The glycaemic response to nine types of rice (white basmati, brown basmati, white and brown basmati, easy-cook basmati, basmati and wild rice, long-grain rice, easy-cook long-grain rice, Thai red rice, Thai glutinous rice) and two types of rice vermicelli (Guilin rice vermicelli, Jiangxi rice vermicelli) commercially available in the United Kingdom were compared against a glucose standard in a non-blind, randomized, repeated-measure, crossover design trial. Fourteen healthy subjects (six males, eight females), mean age 38 (standard deviation 16) years and mean body mass index 21.3 (standard deviation 2.3) kg/m(2), were recruited for the study. Subjects were served portions of the test foods and a standard food (glucose), on separate occasions, each containing 50 g available carbohydrates. Capillary blood glucose was measured from finger-prick samples in fasted subjects (-5 and 0 min) and at 15, 30, 45, 60, 90 and 120 min after the consumption of each test food. For each type of food, its glycaemic index (GI) was calculated geometrically by expressing the incremental area under the blood glucose curve as a percentage of each subject's average incremental area under the blood glucose curve for the standard food. The 10 foods exhibited a range of GI values from 37 to 92. The study indicated that rice noodles, long-grain rice, easy-cook long-grain rice and white basmati rice were low-GI foods, whilst all of the other foods were medium-GI and high-GI foods. The information presented in this paper may be useful in helping people select low-GI foods from the customary foods consumed by the British and Asian populations.
