Got your attention now?

So, knowing just how fast a food you eat "breaks down" into sugar -- and thus how quickly it raises blood sugar levels, producing a high insulin response -- is crucial in weight loss. It's also one of the key areas where "us" and "them" don't agree. "They" -- meaning traditional medicine practitioners and dieticians -- tend to pooh-pooh that connection as unimportant. (I suppose they also ignore the documented fact that insulin signals the body to make more cholesterol, but that's the subject of a different column.)

Anyway, the glycemic index was developed to determine how fast a food brings your blood sugar up (which, incidentally, also contributes to mood and energy fluctuations). The people who developed it used pure glucose as a standard, giving it a rating of 100. The closer to 100 a particular food is, the higher its glycemic index.

Here are a few representative samples (some numbers vary because there are different versions of the scale):

Cherries: 25
Bananas (ripe): 60
Beans: 30-40
Rice cakes: 80-133(!)
Many processed breakfast cereals: 100
Nuts: 15-30
French bread: 95+

One food was a real standout, however. It's a complex carbohydrate, too, shooting to heck the theory that they are always slower-releasing and "better" for you. Want to guess what it is?

The bagel, which weighed in at 105. It beat the gold standard of pure glucose.