to measure the efficacy of two diets, one with a high glycemic load and one with a low GL. The study concluded that there is no statistically significant difference between the outcome of the two diets. Glycemic load appears to be a significant factor in dietary programs targeting metabolic syndrome, insulin resistance, and weight loss; studies have shown that sustained spikes in blood sugar and insulin levels may lead to increased diabetes risk. The Shanghai Women's Health Study concluded that women whose diets had the highest glycemic index were 21 percent more likely to develop type 2 diabetes than women whose diets had the lowest glycemic index. Similar findings were reported in the Black Women's Health Study. A diet program that manages the glycemic load aims to avoid sustained blood-sugar spikes and can help avoid onset of type 2 diabetes. For diabetics, glycemic load is a highly recommended tool for managing blood sugar. The data on GI and GL listed in this article is from the University of Sydney (Human Nutrition Unit) GI database. The GI was invented in 1981 by Dr Thomas Wolever and Dr David Jenkins at the University of Toronto and is a measure of how quickly a food containing 25 or 50 g of carbohydrate raises blood-glucose levels. Because some foods typically have a low carbohydrate content, Harvard researchers created the GL, which takes into account the amount of carbohydrates in a given serving of a food and so provides a more useful measure. Liu et al. were the first to show that based on their calculation, the glycemic load of a specific food—calculated as the product of that food's carbohydrate content and its glycemic index value—has direct physiologic meaning in that each unit can be interpreted as the equivalent of 1 g carbohydrate from white bread (or glucose depending on the reference used in determining the glycemic index). It became immediately apparent that such direct physiological quantification of glycemic load would allow patients with diabetes to do "glycemic load" counting as opposed to the conventional “carbohydrate counting” for monitoring the glycemic effect of foods. The concept of glycemic load addresses the concern about rating foods as good or bad solely on the basis of their glycemic index. For example, although the glycemic index for carrots is reported to be as high as 1.31 times that of white bread, the glycemic load for one serving of