What Low GI Really Means, and Why It Matters

Low GI matters more than most people realise. But how many of us actually understand why?

For decades, the whole conversation about sugar was about one thing: how much. Cut it down, count it, cut it out. But we were all asking the wrong question. It was never just how much sugar. It is which kind, and how quickly it reaches our blood stream.

That is what the glycaemic index measures. And once you understand it, you understand why Releeese exists.

The glycaemic index, or GI, is a simple scale from 0 to 100. It ranks foods containing carbohydrates by how quickly, and how high, they raise blood sugar. Some sugars are absorbed fast, producing a steep, rapid rise. Other sugars are absorbed slowly, producing a gentler, lower rise.

Conventional table sugar sits higher end of the scale, at around 65. Not all sugars behave the same, and that single fact turned out to be the key to everything we do.

For years, being “good” about sugar meant accepting one of two bad deals: give up the foods we love or swap them for artificial substitutes that never quite felt like the real thing. We refused both. That refusal is where Releeese began.

So here is what low GI genuinely gives you. The naturally derived sugars we use sit far lower on the scale than conventional sugar, and they produce a lower blood glucose rise after eating than conventional sugar does.* That is a real, recognised benefit, and it is exactly why low GI has become something so many people now look for.

It is also, in a sense, a return to how sweetness is meant to work. In nature, sweetness rarely arrives fast. It comes wrapped in fibre, in whole fruit, released gently. Refined sugar is the exception: stripped down and delivered quickly, faster than sweetness was ever meant to reach us. Choosing low GI is choosing sweetness closer to the way nature designed it.

But low GI is only half the story. The whole notion of “better for you” has almost always meant a compromise on taste. We refused that. Getting the science right was never going to be easy, but we did it. The real achievement was keeping everything we love about the taste while we changed the science inside. Same taste, different science.

So rather than strip the sugar out and reach for artificial substitutes, we chose a smarter path. Releeese is crafted with naturally derived sugars that look and taste exactly like the sugar you know, yet sit remarkably low on the glycaemic scale. The difference is not in the sweetness you taste. It is in how your body handles them.

• Tagatose (GI of 3): it passes largely unabsorbed through the small intestine, fermenting further along the digestive tract rather than entering the bloodstream as glucose.
• Galactose (GI of 20): it takes an entirely different metabolic route, the Leloir pathway, where the liver converts it step by step rather than releasing it straight into the bloodstream as glucose.

None of this was borrowed from a trend. It began with a discovery. Decades ago, the German molecular biologist Dr Johannes Coy identified the TKTL1 gene, a gene that plays a significant role in how cells metabolise glucose. His research uncovered something remarkable: certain naturally occurring sugars, found in plants, milk and fruits, behave in a completely different way to conventional sugar.

This is the science Releeese is built on. We are the first in the world to use this patented sugar mixture, Galactose and Tagatose, in a milk chocolate and in a 70% dark chocolate. This is not about less sugar. It is a different science, and a different way of making the foods we love. And it is ours.

Learn more about Dr Coy’s discovery and the research behind the TKTL1 gene and its relationship to sugar metabolism at intelligentsugar-expert-drcoy.info.

More and more of us are looking for “better for you” foods, but very few of us are willing to give up the taste to get there. That is the problem Releeese was made to solve. You should not have to choose between the food you love and the choices you feel good about.

So we stopped treating them as opposites. Real chocolate, made with functional, naturally derived, lower glycaemic sugars, and none of the usual compromise.

That is Intelligent Indulgence. Same taste, different science, no compromise.

*Authorised EU and UK health claim: these sugars produce a lower blood glucose rise compared to sugar-containing foods.