Diet: Schizophrenic Carbohydrates

Back in the day, all dieters worried about was how many calories they consumed each day. If you ate too many, you would gain weight; if you ate less, you would lose weight; and when you achieved a stable weight, you were taking in the same number of calories as you were burning. Ah, those were the days!

Then came the Fat Is Satan days, which ruled for quite some time during my young adulthood. Any fat would make you fat—and all fat was bad fat because we didn’t know about different types of fat back then—so you wanted to get rid of any and all fat, period. “Fat-Free” became the magic words to indicate any foods were amazingly healthy. They weren’t.

After fat had been purged, some decided that wasn’t the path to losing weight; it was those horrible carbohydrates that were ruining our waistlines. Don’t worry about fat so long as you’re ridding yourself of rice and pasta. Ham for breakfast, hamburgers for lunch, and spare ribs for dinner with a little bacon for dessert. As long as you ditched the carbs, you could eat as much meat as you wanted as often as you wished. You couldn’t.

And there have been many other “revolutions” along the way. Oat bran, grapefruit, paleo, fasts, and cleanses are just a smattering of what’s been or is out there. And all this attention to diet is a reasonable reaction to the reality that what we eat is extremely important to helping us to maintain our fitness, to feel better. The irony, of course, is that eating garbage can really make us feel good in the moment. Regardless, specialty, fad, or any diet that requires severe limitations, restrictions, and/or body purges won’t work for the long haul. So paying attention to the content of what you consume daily is a very necessary thing to do; we all need a few basics about the types of calories we consume and where nutritionists currently stand on how we look at them. Be advised, however, that you can be certain whatever is written here won’t be the last word on anything. By tomorrow, the latest research or study could be contradicting “facts” we’ve been accepting for years.

Common sense and moderation should be your key tools in determining what you eat.

(Did you notice how that last sentence got a paragraph all to itself? That’s because it’s the most important lesson to digest today and possibly forever. You probably know everything that will be in this blog, including that adage, but entrenching it deep into your psyche, aura, or self so it can pulse in your being like a heartbeat will benefit you more than any diet book you will ever read.)

First Up: Carbohydrates

The poor carbohydrates have certainly been on a ride for the last decade or so. Since carbs come from anything we grow out of the ground, it’s a huge category: Vegetables, fruits, grains, and nuts occupy this versatile group which we humans have been able to manipulate shamelessly over the years to both our gain and our peril. Remember that first basic rule for diet that we went over right off the bat and you can do really well with carbohydrates—keep it simple.

The more we mess with food in this category, the worse the food tends to be for our health. Dry your rice, thresh the grains off the stalks, and put it in a rice cooker; and you’ve got a base for stir-fried vegetables and some chicken that will be a wonderful meal. Take the bran and germ off that grain and you’ve got empty calories that can turn to fat in your system before your take-out is cold. Take that bran less, germless, dried grain; grind it up into a flour; and add it to other stuff and you’ve got processed, fatty, salty, expensive, and seductive junk. So, it’s not really carbohydrates that are good or bad; it’s what we make of them, or more precisely, that we learn how to leave them alone, both when we’re eating and growing them. The progression goes like this: Organic apple—best; apple—good; apple juice—not so great (even fortified); and apple pie—a delicious indulgence we can afford only once in a while.

It’s a credit to our creativity and hubris that we’ve been able to create “Vegetable Sticks,” or “Veggie Straws” (which are basically slightly lower-fat potato chips), and still have the nerve to claim if you eat enough of them, you can count it as a serving of vegetables. No lie, we can do that kind of stuff. Hey, remember when the Reagan administration tried to get ketchup classified as a vegetable in school lunches back in the eighties? So understand how challenging it is to make sure you’re getting good information about that which you eat.

You’d better be double, triple-checking out everything you read (including this wonderful blog), or you will be asking for trouble. Trouble certainly isn’t my intent, and I do research everything I write; but anyone who follows food science can tell you that things change in a hurry. We should also keep our eyes open for some federal labeling reform consumer groups have been pushing for years. It should be much easier to figure out how good or bad a food is based on our most current information before we buy it. And that leads to the need for constant vigilance as our science and understanding advance in ways that change the relevance of what we thought we knew before. We need to update our knowledge all the time.

But that’s all the more reason to keep our choices simple and time tested. We’ve been eating wild blue berries for as long as we’ve been able to find them. Crunchberries, however, are a little more complicated to make and have that end-of-list group of ingredients that reads more like a chemical formula than food. Even though most of that list has been classified as GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by food inspectors, just keep in mind that quite a few items now banned from foods were once on the GRAS list, too. The goal isn’t to be paranoid, though; it’s just to err on the side of caution when it comes to what we allow to become a part of us—or at the very least, to pass though us.

Carbohydrates would be exhibit A in that “If it’s Friday, this food is bad; but by Tuesday, we love it again” group. But the broad category covers so much ground (literally) that we can go from the slums to the mansions of nutrition with a single food. Raw vegetables and fruits are the best ways to eat these kinds of carbs. You can smash them all up in a blender, as long as you don’t strain all the healthy fiber out of the fruit in its pureed form. And some are even starting to wonder about my Vitamix smoothies, as there are those who believe the intense crushing the fruit goes through alters the way we digest it. But smoothies are still better than juice, which is better than jelly, which beats the hell out of Good’N’Fruity, which probably doesn’t have any fruit in it whatsoever. So you do have to educate yourself on a variety of carbohydrate issues.

You can’t go wrong with raw vegetables and fruit for a start. Ice berg lettuce is pretty worthless, and some delicious fruits aren’t all that great (but I will take issue with anyone who tells the nutritional truth about my beloved pineapple), but the worst of them is still pretty damn good. Watch the cheese sauces and anything else you douse cooked/steamed vegetables in; otherwise, they are awesome as well.

Grains, seeds, and nuts generally need at least a little bit of processing before we’ll eat them. The less the better, as we saw with rice earlier. Salt and fat are the two main culprits of which to be aware when selecting grains, seeds, and nuts. You definitely want whole grains as opposed to those with their bran and germ removed. You also have to be cautious about how things like bread are labeled, since food manufacturers will often try to mislead you by putting things like “Made with Whole Grains” in big letters on the front of the product. When you check the ingredient list, however, you discover that white flour is the first and most prevalent ingredient with the whole grains barely making up one-quarter of a serving. If the whole grains aren’t first on the list, most products made with flour probably aren’t a healthy choice.

With seeds and nuts, though, your caution is in a completely different direction—not over-reacting to their fat content. Dry roasted almonds with no salt (a very healthy snack) come in with 15 grams of fat per serving as do the healthy dry roasted, salt-free sunflower seeds. As we’ve already mentioned, moderation is the key, and the mono-saturated and polyunsaturated fats of seeds and nuts are much better for you than saturated or (shudder) trans fats. We’ll be covering all the fats in our next calorie analysis. We probably shouldn’t even discuss nuts and seeds in a carbohydrate article since they are typically 75% fat or more—it’s just that most people think of meats and oils when they think of fat, but remember that you can buy peanut, sesame, and olive oil just about anywhere.

Me, I love me my carbs, and never had any interest in the Atkins diet or any of the fads that rejected all carbohydrates out of hand. I did have to evolve my tastes as the science evolved, and I learned that my beloved long-grain white rice and durum wheat pasta were pretty void of nutritional value. I’ve now completely transferred to whole grains whenever possible. (They have made huge strides with whole-wheat pasta in case you were turned off by it when it first started appearing—it was pretty gritty back in the day.) Vegetables and fruits were a harder sell for me as I was one of those clowns who used to proclaim proudly that I didn’t eat anything that was or is green. Yep, I was an idiot. I am sort of a consistency eater—a food’s texture is often more important to me than its taste—so I have had to find things that are crisp and crunchy. That has pretty much eliminated cooked vegetables and fruits from my diet, but you can still get plenty of servings of raw fruits and vegetables in a day without much trouble.

And you will find plenty of information and diets which slam carbohydrates as something you should basically avoid entirely. The exceptions, generally, are most vegetables and fruits, although some have ruled out legumes. As I’ve said before, I would avoid these kinds of diets and instead focus on understanding the variations in carb quality. Once you’ve learned the good from the bad and the simple from the processed, you can eat carbs without many problems. Experts vary widely on the percentage of calories in anyone’s diet which should be from carbohydrates, but 40-60% is a decent range for adults, with as many as possible coming from vegetables and fruits.

My guess is that we’re a long way from completely getting a handle on the myriad of foods which come under the heading of “Carbohydrates.” As with all my diet advice, once you have the basics down and a regularly updated source to keep you up on the latest research, keep it simple and you can lessen your carb confusion considerably.