lose weight but are following a low GI way of eating.

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