ALL CARBS ARE NOT CREATED EQUAL
by Joshua Rosenthal • New York City

In today’s nutrition world, high protein diets are fashionable and carbohydrate has become a dirty word, associated in many people’s minds with the cause of obesity. This is absurd.

Carbohydrates provide much of the energy needed for normal body functions—such as heartbeat, breathing and digestion—and for exercise. Carbohydrates are in everything from sugar to candy bars to grains and even vegetables. The problem is that people are not eating the types of carbohydrates nature intended. They’re eating carbohydrate-rich foods that have been deformed, denatured and devalued.
All carbohydrates are made up of sugars. When sugar is digested it enters the bloodstream and becomes glucose. Glucose is fuel for all of the body’s cells. Carbo-hydrates are considered simple or complex based upon their chemical structure. How fast the sugars enter the bloodstream and are converted into glucose depends on the type of carbohydrate. Complex carbohydrates are digested slowly. Simple
carbohydrates are digested quickly.

Carbohydrates that appear in nature, as part of whole foods like vegetables and whole grains, are complex. Complex carbohydrates are composed of long chains of sugars. These long chains are bound up within the food’s fiber. The sugars inside must be broken free from their chains and fiber to be released into the bloodstream. This is a relatively slow and methodical process. The sugars are absorbed into the bloodstream at a steady rate over the course of many hours, which is why complex carbohydrates provide long-lasting energy.

A very different process occurs with simple carbohydrates, which are in most modern processed foods. Other natural foods, like fruit, contain naturally occurring simple sugars, but because fruit is high in fiber, this helps slow down the digestion and limits the amount of sugar that floods into the cells. Processing carbohydrates strips them of all the bran, fiber and nutrients. Processed foods contain small molecules of sugar, unlike the long chains of sugar in complex carbohydrates, which enter the bloodstream momentarily after they are ingested. This causes a rapid rise in the glucose levels in the body—a sugar rush. The rush is shortly followed by a crash. The body sees the high level of sugar as an emergency state and works hard to burn it up as quickly as possible. Then blood sugar drops.

If you eat a whole grain—a complex carbohydrate—for breakfast, you will likely have energy throughout the morning, and then experience a dip around noon, just in time for lunch. If you eat an Oreo cookie, a candy bar or white bread, the bloodstream is suddenly flooded with sugars. You get a sugar rush as your blood sugar levels rapidly rise, but shortly afterward your blood sugar drops and you are hungry again. Your body naturally wants to maintain balanced blood sugar, so it is telling you to eat something to bring your blood sugar back up. Most people then go for more sugar and this process, of sugar ups and downs, goes on all day long. The most common time this happens is around 3:00 pm—a few hours after lunch. This is the time that most people crave sugar or caffeine to get through the rest of the day.

Simple sugars can lead to weight gain because our cells do not require large amounts of glucose at one time, and the extra sugar is often stored as fat. The anti-carb fad right now should really be anti-simple-carbs. If you want to lose weight fast, you don’t have to go on a high protein diet. Just switch from simple to complex carbohydrates and eat lots of vegetables. You’ll lose weight and improve your health. Plant foods are so low in calories that they force the body to burn its own fat. Nobody gets fat on a diet that’s made up largely of green vegetables, sweet vegetables, whole grains and some low fat animal products. But throw in a bunch of cookies, white bread, French fries and a few quarter-pounders, and you’ve got yourself a weight problem.

Excerpted from Integrative Nutrition: The Future of Nutrition by Joshua Rosenthal. Integrative Nutrition Publishing, $18.00. www.integrativenutrition.com. Joshua Rosenthal is founder, director and primary teacher of the Institute for Integrative Nutrition in NYC. A therapist with an MS in Education, Joshua has over 25 years experience in the fields of whole foods, personal coaching, and nutritional counseling.