The other mornings I ate two eggs with a chicken sausage, or cottage cheese with peanut butter or tofu, fruit and nuts. Instead of putting beans on my dinner plate every night I did it two nights a week and added more non-starchy vegetables like broccoli and cauliflower the other nights. I changed my lunch from a salad with falafel and hummus, mostly carbs, to a salad of steamed vegetables, lettuce, tomatoes, grilled chicken, a crumble of feta cheese and two healthy slices of avocado with flax oil, herbs, and red wine vinegar.
I saute in coconut oil now and snack during the day on a handful of nuts, and at night on a small bowl of sunflower seeds and a piece or two of premium quality dark chocolate. I know it's hard to believe carbs can make us fatter than fat.
It also defies the seemingly-healthy labeling on food products. But as you're reaching for that "no-fat" yogurt, "low-fat" bread, "fat-free" cookie package, look around you. Are most people fat or slim? When foods have fat removed, they usually have more sugar added to replace the flavor fat supplies. If you accept that an over abundance of carbs turns into fat in your body, you're not doing yourself any favor to reach for higher-carb, fat-free foods.
The food changes I've made over the past six months, for me, were not gigantic. I already ate a low-carb diet. But eating fewer carbs, which spontaneously led to consuming less calories, along with more protein and healthy fat, the weight began to slide off me.
It has also stayed off me because this is how I eat now. And, I'm not hungry. As for the initial three months I went without exercising, I saw while my daily one hour power-walk is a great way to maintain my weight and my health, it didn't really contribute to weight loss.
I'm not advocating a ban on carbs as a quick weight loss scheme. I don't believe in quick weight loss schemes or diets. But I am convinced, as a nation, we eat too many carbs, especially refined carbs, more unhealthy fats than healthy fats, and that food marketers are selling us a bill of goods making us think fat is bad while hooking us on poor-quality carbs. For me, the proof is hanging all around me in the clothes in my closet that are a size or two too big.
For more by Riva Greenberg, click here. For more on personal health, click here. Riva speaks to patients and health care providers about flourishing with diabetes. Visit her website DiabetesStories. Refined table sugar sucrose has a GI of 65, a GL of In other words, a GI or GL of 65 is sufficient to generate the cascade of undesirable blood effects.
GL is 72, also higher. The blood sugar-raising, appetite-increasing, and cholesterol-distorting effects are, in the absence of added sugar, due to the wheat, cornstarch, or rice starch alone. So not only are Americans getting a lot of sugar from all the high fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners added to our diet, but we are also getting it from eating too much cereal, pasta, bread and other grain-based carbohydrates.
Your email address will not be published. This is a well-written article and I agree with much of what you say. However it is an over-simplification of how the body works to say that all carbohydrates are dealt with in your body exactly the same way.
That would be true if we ate only one molecule at a time, but we are human and do not eat like that. The context of what we eat and how we eat it makes a huge difference in how our bodies deal with exactly the same foods. For more on this see my guest post at MizFit When is a calorie not a calorie. You may also be interested in a new study that came out about how low-carb diets increase atherosclerosis despite lowering weight and no changes in cholesterol.
But it makes me nervous when facts are oversimplified as broad generalizations. Thanks for your comment Darya. The large amount of pasta, bread, cereal and rice we eat is only slightly better than all the added sugar in our diet, and yet most people think these foods are healthy and important. One should always eat a lot of vegetables and fruits, which not only provide carbohydrate energy, but also fiber, vitamins and minerals in quantities far greater than that available in grains.
And if one eats grains, it is important to get them whole and prepare them properly by soaking and sprouting, fermenting, etc. Help me understand this a little better — since all carbohydrates are sugar and vice versa, does it make a difference to my body if I eat the bag of Skittles or the bowl of brown rice?
In other words, am I still able to absorb the nutrients from the rice even though my body processes it the same as the candy? Also, what about fiber? Alan, In terms of energy, there is no difference between a bag of Skittles or a bowl of brown rice. Both end up as glycogen. However, nutritionally , they are very different. Skittles are, obviously, empty calories. But you would do better to eat a bowl of spinach than a bowl of brown rice.
Both contain carb energy, but the spinach is significantly more nutrient dense. A cup of rice has 3. See this link for a glimpse of this idea. For me, the jury is still out on fiber. Processed carbs from the grocery store like boxed cereal, pasta and bread are like Skittles without the artificial colors because they have been processed, which strips out any nutrition they might have had.
Sometimes these products are then fortified, but synthetic vitamins are very poorly absorbed and utilized by the body. Whole grain cereal crops are devoid of vitamin C and beta carotene except for yellow maize. They have poorly absorbable vitamin B6, and the phytate levels in grains impairs the absorption of most minerals, especially zinc and calcium. Another similar overfeeding study of 20 lean men also found no differences in the increase of total weight or fat mass gained after 21 days 6.
In a series of tightly controlled clinical studies, 15 subjects were fed a diet that shifted greatly in the amount of carbs or fat it contained over a week period. The calorie amount was for weight maintenance no gain or loss , and was kept the same regardless of the carbohydrate-to fat ratio 7 , 8.
Summary: Clinical studies show that eating carbs instead of fat makes no difference to body fat, as long as total calories remains the same. This holds true whether we overeat calories or not. Indigenous groups like the Tarahumara Indians, Kitavans and Massas all thrived on high carb diets for hundreds of years. Obesity was rare if not non-existent in all of these indigenous groups 9 , 10 , The same was observed for pre-industrialized Asian populations up until the 20th century, living on staple foods like rice, noodles, potatoes and fruit 13 , This was more than the US or UK, yet obesity rates were much lower If carbs themselves are fattening, these populations would not have had lean bodies and good health overall, regardless of how active they were.
However, by this time many developing nations and Indigenous groups — such as the Pima Indians — already had access to refined, affordable often subsidised Western food. Summary: There are numerous historical examples of populations that remained slim and healthy eating high carb diets. This indicates carbs themselves are not fattening. Indigenous groups only became obese after the introduction of Western junk food. In fact, many of them have the lowest rates of metabolic disease and obesity, and live longer than anyone else.
The regions where they live — known as Blue Zones — give us valuable insights into the lifetime effects of certain eating patterns. The Japanese island of Okinawa has the greatest proportion of centenarians people over years old in the world. Their diet has always been carb-dense; high in sweet potatoes, legumes and rice to a lesser extent.
Source: Okinawa Centenarian Study. Those from the Greek Island of Icaria also live long and healthy lives, despite a diet high in bread, potatoes and legumes. Almost 1 in 3 inhabitants lives to be 90 years old, which is 2. Source: The NY Times.
Granted their active lifestyles is a factor to their longevity, but a high carbohydrate diet does not cause them to get fat or sick. Studies show low carb diets can be an effective strategy for weight loss.
Nor is it because cutting carbs alone made you lose fat. Studies show a diet higher in protein keeps you feeling full and tends to decrease overall calorie intake, at least in the short term 18 , 19 ,
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