Hello, I'm Monica Reinagle.

Welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast.

Today we're talking personalized nutrition,

specifically using microbiome analysis to create personalized

dietary recommendations.

For those with diabetes, or pre-diabetes, managing blood sugar levels is a critically important part of preventing the progression of this disease and avoiding serious complications.

But even for healthy people, keeping your blood sugar in a healthy range can help reduce the risk of obesity and the risk of developing diabetes.

Up until recently, the advice for managing your blood sugar has focused on the nutritional composition of foods.

Specifically, you're advised to pay attention to the quantity

and the quality of the carbohydrates in your diet.

Tracking quantity is really pretty straightforward. You can simply count the grams of

carbohydrates. Assessing the quality of the carbohydrates in your diet gets a little bit

more nuanced. You might take into account how much sugar or fiber a food contains, for example.

The problem is that two different foods with the same amount of carbohydrate or sugar or fiber can still produce very different glycemic

responses in your body. A white potato for example might have the same amount of

carbohydrate and fiber as a serving of white pasta, but the potato is likely to cause a higher spike in blood sugar.

This was the problem that the glycemic index hoped to solve by attempting to factor in the variable known as the human digestive process.

Researchers fed human volunteers all kinds of different foods and then measured their blood sugar levels afterward.

And they used this data to produce the glycemic index,

which represents the average rise in blood sugar in humans

in response to various foods.

As a final step, multiplying that glycemic index number

...