Carbs ?
 

Hello I have recently decided to start going to fitness and going on a diet. But I have a question.

What are the different carb people keep talking about. Why are some good and others bad for you?

There are simple carbohydrates (sugars) and complex carbohydrates (starches). Sugary foods should usually be avoided because they'll raise your blood sugar (the exception is fruit, which is good for you). Complex carbohydrates are digested more slowly.

Some carbs, like grains, can be either refined (e.g. white rice) or unrefined (e.g. brown rice). When a grain is refined, part of it is removed, and fiber and other nutrients are lost. Whenever you eat grains, you should always eat whole grains. For example, when you buy bread, it should say "whole wheat" in the ingredients. If it says something like "wheat flour" or "enriched flour" then avoid it because that means it's refined.

Other foods with good carbs are starchy vegetables (e.g. sweet potato) and beans.

As an HFLC dieter, I believe they are all "bad" for you. Carbs are sugar, no matter how slowly or quickly they are digested. The human body can only take a small amount of sugar in the blood stream. The sugar spike that is caused by eating sugar is your body's endocrine system trying to stop a "crisis" of sugar in the blood which could easily give you diabetes. After years of eating sugar, you eventually get diabetes. In the meantime, the only place that the endocrine system (using a hormone called insulin) can store the extra sugar is in the fat cells. About 2000 grams can be packed in the liver and other areas in the body. This is how people get non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. Once those places are filled, the fat cells are used to store the additional sugar. Insulin puts the sugar in the cells, but it often never gets out because many people eat sugar all day, 3 to 6 meals and snacks. The only real way to stop the storage of fat is to keep your insulin levels low.

I've never heard of whole grains, beans, or sweet potatoes causing diabetes (assuming you eat a normal amount of them, combined with a healthy diet), but I might be mistaken. Have any studies shown that they cause diabetes?

This is fine that you have never heard of this. There is a whole side of nutrition science that many people do not hear about, because they pick diets that they want to eat, rather than ones that are based on science.

Diabetes has been totally reversed by just stopping eating carbs and sugars. That is it. No pills needed.

Carbs (whole grains, beans, sweet potatos) spike insulin levels, and insulin stores fat. This is in any and every health science textbook.

If a person is obese already, then this spiking and storing has been going on for a ling time already, so the best way to stop the storing, and move on to using the fat is to stop eating carbs and sugar. (Sugar and carbs are the same thing). What happens when you stop eating carbs and sugars? Insulin is reduced, often radically, and the fat stored in your cells is released from where they are stored, and used as food. People do not eat food, they eat stored body fat. Food is taken apart in the stomach and intestines and turned into fuel. No one actually eats what they put in their mouth. You lose weight when you use the body fat that the insulin has stored in your fat cells. That is caused by not eating carbs.

Often, if you are young and not obese already, you have simply not gotten to the point where this matters (yet).

Sugar (carbs) is used as fuel by the body, but often only when something like rice is all the people have to eat, and they are perhaps always on the verge of starvation, and maybe constantly thin.

Here is a list of science papers which were collected on this site. Read Good Calories bad Calories by Gary Taub, and other books by Sally Fallon, The Art and Science of Low Carb by Volek, and Phinney, and many more.

https://www.dietdoctor.com/low-carb/science

I understand that sugar (carbs) are yummy, but if you are looking at losing your feet (which happened to my mother and brother because Diabetes runs in the family) you would see it for what it is (an unnessesary part of the diet), and that goes for carbs. Carbohydrates are not "Essential" in the human diet. Meaning, there is no amount, under which, you would get illnesses of deficiency. Vitamins and minerals are a different thing. There are several which are essential, and people in the past got those from pure drinking water, and also eating the guts of small animals who ate plants. (Harley Mowat's research)


By the way, speed of digestion does not matter. If you read above, you would see that we eat our own body fat. We do not eat food. The food is a raw material for the fat that is stored. So you actually eat the fat that was stored many days ago, so digestion rate is besides the point. A person who is 1 pound overweight has 3,500 calories (about 1.5 days worth of energy). A person who is 100 pounds over weight has 350,000 calories of energy that can be used. That person can (under doctors care) go for many months (about 175 days) not eating anything.

For me, it is so hard to give up on Carbs. I just dont manage to control my cravings.

I would take anything you read about diet with a huge grain of salt, and two grains of salt for the opinions that we 3FCers post here! It is difficult to tease out what diets work. An enormous amount of the research is based on self-reporting and that has been demonstrated to be extremely inaccurate. Even the best of intentions meet up with the innate tendency to skew our accounting to look better, esp. when it is reported to someone else, even anonymously. Very little is understood about genetic make up and how it influences weight, metabolism, etc.

It's all work in progress. I am automatically skeptical of anyone who claims to have a definitive answer. The experts doing credible, peer reviewed research sure aren't making those claims. For now, those of us who are working on weight loss and maintenance are experiments, n=1. Sharing what works and deosn't work is to the good, and the support is wonderful too. "Don't eat this, do eat that" triggers my ignore reflex :lol:

I think if your main concern is the number on the scale or the size of your clothes, any diet will work if you stick to it.

I didn't think carbs mattered until I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. My diabetes came from eating excessive carbs and too little exercise. You don't have to read a book or posts on a forum to find out the truth for yourself. Just buy an inexpensive blood glucose meter at Walmart and test for yourself. Check your blood sugar reading 2 hours after a high carb meal, then again 2 hours after a low carb me, and see the difference. Maybe what you see will convince you to eat fewer starchy carbs.

I agree with Giselley. Some studies even shows that sugar gets more addictive than heroin or cocaine. They have made a test on rats giving them drugs until they get addicted. Then they were giving them the choice between heroin, cocaine and sugar. All the rats preferred sugar! That's crazy!
That's also the reason why most of the food manufacturer are adding some much sugar to their products. To make us addicted! (and it works)