GI Fuels New Product Development

With Tesco launching its major push on the low glycaemic index (GI) diet, many food manufacturers and ingredient suppliers may be tempted to follow suit with their own "low GI" brands. But according to Reading Scientific Services Ltd (RSSL) - one of the few laboratories able to measure the GI of products, and with expertise in new product development/reformulation - huge confusion still exists about what the term means. It isn't just consumers that are confused, so are food producers.

GI is a measurement that expresses a food's ability to give rise to an increase in blood glucose levels. It relates specifically to the increase brought about by consuming a quantity of food containing a fixed amount of available carbohydrate (usually 50g).

There are other measures that are also sometimes calculated. Glycaemic Load (GL) is another dimensionless number that relates the GI of a food item to the amount of available carbohydrate contained in an average serving, rather than the arbitrary portion containing a fixed quantity of available carbohydrate. Glycaemic Response compares the potential of a product to raise blood glucose with a glucose reference, and may be used to evaluate products containing polyols.

Given the definition and therefore the precise way in which GI must be measured, food manufacturers have to be very careful about the way they reformulate products to reduce their GI value, and they must also make sure the value is measured for every reformulation. It is impossible to calculate GI values from tables, or by extrapolation from earlier measurements. However, with its NPD expertise in a broad range of products and wide knowledge of ingredients suitable for inclusion in low GI foods, RSSL is able to help manufacturers develop low GI options more rapidly than would be the case by in-house trial and error.