White bread, rice, and other carbs boost heart disease risk in women
Baku, February 9 (AZERTAC). Women who eat more white bread, white rice, pizza, and other carbohydrate-rich foods that cause blood sugar to spike are more than twice as likely to develop heart disease as women who eat less of those foods, a new study suggests.
Men who eat lots of those carbohydrates -- which have what`s known as a high glycemic index -- do not have the same increased risk, however, perhaps because their bodies process the carbs differently, the researchers found.
Only carbohydrates with a high glycemic index appear to hurt the heart. Carbs with a low glycemic index -- such as fruit and pasta -- were not associated with an increased risk of heart disease, which suggests that the increased risk is caused "not by a diet high in carbohydrates, but by a diet rich in rapidly absorbed carbohydrates," says the lead author of the study, Sabina Sieri, of the Fondazione IRCCS Istituto Nazionale dei Tumori, a national institute for cancer research in Milan, Italy.
The glycemic index ranks on a scale from 1 to 100 how quickly (or slowly) carbohydrates affect your blood-sugar levels. (White bread scores 100.) Foods that rank below 55 are considered to have a low glycemic index and produce only small fluctuations in blood glucose and insulin levels; foods that rank above 70 are said to have a high glycemic index and tend to cause unhealthy spikes in blood sugar.
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