The results have clearly shown how wholeness of foods, in the sense of structural intactness, can influence the temporal charac- teristics of the postprandial nutrient loading imposed by a food within the gut lumen during digestion. In the present paper the particular loading considered was the loading of glycemic carbohy- drate, expressed as glycaemic impact. Since the brush border has an enormous capacity to transport products of available carbohy- drate digestion into the portal blood, glycaemic impact is closely
related to the glycaemic response that it induces. The relationship between in vitro carbohydrate digestion and the glycaemic effects of foods measured in clinical trials is well known (Woolnough et al., 2008), and has been confirmed for the data in the present study through its relationship to the adjusted glycaemic load val- ues of the foods (Monro & Mishra, 2010), based on their published glycaemic index values (Henry et al., 2007, 2005).
The foods examined were able to be placed into three main groups, although within the groups there was still variation, as the standard deviations in Fig. 2 indicate: