RE SEARCH New Agrico table potato label focuses on hea At Corpus, the Human Body Experience Centre in Leiden, the Agrico cooperative recently introduced a new label of table potatoes. The healthy functioning of the human body is highlighted in the Carisma name. Especially, because this label covers potatoes with a low Glycemic Index (GI). Why this is so healthy is explained during the presentation in an informative guest lecture by Professor Wim Saris, Professor of Human Nutrition at the University of Maastricht. L ooking at today’s world, in his studies and research, Saris has found that obesity and its related problems such as type 2 diabetes plus heart and vascular diseases are increasing rapidly in the western world. The reason mainly, he says, is mainly because people eat too much and too often. ‘The modern consumer is being confronted with food always and everywhere.’ He remembers very well that, in 1992, at Utrecht Central station, you could only eat at the Hoog Brabant restaurant. Today, in 2015, you trip over all the places where you can buy food. This is a development that Saris sees reflected everywhere in society. This results in diabesity, a combination of obesity and diabetes. He sketches the development on the basis of a graph. As an example, he takes the food given to patients in a mental hospital in France, the details of which have been been recorded for a few hundred years. That’s food for scientists, so to speak. This series of figures shows many similarities with the food patterns in the rest of the western world. Around 200 years ago, patients in the mental hospital were eating comparatively large quantities of carbohydrates and not enough energy food due About 200 years ago, patients were eating comparatively large amounts of carbohydrates and not enough energy in to a food shortage. Moreover, they still did a lot of physical work, because the patients had to work on a farm. After agricultural mechanisation, their energy requirements went down but, at the same time, the percentage of fat in food increased considerably resulting in overweight. A comparable situation has occurred in the rest of the population of the Western countries. For many years now, people have been .looking for diets to avoid overweight. For example, in the last 30 years, a wide range of diet books have been published with tips and advice on how to lose weight and stay slim. ‘These diets vary with food that either has an extremely low or an extremely high fat content such as the Atkins diet. And then everything in between’, says Saris. He has mainly focused his research on the role of the Glycemic Index (GI) in food products. What is the Glycemic Index? What exactly is that Glycemic Index? Saris defines this as a comperative rating of carbohydrates in a product that shows how much they cause the blood sugar level to rise compared to a reference food, usually 50 grams of glucose. ‘All the products we eat raise our blood sugar level. The faster the sugar reaches the blood, the higher the GI. A GI test is a laborious process. First, a group of at 4 Potato World 2016 • number 1 Pagina 3
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