The Carbohydrate Trend

As companies began refining healthy foods, making them sweeter and increasing shelf life, sometimes to months and years, the nutritional quality of these foods diminished significantly. This is true of carbohydrate foods more than any other. This includes the mass production of sugar that has grown dramatically as its use in many foods continues to increase. The result is that over the past few generations most people consume too much carbohydrate.

Today, one obvious result is that over fat people now make up the majority! One reason is the fact that a significant portion of carbohydrate foods turns to fat in the body.

The trend in carbohydrate overconsumption continues today, propelled by companies selling refined carbohydrates and sugar.

They’ve been so successful that the newest epidemic includes obese babies. This is due to the promotion of highly refined baby cereals, which are actually worse for babies than pure sugar.

For many generations, the common recommendations have been to eat a large amount of carbohydrates. And, if you’ve followed the USDA food pyramids through the years most of your diet is carbohydrate, and you’ve gotten fat. The problem goes beyond being fat —highly refined carbohydrate diets are unhealthy on all levels, significantly reducing human performance. Today, the term “carbohydrate” is almost always synonymous with “refined carbohydrate.”

One reason for this imbalance is that the human body has not adapted to processing this amount of carbohydrates, especially in refined forms. For 99.6 percent of our existence on earth, humans con- sumed diets that were relatively low in almost all carbohydrates but higher in fat, protein and vegetables. During most of evolutionary history, humans lived near the sea and consumed significant amounts of fish, seafood, and other land-animal proteins. More importantly, significant amounts of plant foods were also consumed. These included vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds, which help protect against the potential effects of high intakes of saturated fat. In addition, our ancestors were very active physically. Only in the last 5,000 years has this changed. The Agricultural Revolution brought a dramatic increase in carbohydrate foods, and the Industrial Revolution brought highly refined carbohydrates to the table. The intake of carbohydrates by humans has never been so dramatically high as it has been in just the last 100 years. This relatively short period of significant dietary change has contributed to many problems leading to heart disease, cancer, obesity and other diseases.

For most people, eating such a high-carbohydrate diet can reduce fat-burning and energy production, increase body-fat storage, significantly reduce overall health, and greatly diminish human performance.

Carbohydrates and Insulin

Common foods including breads and other items made with flour such as rolls, muffins, pancakes, waffles, cereals and pasta are among the highest in carbohydrates. Also included in this category are all sweets, including the hidden sugars found in many foods. One of the main problems associated with eating carbohydrates has to do with insulin.

Insulin is a hormone made by the pancreas. When you eat carbo- hydrate foods, they are digested and the carbohydrate is absorbed into the blood as glucose (blood sugar). This stimulates the release of insulin, which has many different jobs. Three key actions of insulin on blood sugar include the following:

containing it, and liver glycogen is used mostly to maintain blood-sugar levels between meals and during nighttime sleep.)

•About 40 percent of the carbohydrate you eat is converted to fat and stored.

•About 50 percent of the carbohydrate you eat is quickly used for energy in the body’s cells. (Earlier we talked about getting energy from both sugar and fat — this is the part that comes from sugar.)

• About 10 percent of the carbohydrate you eat is converted to and stored as glycogen, a reserved form of sugar.

When blood sugar is low, glycogen stored in the muscles and liver is converted back to glucose and used for energy. (Muscle glycogen is used for energy by the muscles