Supermarkets are making more of an effort to help people buy healthy foods when shopping.
It's a response to consumer pressure and European regulations but the stores that do provide more comprehensive food labelling - with nutritional breakdown of food products - and promotion of fruit and vegetables with "five-a-day" slogans have to be commended.
However, to understand food labels fully, you still need to know a certain amount of basic nutritional facts, such as the percentages of protein, carbohydrates and fats that make up a healthy diet.
This information - about 15 per cent protein, 35 per cent fats (no more than 10 per cent from saturated fats sources) and 50 per cent carbohydrates - isn't always easy to keep in mind and trying to maintain a nutritionally balanced diet without such basics can prove to be difficult.
The answer to such problems can be found in the GI diet.
It is based on eating carbohydrate foods that raise the levels of glucose in the blood slowly (low GI carbohydrate foods include porridge, boiled new potatoes, plain yogurt, medium-ripe bananas) rather than those which cause rapid increase in blood glucose which, in turn, leads to increased production of insulin whose surplus results in more body fat (high GI carbohydrate foods include cornflakes, fruit yogurt, broad beans and biscuits).
The low GI foods are then combined with high protein foods (meat, eggs, fish) which contain the necessary fat required in the diet.
The GI diet or High Energy Low GI plan as it is sometimes called is promoted by Unislim (www.unislim.com) and can also be followed from the privacy of your home computer at www.ediets.ie.
Follow the diet at this Tesco-sponsored website and you will be able to purchase low and medium GI foods from the Tesco range, following its recent introduction of GI labelling on own-brand products.
