What's up with Carbs?!?

Welcome back! I hope you’ve started to learn some new things about nutrition and your health. Today I’ll be discussing simple and complex carbs. We hear about these a lot in today’s world. So let’s get started!

Nearly everyone craves sugar. When experiencing such cravings, most people go right for the most accessible sweet treat candy, chocolate bars, cake or cookies. But what these people don’t realize is that many healthy alternatives can help alleviate sweet cravings.

A sugar craving is simply the body asking for energy. When sugar is digested, it becomes glucose. Glucose is fuel for all of the body’s cells. When you eat sugar, it enters the bloodstream and is converted into glucose at different rates, depending on the type of sugar you consume. All carbohydrates contain sugar, but depending on their chemical structures-simple or complex-they are processed differently. Most simple carbohydrates are highly processed, contain refined sugars and have few vitamins and minerals. Processed foods contain short chains of sugar, which enter the bloodstream almost momentarily after they are ingested. This causes a rapid rise in the glucose levels in the body-a sugar rush. The rush is shortly followed by a crash. The body sees the high level of sugar as an emergency state and works hard to burn it up as quickly as possible. Then blood sugar drops almost instantly. Other natural foods, like fruit, contain naturally occurring simple sugars. Fruit is high in fiber, which helps slow digestion, limiting the amount of sugar that flows into the cells.

Carbohydrates that appear in nature, in whole foods like vegetables and whole grains, are complex. Complex carbohydrates are composed of long chains of sugars. These long chains are bound within the food’s fiber. The body processes the sugars by breaking the chains and releasing fiber into the blood stream. This process is relatively slow; therefore, the sugars are absorbed into the bloodstream at a steady rate for many hours, providing long-lasting energy.

If you eat a whole grain-a complex carb-for breakfast, you will likely have energy throughout the morning, and then experience a milk dip around noon, just in time for lunch. If you eat an Oreo cookie, a candy bar or white bread-all simple carbs-the bloodstream will be suddenly flooded with sugars, providing a quick burst of energy. But shortly after, your blood sugar will drop and you will be hungry again. Your body wants to maintain balanced blood sugar, so it is telling you to eat something to bring your blood sugar back up. Most people go for more sugar, and this experience of sugar ups and downs continues throughout the day. Blood sugar often drops around 3 p.m., a few hours after lunch-the time when most people seek sugar or caffeine to get them through the rest of the afternoon.

Carbohydrates provide much of the energy needed for normal body functions-such as heartbeat, breathing and digestion-and exercise. Carbs are in everything from candy bars to grains and even vegetables. The problem is that people are not eating the types of carbs nature intended. They’re eating carbohydrate-rich foods that have been deformed and denatured. Simple sugars can lead to weight gain because our cells do not require large amounts of glucose at one time, and the extra sugar is stored as fat. The anti-carb movement should really be an anti-simple-carb movement.

Overconsumption of simple carbs has led to an abundance of hypoglycemia in America. Hypoglycemia is the body’s inability to handle large amounts of sugar. It’s common among people with diabetes, but can also be caused by an overload of sugar, alcohol, caffeine, tobacco and stress. Hypoglycemia is triggered when the pancreas secretes too much insulin in response to a rapid rise in blood sugar, which in turn causes blood sugar levels to plummet, starving the body’s cells of needed fuel. A person with hypoglycemia may feel weak, drowsy, confused, dizzy and hungry, especially around 3 p.m. when blood sugar is naturally at its lowest. When your blood sugar is low, you are vulnerable to cravings because your body urgently needs something to spike its glucose. If a hypoglycemic episode hits you between meals, a healthy choice would be to nibble on a carrot or celery stick, not grab a bagel with cream cheese or wolf down a chocolate chip cookie.

Sugar cravings are as natural as our desire for air. Throughout the years, humans have been programmed to desire sweet-tasting foods. Long before food processing, the only source of sweet tastes was plant foods such as squash, roots, grains and fruits. In order to get the sweet taste their bodies desired, people had to eat plants. It is no coincidence these sweet foods are also great sources of nutrients, energy and fiber-everything we need to maintain our health. So, the best way to curb or alleviate intense sugar cravings is to provide the body with the sweetness that it needs by regularly eating naturally sweet foods.

Stay Nourished,

~Coach Stephanie