California Cuisine Redux PLUS the Glycemic Index

Lost in the hullaballou over the Harvard Healthy Eating Pyramid was the California Cuisine Pyramid, which was really the basis for the current line of inquiry. Let's recall that California Cuisine placed fruits and vegetables at the base of its pyramid to emphasize their impotance in healthy nutrition. And not just any fruits and vegetables either , but phytonutrient fruits and vegetables. This, of course, begs the question: what the heck is a phytonutrient vegetable?!

Well, I am not about to begin to define a phytonutrient vegetable (or a phytonutrient fruit for that matter), but suffice it to say that, broadly speaking, a phytonutrient is what I might call an antioxidant. Wikipedia has an excellent discussion here, as well as a list of foods high in phytonutrients. Lecture 9 of the UCLA Nutrition Lecture Series has a discussion by the author of the California Pyramid on the objectives of the pyramid and the foods in it. Suffice it to say here that the designers of the California Pyramid did not want people fulfilling their fruits and vegetable requirements with corn, and the most popular vegetable in the US : french fried potatoes!

Just for the record, the Calfornia Pyramid calls for 5-11 servings of fruits and vegetables a day, stressing the importance of consuming a good variety of both.

Turning attention to the Glycemic Index (GI), a good discussion , including a list foods and their GI, can be found at Prevention.com. In a nutshell, low GI foods cause a slow and gradual rise in glucose and insulin; whereas high GI foods cause the rapid rise and severe spiking in glucose and insulin we have already discussed. If you are thinking that white bread, white pasta, white rice, and white potatoes are high on the GI, you are smoking! [By the way, the article at Prevention.com suggests ignoring high GI's for certain foods - don't you believe them! There are other foods providing the same nutriants without causing havoc with your gulcose and insulin.]

So here's where we are: the Harvard Healthy Eating Pyramid suggested an "abundance" of vegetables as part of the daily diet, but were quite vague about defining how much vegetable constituted an "abundance" and, indeed, any discussion of what vegetables would be appropriate and provide the most benefit. Ditto fruits. [For an example, I recently added raisins as a "fruit" to my diet because I wasn't keeping up with 6 fruit servings a day. But I always felt that raisins were probably more like candy than fruit because they were so sweet, and indeed, raisins have just a one point lower GI than table sugar!]

Armed with my lists of high phytonutrient foods and low GI foods, I am now ready to take on the Harvard Healthy Eating Pyramid and see how well my current diet fits into their plan, and, if necessary, what changes I might make for a better fit.