Carbohydrates
Carbohydrates have been the main macronutrient staple of our diet and government dietary recommendations around the world for decades. Carbohydrates are predominant in grains, sugar, starchy vegetables, and are known by many names. There are:
Monosaccharides with the mono meaning one molecule of carbohydrate and these include glucose, fructose and galactose
Disaccharides which are two carbohydrate molecules stuck together like sucrose which is table sugar and is a glucose and fructose molecule bonded together, and lactose which is a glucose and galactose molecule stuck together, and
Polysaccharides, starches and fibres, which come in many forms and are chains of monosaccharides (usually glucose) bonded together. How these bonds are constructed have a lot to do with how these polysaccharides behave in the body. In the case of what are often called "simple starches/carbs", the bonds are broken quickly and easily and you end up with a lot of glucose in your blood and quickly, like in the case of the starches in white potato. There are other starches which break down more slowly and less easily and increase glucose in our blood more slowly, often referred to as "complex carbs". Then there are some like in the case of fibre, which the human body doesn't absorb at all (I like to call them "non-absorbable carbs", as opposed to the "absorbable carbs" - those listed so far) and therefore don't put glucose into the blood, although our microbiome companions use them for their own purposes and for keeping our digestive tract working well.
Interestingly our bodies don't actually require us to eat carbohydrates because it can actually produce glucose itself from fats and proteins. The body makes about 120g of glucose every day whether or not you are eating carbohydrates. Unfortunately, through misleading, manipulated science and agriculture, many have been consuming carbohydrates far in excess of perhaps what our natural balance is. There is a considerable lack of evidence that carbohydrates should form the staple of our diets, and while I am not saying that we shouldn't eat them, I am saying that the balance of how much and what types we consume vs fats and proteins, and how much this varies from person to person, needs to be considered.
PHYSICAL EFFECTS
We now know that eating a diet high in sugars, so the monosaccharides like glucose and fructose, or other carbohydrate molecules that break down easily into glucose such as table sugar and "simple starches", are associated with a whole heap of diseases. Sugar promotes inflammation, Cardiovascular Disease, Diabetes, Cancer, Dementia, Stroke, Depression, Alzheimer's Disease, high blood pressure, high triglycerides, Liver Disease and Obesity. Sugars are also highly addictive -eight times more so than cocaine! Hunter gatherers ate 20 tsp of sugar per year. Now, the typical person eats more than that in a day.
We are engineered as humans to seek out sweet tasting foods because in nature they are almost always safe to eat. Prior to agriculture sweet foods were generally only available in the summer, and eating them would help us fatten up for the long winter ahead when there was less food around. This fattening up worked because when we eat these sugars, our blood sugar rises, which stimulates the release of insulin from the pancreas, which has the effect of taking these sugars in the blood and transporting them into the cells of the body for storage and works to keep these stored in the cells, giving us body fat. Belly fat particularly is a result of elevated levels of insulin and tends to melt away when insulin levels are reduced. Belly fat itself produces its own inflammatory factors, further increasing inflammation in our bodies.
There are measures which quantify how quickly a food increases your blood sugar i.e. blood glucose levels. Glycaemic Index is a measure of how quickly the type of carbohydrates in a given food increase your blood sugar levels. Glycaemic Load takes into account the typical portion eaten of a given food as to how it will affect blood sugar levels. It does this by multiplying the Glycaemic Index by the actual proportion of carbohydrate in the food. This provides us with a more accurate picture of the overall effect that the food product has on blood sugar levels. How a food is prepared and served can also affect glycaemic load. For instance, cooling potatoes and rice after cooking them actually turns some of their starch into resistant starch, which behaves like fibre in the body, so if you're going to eat potatoes or rice their glycaemic load with be lower if they are cold.
Sugar is what has driven the obesity epidemic and after it has made us fat, that sugar will also go to creating the bad types of blood cholesterol (small, dense Low-Density Lipoprotein (LDL)) and even glycating by sticking to proteins in your blood like collagen and elastin, and potentially to the walls of your arteries. Insulin is associated with weight gain, oxidation of LDL, decreasing good blood cholesterol (High-Density Lipoprotein), making blood sticky and more likely to clot, and mood disturbances - plus infertility, polycystic ovarian syndrome, unwanted hair growth and loss, and acne due to altered sex hormones.
Fructose is a complicated sugar. This is the predominant sugar in fruits which as a living edible plant should be good for us, but because fruits have selectively been bred to be sweeter and sweeter than how they were originally found in the wild, they often contain far more fructose than they used to (if you have a low carbohydrate tolerance or need to reduce carbs for a while, then you may want to stay away from the sweeter fruits). Where we really run into trouble with fructose is in processed foods like high-fructose corn syrup which have much higher concentrations than you will find in fruit. Agave syrup is really high in fructose too. Studies have shown that fructose causes fatty liver disease, diabetes and inflammation. The reason it has such a strong effect on the liver is it is the only place in the body where it can be processed.
In the Unites States 74% of all packaged foods contain glucose, fructose, and/or sucrose. Staying away from sweetened beverages is hugely beneficial, especially soft drinks. A prominent cardiologist I know thinks that if you could point the finger at a single thing that has been more responsible for all the heart attacks we see that anything else, it would be soft drinks. A study in the journal Circulation attributed 184,000 deaths around the world to each year to sugar-sweetened beverage consumption.
ENERGETIC EFFECTS
The sources of carbohydrates are many and extremely varied. It is the energetics of each individual source that need to be considered. Each of the grains will have different energetics from others, as do the higher carbohydrate/starchy vegetables and fruits.
Macrobiotics view wholegrains, particularly brown rice, as an energetically balanced food.
Sugar is expansive, extremely yin - therefore scattering/dispersing, cooling, weakening, and promotes focusing far into future and craving for extreme yang foods.
Eating lots of meats that come from animals who's primary diet is carbohydrates, such as chicken, can lead to carbohydrate/sugar cravings.
Sugar releases opiates which increase dopamine and these opiates also affected the part of the brain that responds to intimacy which may go some of the way to explaining why we go after sugar when what we are really craving is intimacy.
What to do?
The concept of "carbohydrate tolerance" has become popular recently whereby you identify what your personal carbohydrate tolerance is - how much of it you can consume in your diet before it starts having detrimental effects. I believe this level is different for everyone and for those that are typically overweight/obese, have type-II diabetes, prone to yeast or other infections (sugar feeds yeasts) and/or inflammatory conditions, their carbohydrate tolerance is probably lower than what they have been consuming and lower than what is currently recommended by many dietary guidelines. The latest scientific literature has been, and continues to be, flooded with studies that show the benefit of so-called low-carbohydrate diets. Typically they show that eating a low-carbohydrate, high fat diet resulted in desired weight loss, reduced risk of heart attack and stroke, and improved longevity. You start to see real benefits after about 10 days - diastolic blood pressure drops, small dense LDL drops, total triglycerides drop and your taste buds start adjusting and find foods with much lower sugar content now taste sweet.
We were told for a long time that the body needs carbohydrates because it uses glucose for energy, and this is certainly what I was taught as an Exercise Physiologist. However, it isn't the only thing that the body can use for energy. Ketones can also effectively be used for energy. The body typically has about 2000 calories stored as glycogen (glucose) and has least 40,000 calories stored as fat making it a virtually endless supply of energy. Fat gets mobilised as ketones and can directly be used for energy and are arguably cleaner burning than glucose. If you restrict your net/absorbable carbohydrate intake, which is the total amount of carbohydrates in the food you are eating, less the fibre, to less than approximately 50g per day (and don't eat anything which tastes sweet as this alone stimulates insulin release - even when there are no calories present - like in the case of artificial sweeteners), your body will flip over to using ketones for energy instead of glucose - known as ketosis. Some people like to stay in ketosis for months on end, but I personally, and many functional medicine practitioners, don't necessarily recommend this. What seems to be the most popular method at the moment is to get your body into ketosis for 2-4 weeks, so it can remember how to use ketones i.e. fat for fuel, and then you start re-introducing more carbs, in the healthy complex forms like more sweet vegetables. The goal is your body becoming metabolically flexible, where it has the ability to switch between using fat and glucose for fuel, even doing this throughout the day. If you are trying to do this for weight loss, then after those initial 2-4 weeks of having less than 50g net carbs per day, you will almost certainly have lost some weight, and then you slowly start increasing your carbs till you find where your weight stabilises and this is your carbohydrate tolerance, if you want to continue to lose weight, then you would stay below this level till you get to your healthy weight and then stabilise. Ketogenic diets have been used to treat epilepsy for a long time. Now there is evidence showing they are effective in reversing Type-II Diabetes, Obesity, Alzheimer’s Disease, Autism, and Cancers and have other benefits such as increasing stem cell production, reducing belly fat, increasing hippocampus (important in memory) size, improving immune function, improving mitochondrial function, improving cognitive function, reducing inflammation, reducing oxidative stress, and increasing life expectancy by up to 30%. A typical ketogenic diet looks something like getting 70% of your calories from fat, 20% from protein, and 10% carbs. When in ketosis people typically report no longer getting cravings or being hungry all the time, and that have improved mental clarity.
Do you have any of the symptoms of excessive sugar/carbohydrate consumption? e.g. being overweight, brain fog, inflamed joints.
What percentage of your food and beverages come from processed sources?
Have you tried ketogenic or low carbohydrate diets before? If so, how did you feel?
What do you think your carbohydrate tolerance is? Why?
Related Articles:
Good Sources for Further Learning:
Mark Sisson - marksdailyapple.com
Mark Hyman - drhyman.com
Much Love,
Sophia Englezos