Document Type

Article

Publication Date

1-13-2009

Abstract

Background: Carbohydrate quality and quantity may affect the risk for cardiovascular diseases (CVD) and type-2 diabetes mellitus. Glycemic load (GL) is a mathematical concept based on carbohydrate quality and quantity. GL is a product of glycemic index (GI) and the carbohydrate content of a food item divided by 100.

Objective: In this study, the association between GL and components and prevalence of metabolic syndrome was investigated in a representative sample survey of US residents utilizing the data reported in the third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (n = 5011).

Methods: Metabolic syndrome was defined according to the criteria established by the Adult Treatment Panel III. Multivariate-adjusted means for waist circumference, triacylglycerol, systolic and diastolic blood pressures, blood glucose, and HDL cholesterol were determined according to the energy-adjusted GL intake quartiles using regression models.

Results: In all subjects and in men, high GL was associated with low HDL-cholesterol concentrations in multivariate-adjusted analysis (P for trend < 0.01). However, no association was observed between GL and any of the individual components of metabolic syndrome in women. Also, no association was observed between energy-adjusted GL and prevalence of metabolic syndrome in both men (P for trend < 0.21) and women (P for trend < 0.09) in the multivariate-adjusted logistic regression analysis.

Conclusion: It is likely that the diets low in GL may mitigate the risk for CVD through HDL cholesterol.

Comments

Originally published in International Archives of Medicine vol. 2 iss. 3 2009.

DOI: 10.1186/1755-7682-2-3

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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