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Glycemic Load: How To Lose Weight Without Being As Hungry

I’ve written before here about the glycemic index, that measure of how fast a food causes your blood sugar to rise. High glycemic foods, like simple sugars, cause our blood sugars to rise quickly resulting in a pouring out of insulin, a rapid fall in our blood sugar, and we become hungry again soon. Protein in our diet blunts this glycemic index effect, as does eating more complex carbohydrates such as vegetables.

An new concept has emerged that complements the glycemic index, called the glycemic load. The glycemic load reflects how much total carbohydrate is released in your body from various foods. While carbohydrates, sugars and starches, are a core part of our nutrition, we know that eating a lot of them results in more hunger and we end up eating more calories and gaining weight. Low carbohydrate diet plans have shown some advantage over low fat diet plans for losing weight, although both work if the total calories eaten are reduced. Read more »

*This blog post was originally published at eDocAmerica*

Latest Interviews

IDEA Labs: Medical Students Take The Lead In Healthcare Innovation

It’s no secret that doctors are disappointed with the way that the U.S. healthcare system is evolving. Most feel helpless about improving their work conditions or solving technical problems in patient care. Fortunately one young medical student was undeterred by the mountain of disappointment carried by his senior clinician mentors…

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How To Be A Successful Patient: Young Doctors Offer Some Advice

I am proud to be a part of the American Resident Project an initiative that promotes the writing of medical students residents and new physicians as they explore ideas for transforming American health care delivery. I recently had the opportunity to interview three of the writing fellows about how to…

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Latest Book Reviews

Book Review: Is Empathy Learned By Faking It Till It’s Real?

I m often asked to do book reviews on my blog and I rarely agree to them. This is because it takes me a long time to read a book and then if I don t enjoy it I figure the author would rather me remain silent than publish my…

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The Spirit Of The Place: Samuel Shem’s New Book May Depress You

When I was in medical school I read Samuel Shem s House Of God as a right of passage. At the time I found it to be a cynical yet eerily accurate portrayal of the underbelly of academic medicine. I gained comfort from its gallows humor and it made me…

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Eat To Save Your Life: Another Half-True Diet Book

I am hesitant to review diet books because they are so often a tangled mess of fact and fiction. Teasing out their truth from falsehood is about as exhausting as delousing a long-haired elementary school student. However after being approached by the authors’ PR agency with the promise of a…

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