Take Control of Your Health & Well-Being

A glance at the list of food sources for these essential micronutrients quickly shows you how important fruity vegetables, nuts and pulses are, precisely the food groups you severely restrict on a classic low-carb diet. Fish, chicken and red meat supply a small number of these nutrients as well, but many are simply not present in these foods. And, of course, normally we eat these foods cooked, and the cooking process can severely deplete the nutritional value. A fat and protein-oriented diet will not provide the nutritional profile you need for good health.

But Atkins does recommend supplements, you may reply, surely that will ensure I get the right nutritional profile. Unfortunately Atkins was no micronutritionist, and the supplement recommendations, though they go some way to compensating for a very skewed diet, are not well thought through and in some areas are completely inadequate. For example, the importance of vitamin K, resistant starch, flavonoids and sterols to a healthy diet is simply not recognized.

Moreover there is plenty of evidence about the benefits of whole foods for health, such as the importance of fibre for healthy digestive functioning. Supplements can support a healthy eating programme, but your starting point for good nutrition should be the whole foods you eat at every meal.

The Good Carbs
My biggest single concern with the low-carb phenomenon is the categorizing of all sugar and starch carbohydrates as problem foods. They are not intrinsically bad, but they do become a problem when you combine a high-carb diet with a low-exercise lifestyle. Carbohydrates are a natural form of body fuel, and if we were more active, efficiently burning this fuel before it becomes stored as fat, we would have no problems with overweight and obesity.

Even more critically, the low-carb phenomenon has also failed to recognize the major breakthrough in the classification of carbohydrates over the past few years - namely the identification of the fermentable carbohydrates and their importance for health, satiety and weight control.

Understanding Carbs
There are two main groupings of carbohydrates it is important to understand — digestible carbohydrates and fermentable carbohydrates.

Digestible carbohydrates include the ’simple carbs’, sugars such as sucrose and glucose, and the ‘complex carbs’, the starches in foods such-as bread and potatoes which are broken down by digestive enzymes in the small bowel into glucose. These foods all contain about 4 calories per gram; and they all contribute to the glycaemic load of the diet, or the total amount of glucose derived from the diet which pours into the bloodstream.

Many diet books have focused on how simple carbs deliver glucose to the bloodstream more quickly than complex carbs. The argument is that this difference can affect our energy levels and therefore our appetite. In feet worrying about simple versus complex carbs is something of a red herring. The fact that these foods deliver glucose at slightly different rates may be relevant to sports nutrition, but it makes little difference to our long-term health prospects. What is important is the overall glycaemic load of our diet. The glycaemic load of the modern diet has been calculated as being nearly ten times that of the Stone Age diet, the diet that in evolutionary terms our bodies are still designed for. This excessive glycaemic load is now widely regarded as a major cause of diabetes, heart disease and certain forms of cancer.

Tags: books, calories, Chi, Diabete, diabetes, diet, Ear, exercise, Fat, food, foods, Good Health, health, healthy diet, healthy eating, Heart, heart disease, nutrition, Obesity, Overweight, Overweight And Obesity, Protein, sports nutrition, Supplement, supplements, Tan, the diet, Vitamin, weight

Related posts

• Health Benefits of Exercise: What You Should Know Before You Start (4)
• Tips To Lose Weight Faster (17)
• The Cholesterol Factor in Heart Disease (13)
• Step-by-Step Process to Create a Picture of Success (10)
• Calories versus Activity (17)

Tags: books, calories, Chi, Diabete, diabetes, diet, Ear, exercise, Fat, food, foods, Good Health, health, healthy diet, healthy eating, Heart, heart disease, nutrition, Obesity, Overweight, Overweight And Obesity, Protein, sports nutrition, Supplement, supplements, Tan, the diet, Vitamin, weight

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.