About Carbohydrates

When planning nutrition, there are seven components that the human body needs in order to maintain health. These include carbohydrates, proteins, fats/oils, minerals, vitamins, enzymes, and water. And today we will talk about carbohydrates.

Carbohydrates (or carbs for short) are getting a lot of bad press these days, especially since the popularization of the Atkins Diet and other similar diets. Simply put though, your body NEEDS carbs in order to function.

Something to keep in mind is that there are two kinds of carbohydrates. The first is simple sugars. These are quickly absorbed into the bloodstream because they are in a chemical form that the body can readily use. Typically you will feel a burst of energy when consuming simple sugars, but many people will also feel a "crash" soon afterwards because just as the simple sugars are easy to assimilate, they are quickly used up and then nothing remains to continue to nourish the body. There is too much difference between the available energy when the sugars are entering the bloodstream and the period soon after when they are gone. This can cause headaches, tiredness and fatigue, irritability, and other results that you may recognize, while other problems are building inside your body that you don't feel.

In order to process sugar, the body needs insulin. When taking in simple sugars, the body demands insulin (which is made by the pancreas) quickly, because the sugar is ready to use NOW. If you continually eat simple sugars, the pancreas can become stressed with all the stop-start demands for quick insulin production. This is one of the dietary factors that can lead to diabetes, in which the pancreas is no longer able to produce sufficient insulin to process sugars.

Another problem is that insulin, which has come to be known as the "fat storage hormone," basically helps to instruct your body that the sugar being processed needs to be stored for future energy, and over time, will be much more likely to lead to obesity than if the same calories had been consumed in another form.

The second type of carbs are complex carbohydrates. These are the ones found in whole grains, vegetables, etc. The advantage with complex carbohydrates is that their complex structure means that it takes the body longer to process them to make them available for energy, so the need for insulin to process these sugars is a slow, steady process that doesn't place the demands on the pancreas for immediate insulin that simple sugars do. Thus the pancreas is not stressed, the insulin doesn't tell the body that the sugars are best converted to fat, and the body receives a slow, consistent dose of energy over time, avoiding those "crash" headaches, fatigue, etc.

The intake of simple sugars should be limited. Instead, you should seek out complex carbs for as much of your energy calories as possible.