Fifty years ago the Dr Atkins's low carbohydrate
diet hit the mainstream and suddenly hundreds and thousands of people
who have had a long history of unsuccessful dieting shed stones. Its
effect on the dieting industry was akin (every pun intended) to the
effect of the tsunami on Banda Aceh, it led to total confusion!
That idea has spawned two generation of people who have the idea
at the back of their mind that carbohydrates are bad for you, yet
how many people actually know what a carbohydrate is. In reality,
the water is a lot muddier than it was thought to be fifty years ago
when Dr Atkins' refined his diet.
Some carbohydrates when eaten to excess promote obesity, heart disease
and diabetes; these carbohydrates are white sugar, white flour, white
pasta, cakes, pastries, and biscuits. However not all carbohydrates
are tarred with the same brush.
Carbohydrates provide energy for physical activity and they are necessary
for correct organ function. The best sources of carbohydrates are
fruits, vegetables, and whole grains; these deliver fibre, minerals
and vitamins, as well as crucial phytonutrients. This is where the
Atkins's diet as well as other low carbohydrate diets differs from
medical opinion. In general, we should be eating about eight portions
of fruit and vegetables a day minimum, but the low carb diets severely
restrict the intake of fruit and vegetables. As they do not count
calories only carbohydrates you can have as much full fat cream as
you desire but the use of milk is banned, as milk contains carbs not
present in cream.
Carbohydrates come in a variety of forms; the most abundant are sugars,
starches and fibre. The basis of the carbohydrate is the sugar molecule,
which is broken down into carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. The starches
and fibres are more complex chains of sugar, and as such, carbohydrates
are classified as simple and complex according to their molecular
structure.
Simple carbohydrates are fructose found in sugar, dextrose and sucrose,
corn and grape sugars, and sucrose, which is the chemical name for
granulated white sugar. The complex carbohydrates are composed of
three or more linked sugars. Simplistically simple sugars were declared
bad and complex carbohydrates good; however, that does not clarify
the issues in a meaningful way.
The digestive system does not differentiate in the way it handles
carbohydrates, for them to be used as an energy source they have to
be absorbed by the bloodstream, and the only way that that is possible
is if they are broken down into single sugar molecules. Glucose is
another word for the blood sugar and it has to be transported as a
single sugar unit or it is too big for the blood to transport it.
The exception here is fibre the body cannot break down fibre so it
passes through the digestive system largely untouched.
Foods, which have a high Glycemic index, release their glucose levels
into the blood very rapidly, in effect they cause the glucose levels
to spike erratically. This means that insulin production is affected.
White bread and baked potato are examples of high Glycemic foods.
Conversely low Glycemic foods such as brown rice release their sugars
in a stable manner and the spikes and the affect on insulin are avoided.
As a general rule the more processed a food is the more likely it
is to have a higher index, as processed food are stripped out of the
outer bran which was rich in fibre and the processed part which remains
is mainly the starchy inner germ.
The Glycemic index was not discovered until the nineteen nineties,
it was though in Doctor Atkins' day that all carbohydrates were the
same, and the body treated them all the same. In today's world with
the knowledge that we now possess, saying all carbohydrates are bas
is akin to insisting the earth is flat. The new mantra concerning
carbohydrates is that the foods with a low Glycemic index protect
the body against diabetes because they keep blood sugar stable.
