Complex Made Simple
These days, it’s much easier to avoid carbohydrates in your diet than it is to avoid actually HEARING about low-carb diets. Last week I watched a sitcom that used a low-carb diet as a plot device! Arggh! Sometimes I want to shout, “Enough already with the low carbs!”
That said Today I’m going to take a look at carbohydrates. And before you shout, “Jenny! Enough already with the low carbs!” let me just say that the information I have for you today isn’t about low-carb diets, per se; it’s about recognizing the difference between good carbs and bad carbs. Because there are certain carbohydrates that are useful in our diets, and then there are the carbs we should avoid at all costs.
Carbohydrates 101
The topic of carbohydrate types was prompted by an e-mail from an HSI member named John who wrote, “You should be educating the people about the difference between refined carbohydrates and complex carbohydrates. Refined carbohydrates are bad and complex carbohydrates are good.”
John is on the right track here, but we need to tweak the terminology a little bit. I asked our nutrition specialist, HSI Panelist Allan Spreen, M.D., to elaborate on John’s e- mail, and he started out by noting that carbohydrate foods are basically broken down into two groups: “simple” and “complex” carbohydrates. And both of these groups can be further broken down into “refined” and “unrefined.”
Nutrient needs
Let’s start with the “refined simple” carbohydrates – what Dr. Spreen calls “the sweet stuff” – which includes “all the sugars of one form or another.” And as he points out, the key word is “refined” because it represents the removal of nutrients required for the metabolism of the contained sugar. Without those nutrients, Dr. Spreen says, “Your body must draw from body stores of nutrients to metabolize the sugar. And draw it will. Once those stores are overtaxed disease sets in, or at least undesirable symptoms that hit wherever your body’s weakest link happens to be. This removal of nutrients is the key to our demise, in my opinion.
“But, it gets worse. Not only does the refining process remove nutrients, but it also concentrates the sugar within the simple carb food. This causes overstress on the pancreas, the organ responsible for removing sugar (glucose) from the bloodstream and shoving it into muscle cells to be burned as fuel. This overstress manifests as insulin over- secretion, causing (for a while, anyway, until it gives up) low blood sugar swings with a subsequent vicious cycle of blood sugar over-shooting and under-shooting as the body tries to auto-regulate.
“Ah, but it gets even worse. Another problem in most refining processes of simple carbs is the fact that nearly all fiber is removed. The fiber slows the release of the sugar into the system, easing the signal to the pancreas to release too much insulin too fast.”
And it’s the fiber in fruits – which are unrefined simple carbohydrates – that helps make the sugar in fruit so much healthier than the sugar in refined carbs. That’s why, as Dr. Spreen points out, the same healthy benefits are not found in fruit juice, “which is concentrated almost universally, and processed in other ways. It’s better to eat your fruit, with clean edible skins. That way you’ve lowered the amount of sugar taken in, along with the fact that the natural fiber is still on board and the sugars are not as concentrated as they would be otherwise.”
The good and the bad
As John stated in his e-mail, “complex carbohydrates are good.” And generally speaking, there is some truth in that. But Dr. Spreen points out that, ‘going complex’ may not be all it’s cracked up to be.
“The basic complex carbs are the edible starches. That’s flour, bread, cereals, grains and the like, along with most vegetables. Most of this group makes up the huge ‘base’ of the so-called Food Pyramid; that moronic image from government bureaucrats, which is in large part responsible for the unimaginable amount of obesity rampant in this country.
“Starches are simple carb molecules (sugars) that are linked together by special bonds before they can be used by the body as sugar. That can be a good thing, since the enzyme process needed for that breakdown takes time to work, and that delay slows the release of the sugars into our system (the same problem caused by refined simple carbs).
“Unfortunately, the same principles apply in the case of refined complex carbs as to the simple ones: the sugars can be concentrated; they can have the necessary nutrients as well as the fiber removed.
“As soon as a starch hits enzymes in your mouth, the starches begin the digestion process, and breaks down to (you guessed it) sugar. If those starches start without the nutrients and especially the fiber they originally contained, they are not only inferior foods, but they’re also inferior foods with automatically concentrated starches, because the fiber’s gone. As soon as the starch breaks down to sugar, you’re back to a refined simple carb.”
Hot potato
Nearly all our starches today are refined. And according to Dr. Spreen, it’s extremely difficult (if not impossible) to find 100% unrefined pastas, breads or cereals. Yet we’ve historically been told that pasta and bagels are excellent “diet foods”!
And then there’s the baked potato. Writing about this third food item thrown into the daily “diet” lunch, Dr. Spreen says, “The baked potato is as close to a pure, refined starch as you can get without actually refining it. I’d tell patients, if they felt obliged to eat a baked potato, to shell out most of it, add some butter, and eat the remainder, including the skin. That’s not only where the fiber is, but also where much of the nutrition is, too.
“So be careful when you dig into a load of pasta or bagels. In terms of trying to lose weight, you’re literally playing with a ‘hot potato.'”
To Your Good Health,
Jenny Thompson
Health Sciences Institute
