"Free" Foods

Free Foods

Many foods have few available carbohydrates in a standard serving. We call these the “free foods,” not because your supermarket will give them to you without cost, but because they are essentially free of any serious impact on your blood sugar.

Another factor is that because servings of these foods are so low in available carbohydrates, it’s difficult, if not impossible, to get volunteers to eat enough for a test of their glycemic indexes. The standard test portion is 50 grams of available carbohydrates. With any of the free foods, test subjects would have to eat huge portions.

It’s a free food, if it’s less than 5% carb.

For convenience we can say that any food with fewer than 5 grams of available carbohydrate in a 100 gram portion is a free food. The rest of the portion is protein, fat, fiber, ash, and water. This is similar but slightly different from the concept used in the Dietary Exchange Lists, which says, “Free foods are those with either under 20 calories or 5 grams or less of carbohydrates per serving.”

http://www.mendosa.com/freefoods.htm

http://www.health24.com/dietnfood/Healthy_foods/15-18-20-138.asp