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undo the benefits you are trying to achieve. The concept of glycemic index (GI) is one good example: a fictional notion that, if believed like a fairy tale, could have you kissing frogs to make princes.
    GI assigns values to foods that describe how high blood sugar climbs over 90 minutes after consuming that food compared to glucose. The GI of a pork chop? Zero: no impact on blood sugar. Three scrambled eggs? Also zero. A plate of kalamata olives and big wedge of feta cheese? Zero again. A zero glycemic index applies to all other meats, fats, oils, most nuts, cheeses, mushrooms, and nonstarchy vegetables. Eat any of these foods and blood sugar won’t budge and insulin will not be provoked beyond a minimal level.
    While there is really nothing wrong with the concept of GI or the related concept of glycemic load (GL), which factors in quantity of food, the problem lies in how values for GI and GL are interpreted. Standard practice is to (arbitrarily) break GI levels down into high GI (70 or greater), moderate GI (56 to 69), and low GI (55 or less), while GL is broken down into high GL (20 or greater), moderate GL (11 to 19), and low GL (10 or less).
    Can you be a little bit pregnant? Can you have a little nuclear war? The same applies to GI: There should be no “low” or “high” distinguished by such small differences. All GI levels are associated with blood sugars that are too high if weight loss and ideal metabolic health are your goals. Applying the flawed logic of the GI, cornflakes, puffed rice, and pretzels have high GIs (above 70), while whole grain bread, oatmeal, and rice have low GIs, resulting in the conventional advice to includes lots of these low-GI foods in your diet.
    A typical nondiabetic person who consumes 1 cup of oatmeal—a low-GI food—in ½ cup of milk without added sugar will experience a blood sugar level in the neighborhood of 160 mg/dL. This is a high level that provokes the weight-loss blocking effect of insulin, not to mention also triggering (over time) adrenal disruption, cataract formation, damage to joint cartilage, hypertension, heart disease, and neurological deterioration or dementia when provoked repeatedly, as with oatmeal for breakfast every morning. A blood sugar of 160 mg/dL may not be as high as, say, the 180 mg/dL that occurs after consuming a high-GI food, such as a bowl of cornflakes or puffed rice cereal. But it is still high enough to provoke all the destructive effects of high blood sugar.
    Low GI would therefore be more accurately labeled as “less-high” GI. Even better, we could just recognize that any GI above zero or low single-digit values should be regarded as high.
    The concept of glycemic load that factors in portion size is no better. Under this system, the GL of cornflakes is 23, the GL of oatmeal is 13, and the GL of whole wheat bread is 10, once again lulling you into thinking that foods like oatmeal and whole wheat bread don’t raise blood sugar. But they do. Foods like oatmeal and whole wheat bread don’t have low GLs; they have less high GLs.
    Is there a value that better predicts whether there will be a blood sugar rise? Yes: grams of carbohydrates. Specifically, net grams of carbohydrates obtained by subtracting fiber (since fiber, while included in the total carbohydrates value on nutritional panels, is not digested to sugar):
    NET CARBOHYDRATES = TOTAL CARBOHYDRATES – FIBER
    If you were to test blood sugars with a fingerstick glucose meter 30 to 60 minutes after consuming a food (when peak blood sugar usually occurs, not 2 hours as advised by physicians for diabetic blood sugar control), you would see that it takes most of us 15 g net carbohydrates before blood sugars rise, regardless of whether they are high-, medium-, or low-GI. We have based all Wheat Belly 10-Day Grain Detox dietary choices and recipes on this limit.
    Let’s dash another fairy tale commonly offered by the dietary community that can trip