 Have you ever wondered why you can eat a bag of candy and feel hungry just 30 minutes later? It has to do with something called the glycemic index of the food or the combinations of food that you choose to eat. So let's compare two snacks. First, let's look at a candy bar. Then the alternative snack, a bowl of brown rice with some stir-fried broccoli on top. The candy bar is high in simple sugars like sucrose and glucose. Their carbohydrates your body can really quickly break down and absorb. This means that if we were to look at a graph of your blood sugar after you ate a candy bar, it would look something like this. So on this axis we have blood sugar and on the other axis we have time. I'm going to put an N here for where a normal blood sugar level might be. So this is in between meals. So right after you've eaten your candy bar, your blood sugar is going to start to climb pretty quickly. Which means that the food has a relatively high glycemic index. Now when blood sugar goes up like this, the body senses it and starts releasing a proportional amount of a hormone called insulin that works to lower blood sugar and bring it back down to its normal level. So when blood glucose or blood sugar shoots up like this, insulin will also shoot up. But there'll be a bit of a time lag and because of that time lag, there's going to be a period of time when the blood sugar actually dips lower than it should and this is when you feel hungry. Now if on the other hand you were to choose the broccoli and brown rice as your snack, your body would have to work harder to break down the carbs in that food. So the graph would look something more like this. Again, we have blood sugar on our y-axis and time on our x-axis and here's our normal, here's our n. So right after the bowl of broccoli and brown rice, your blood sugar is going to go up more slowly than it did when you ate the candy bar. This also means that your insulin levels aren't going to spike like they did when you ate the candy bar. They're only going to be released in proportion to the amount of sugar entering your blood and the speed at which it enters the blood. Blood sugar will go down, but it probably won't plummet and probably won't be as likely to go under the normal range for blood sugar. The result is that you're going to end up with a more stable blood sugar over a longer period of time. So what's the take-home message of all of this? Choose foods with a low glycemic index whenever possible. Things like chicken and brown rice, even whole grain bread with cheese are good combinations. If you combine your carbohydrates with a bit of fiber, protein or healthy fats, it'll slow down the release of sugar into your blood and prevent you from getting the munchies too quickly.