Carbohydrates: The Complex Truth

Demand tigers buckets ziggly juice off keyboard pulpitate.

Wait, what??

If you’ll bear with me, I’m just making a point: as human beings, we need to make sense of our world by firstly giving things names and then grouping them together. We need to make associations in order for the world to have meaning. We make ideas relate to other ideas in our heads so that we understand our place in the world and how to respond to it. So, that first sentence is jarring precisely because it takes all our associations and throws them out the window. What is ‘ziggly’ and what does it have to do with tigers? And since when do the words ‘keyboard’ and ‘pulpitate’ follow each other? It makes zero sense.

Our next response is either to try fill in the gaps, rearrange the words, or ignore the sentence altogether.

In order to avoid this mess, this meaninglessness in life, we’re wired to link ideas to other ideas. Birds= wings. Jobs= money. Shadow=  sun. And on and on it goes.

This is good. It helps us recognize patterns. It helps us identify what works and what doesn’t. For example, if prayer= answers then we’re likely to do more praying, ceteris paribus. On the other hand, if stealing=punishment, we’re less likely to steal. We make the association and it informs our behaviour.

But as life becomes more complex, this kind of reasoning begins not to serve us.  And this is very clear when it comes to certain dogmas about nutrition. A big one today is: Carbs= fat.

Which Carbs and for Whom?

It would really make life easier to think of bread, sweet potatoes, yam, croissants, and couscous as belonging to one food group, which has similar characteristics. In fact, that’s exactly what we do, and that’s why those of us who want to lose weight are wary of all ‘carbs’ because we heard somewhere that they stay in your body and immediately make you overweight.

But saying carbs=fat is the same as saying technology=harmful. Which technology, and who is it harming? Is it not the same technology that is allowing me to write this blog, and you to read it? How do you measure it’s harmfulness? Does it come with benefits? What are they? Do those benefits outweigh the harm? And in any case, how can you know the answer to any of those questions if we don’t know which subset of technologies you’re talking about? 

To press the point home, let’s look at two other associations which are in fact true in their own right but show us how unhelpful it is to make linkages without pausing to think about it.

High Fibre=good. This association is backed by lots of scientific evidence, and we know from all those ‘Special K’ adverts that eating enough helps you go to the toilet more regularly. Regular elimination means your body is getting rid of the nonsense so that it doesn’t go back into your system, so clearly that’s good.

High Sugar= bad. Our body and brains use sugar (e.g. in the form of glucose) for energy, so it’s not all bad, but everyone pretty much agrees that sugar in the quantities and types we consume it today has many negative effects. Study after study implicates sugar as a major culprit in many chronic diseases for example. So yes, we can fairly say that high sugar= bad.

BUT, did you know that fibre and sugar are both carbs? In fact, there are three types of carbohydrate: fibre, sugar, and starch. So if fibre, starch, and sugar are all carbohydrates, and each of them have various effects on our health, do you see how nonsensical it is to simply say carbohydrates make you fat, or carbohydrates are bad for you?

Simple and Complex

Without getting into too much boring detail, the best way to think about carbs is to use the two broad categories of simple carbs and complex carbs. Simple carbs are easily broken down by the body for use as energy. They are called ‘simple’ because of their chemical structure: they are made up of one or two sugar components/units.

Simple carbs are easy come, easy go: they give almost instant boost, but we quickly crash as the body fights to regulate our sugar levels. The body’s mission is always to keep things steady- not too high, not too low. This is called homeostasis. Simple sugars disturb homeostasis by raising our sugar levels too high too quickly. The body’s response to this is to rush to bring your sugar levels down again, hence the crash from a ‘sugar high’. Your body does this by releasing the hormone insulin which tells your cells to let more sugar in, and the cells expand as a result. This is why high consumption of simple carbs is linked to obesity and diabetes!

Simple vs Complex Carbs: An example
Simple Carb Foods	Complex Carbs
Glucose- Bread, cakes, pies, salad dressings, honey, energy bars, sugary drinks	Whole grains- oats, brown rice, rye, quinoa, bulgar wheat etc
Sucrose- Table sugar	Root Vegetables: Potatoes, sweet potatoes, yam, cassava, parsnips, turnip, celery, beetroot
High fructose corn syrup- found in many sweets and cereals	High-fibre/cellulose- broccoli, cauliflower, kale, cabbage, lettuce, most fruit, pumpkin, squash
Maltose- sugar found in milk

 Table for demonstrative reasons only and is non-prescriptive.

Complex carbs, by contrast, are made of 3 or more components, and they contain other minerals and vitamins needed by your body. Moreover, some also contain ‘cellulose’, the fancy biochemical word for fibre. These carbs aren’t broken down as easily, and so provide a more gradual stream of energy. They also contribute to the wellbeing of the good bacteria in our guts: fibre, for example, is not actually digested by the body (the body can’t digest it), but it provides food for these good bacteria. To add to these, some of the most complex carbs (called polysaccharides), actually manufacture other nutrients as they are fermented in your large intestine

So what?

Use this information to start being smarter about your carb game. If your goal is weight loss, then it’s not just ‘carbs’ that you need to cut out. You are more likely after simple carbs. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. Since they provide important nutrients to the body and help keep you regular, complex carbs may actually HELP you lose weight. Even if your goal is overall wellbeing in general, the same principle applies: do less of the non-beneficial and potentially harmful stuff, do more of the good stuff.

So, my friend, don’t “Demand tigers buckets ziggly juice off keyboard pulpitate.”

Instead, demand complex carbs!

And when you are fed what seems to be a simplistic rule, always insist on the more complex truth.