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Added 3 months ago
Carbs are not the Enemy!
The term 'common sense' has to be one of the biggest oxymorons these days. I saw a doctor on a morning show a while ago talking about the latest medical research on health and fitness. Apparently we should exercise as often and as long as we can, not just the 20 minutes, 3 times a week they've been telling us. You think?! And some types of fats are actually good for you. Really? Latest research you say. And then came the dinger - 'Carbs are bad.' "Carbs are bad?' Kylie asked. "Yes, carbs are bad.'
Statements like this on morning shows (not to mention the infomercials for rubbish fitness equipment!) are one of the reasons my wife doesn't like me watching them. They get me so worked up! I can understand that a person who receives most of their nutritional information from Lindsay Lohan or Victoria Beckham's latest crash diet could think something as blatantly stupid as this, but a Doctor stating the latest research? On a morning show which (rightly or wrongly) many viewers consider a legitimate news source? It makes my blood boil. Let’s just think about it for a moment. Rice, corn and wheat are the three main food sources for the human species. They are all carbohydrate based foods. The main energy source your body uses is glucose - blood sugar. Our bodies run on carbohydrates. What needs to be discussed is the type and amount of carbs we should be consuming, not whether or not we should be eating them at all.
Portion Control
Let’s start with amount. If you eat too many calories you’ll put on weight, regardless of where those calories come from. Protein and carbohydrate both have about 4 calories per gram. So for the same amount of food, you get about the same amount of calories. The big problem is that carbs are much easier to eat. Most people wouldn’t generally sit down to a big bowl full of steak on a regular basis! But a large serving of pasta isn’t out of the question. Carbohydrates are also generally pretty cheap compared to protein sources. A good way to keep control of portion size is to divide your plate into quarters. One quarter protein, one quarter carbs, and the other half veges or salad. Most people do not need to cut carbs out, just don’t eat so many of them!
Be Choosey!
Now we’ll talk about type. This is where it starts to get a little tricky. The first thing we have to discus is the Glycemic Index, or GI. Basically this is a ranking of the way different carbohydrates affect your blood sugar levels. When you eat carbs they are broken down into glucose, the workable sugar that our bodies use. When the glucose enters the bloodstream it is shuttled to the cells by a hormone produced by the pancreas called insulin to be converted to energy. High GI foods are broken down into glucose quickly allowing a great surge in blood sugar levels. The problem with this is that the body does not like too much sugar in the blood at one time. The pancreas responds by producing high levels of insulin, and too much sugar is removed from the blood. This can leave us feeling lethargic, and if the cells that are to burn up the sugar have already been filled, the sugar will be stored as body fat. And when your blood sugar is low, you feel like eating something to increase it again – usually something sugary. Low GI foods break down slowly and drip feed glucose into your bloodstream. This produces a more regulated insulin response, allowing the body to burn off the energy as it is needed, keeping your energy at a more sustained level.
Generally, the more processed a food is, the higher the GI. You should be trying to eat foods that are closest to the way nature made them before man started tinkering! Take rice for example. White rice has a higher GI than brown rice. When the husk is removed from brown rice you lose lots of nutrients, including fat and fibre. These two nutrients digest much slower than carbs, so they lower the GI of the rice. Not all unprocessed food has a low GI however – most varieties of white potatoes for example are high – but it is a good starting point to healthier eating. (Plus many of the other preservatives and additives in processed food are toxic – but that’s another article!) We must also consider the GI of the entire meal, not just the components of it. As in the brown rice example, fat and fibre lower the GI, as they would to the entire meal. Protein can also be added to that list. We need to also think about the amount of carbs in a serving of high GI food. Pumpkin is a good example. It has a moderate to high GI, but the carbohydrate percentage is very low (about 5%). So even though the carbs in it would reach your blood stream quickly, you would have to eat a truckload to create a massive sugar spike. Pumpkin is a great source of fibre, vitamins A and C, and tastes delicious! So you don’t have to take it off the menu. Visit www.glycemicindex.com to find out lots of great information about your regular foods.
Keep It Whole
Another more pressing problem is the processed carbohydrates I mentioned above. For our bodies to properly breakdown and utilise the foods we eat, we need many different nutrients. When we eat a plant or an animal that hasn’t been processed and refined too much, it comes with all sorts of goodies that help us turn it into usable energy. Most of us think of sweet potato as carbs or fish as protein, but whole foods also contain vitamins and minerals and enzymes and fats and a whole host of bits and pieces that work together in our bodies to properly process it. When we start to remove many of the food’s components, we start to cause problems with how our bodies react to it. Fibre, for instance, helps us feel full after a meal. Process it out of the food, and we can consume the same amount of calories but feel hungry again sooner than necessary. Then there is the fact that many processed ‘foods’ are actually just downright toxic. They have been sucked dry of almost all of the goodness and filled with additives and preservatives to maintain the necessary colour, texture and flavour. This is where we get the term ‘empty calories’. All the energy is still there, just none of the nutrition. Processed foods like these have also created a new health problem that has been dubbed malnutritive obesity – or malnubesity. This basically means people are becoming overweight, yet suffering from malnutrition, something that has never really happened to our species before. Stay away from soft drinks, biscuits, confectionary and the like. (Sports drinks like Gatorade are also high in refined sugar; however they can be used when competing at high levels of exercise, especially if outdoors in the sun.)
Carbs Are Our Friend!
There are 6 nutrients humans need to consume in order to stay happy and healthy. Protein, fat, vitamins, minerals, water and carbohydrate! This is not a fad or an old wives tale or some conspiracy to make us all overweight. This is a fact. We’ve been eating carbs for many generations but we’ve only started becoming increasingly overweight very recently. While consuming the wrong types and over eating carbs are definitely a contributing factor to an unhealthy lifestyle, to lay blame completely on our old friend is just blatantly wrong. So moderate, choose wisely and don’t be afraid to have a small bowl of wholemeal pasta with your baked chicken breast and steamed veges!
Posted by Oxygen Personal Fitness at 12:48 pm 0 Comments
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