GI News—September 2010

• Wanted! Low GI fast food choices
• Why it’s time to raise the bar and lower the GI cut-offs for fast foods
• Low carb or low fat for weight loss? The choice is yours if you can stick to it
• Masterchef. The other ‘big M’ and healthy home-cooked meals
• How nutrition health halos trick us into treating
• Will you have a statin with that?

‘If starting tomorrow at noon, we all went into Taco Bell and Burger King and ordered only salads, their menus would change faster than you can say Lite Italian’ writes Prof Brian Wansink in Mindless Eating. ‘Within a year, people would be able to eat a Taco Salad Bell any time they wanted to make a run for the border. Within another year there would be another Broccoli King … No food company is in the business to make us fat. They’re in the business to sell us food. If we want fattening food to mindlessly eat, companies will fix it. But they will also fix us healthy food we can mindfully eat if they can profitably do so.’

Vote with your feet. It’s up to us, not governments and self-appointed nutrition nannies. If we all demand healthy low GI fast food options, you can be sure the food companies will supply them. Our job is to make it profitable for them to do so. That means we have to order them and not the tempting high calorie, high fat, high GI alternatives. So here’s to great tasting baked ‘fries’ or wedges made with lower GI potatoes, lean meat burgers on really grainy low GI buns and curries and stir fries served with lower GI rices.

Good eating, good health and good reading.

Editor: Philippa Sandall

Web management and design: Alan Barclay, PhD