Prof Winnie Chee Siew Swee, Professor of Nutrition & Dietetics at the IMU-CTNH (in the photo above) is one of the contributors to this article.
One of the most common challenges that people all over the world face is that of eating healthy and controlling our meal portions. Some of us struggle with it to help with weight issues, others have to keep an eye on their food intake for particular health conditions. Others just want to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Whatever the motivations, one thing is true for Malaysians–and those with non-Western diets–it is a lot harder to find nutritional information, such as the glycemic index, about local fare as opposed to Western dishes. A recent collaboration between two institutions–one in Malaysia and the other in Singapore–to chart the glycemic index of Asian foods is the first step in rectifying this. You’re about to bite into your favourite pandan chiffon cake but you remember reading an article about the glycemic index (GI) of foods and how this affects your blood sugar level. “What is the GI for a chiffon cake?” you wonder. You quickly whip out your phone to google it…but nothing turns up. It’s a common roadblock. Search the GI of a strawberry shortcake and you will immediately find numerous resources including recipes for a lower GI version and a list of other foods with comparable GI values. For a chiffon cake, however, you would need to be a GI Joe of the nutrition world to track down the same data. Dr Sangeetha Shyam from IMU’s Centre for Transformative Nutrition and Health (CTNH) says, “As part of my doctoral work at IMU, we had pioneered the DIETPLUS Version 3, a programme that works as a Malaysian GI and nutrient calculator. It was created to support low GI dietary studies in Malaysia. This was in 2010 and we have freely circulated this calculator to all Malaysian nutrition and health researchers.” However, this has not been enough and with GI gaining a lot more traction from the profession as well as individual folk, there has been an urgent need to update and improve the accuracy and accessibility of the glycemic index of Malaysian foods. Over the last two years, Dr Sangeetha was one of the five scientists from IMU-CTNH and A-Star Singapore that collaborated to put together a GI compendium of non-western foods. The team was led by Prof Jeyakumar Henry, a senior advisor at Agency for Science, Technology and Research’s Singapore Institute of Food and Biotechnology Innovation (SIFBI). He says: “It was very difficult to access GI values of Asian and non-western foods as there was no database and international databases gave very little focus to the region. I began my work in GI 25 years ago in the United Kingdom and when I moved to Singapore in 2011, I was acutely aware of the paucity of GI values for Asian and non-western foods.” Together, the team managed to put together a list of 940 foods from 16 Asian and Middle Eastern countries including Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Hong Kong, India, Sri Lanka, UAE and Saudi Arabia. This list includes items such as nasi lemak, red bean pau and yes, even chiffon cake!
What is GI?
Carbohydrates are broken down to sugar during digestion and are absorbed into the blood. This then affects our blood sugar levels. GI is a number that indicates the quality of carbohydrates in foods. The higher the GI of a food, the higher and more rapidly it raises blood sugar when consumed. Food is categorised as having a high GI if its GI value is 70 and above. Foods with a GI of 56 to 69 are placed in the medium GI category. A low GI food has a GI of 55 or lower. For example, roti jala with chicken curry has a GI of 81, chiffon cake has 60 while yellow-fleshed watermelon has a GI of 47.
“Knowing these numbers is important for consumers to make an informed choice especially for those who want to watch their weight or control their diabetes,” says Dr Sangeetha. She adds that GI values have become even more important in light of today’s COVID-19 pandemic. “It has made us acutely aware of the health implications of unhealthy diets, obesity and diabetes. Both diabetes and obesity are associated with raised blood sugar levels that increase inflammation. High levels of inflammation can compromise immunity and make people more susceptible to infections.”
Carbs–quality over quantity |
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Controlling carbohydrates has long been the focus with low-carb, high-protein diets still very popular. While it seems logical that reducing our intake of carbs will help us to reduce our blood sugar levels, mainstream scientific evidence does not support low-carbohydrate diets. According to Dr Sangeetha, it is unnecessary and even dangerous to completely cut out carbohydrates as the current evidence and mainstream consensus is that both high- and low-carbohydrate diets increase mortality. “Very low carbohydrate or keto diets are considered experimental and lacking in evidence in terms of long-term safety,” she says. According to her, a good balance is when carbohydrates provide about half our energy needs. “In Asia, our diets are particularly high in carbohydrates. In a typical Asian diet, 50 to 80 per cent of energy comes from carbs, way higher than Western diets which tend to be heavier in proteins,” Dr Sangeetha says. Reducing drastically or completely cutting out carbohydrates from an Asian diet would mean that our plates would have little or no staples and would probably cost a lot more. “It’s not sustainable–and most times not affordable–to have a low-carbohydrate diet. What is more important, and what we should focus on, is the kind of carbohydrates we ingest,” she says. This is where GI plays an important role. The GI of a food enables us to choose the type of carbohydrates we consume by basing our diet on quality—that is, low GI foods—rather than focusing only on quantity. |