Role of Carbohydrates in Fat Loss

Are carbohydrates bad for health?

The vast popularity of certain commercial diets like the Atkin’s diet have made an impact on the general belief of certain populations using these diets, to the extent that these people simply brand carbohydrates as bad for health. They forget the fact that a vast population exist on the earth by eating carbs as major proportion of their foods. Some others classify carbs as simple and complex ones. They advocate avoidance of simple carbs and inclusion of complex cabs in the diet for health promotion.

What about fruits and vegetables?

As we shall see shortly, this oversimplified classification of carbs does not help us in making our food choices for health promotion and disease prevention. As per this classification, sugar, glucose, fructose, maltose, lactose etc. are examples of simple carbohydrates. They should be avoided for disease prevention. But what about fruits and vegetables? The vast majority of fruits and vegetables contain mainly simple sugars like fructose, glucose, maltose etc. It is absurd to discard these natural nutritionally rich treasures for health promotion. In spite of having simple sugars, fruits and veggies give us the indispensable vitamins minerals, phytonutrients and fiber.

Now let us take the case of complex carbohydrates. The advocates of the above-mentioned classification say that they should be included for health promotion. Again what about pizzas, burgers, noodles, biscuits, baked items and numerous other processed food items which contain starch—the complex carbohydrate. Can we say that these items promote health?. We all know that fruits and vegetables promote health naturally and processed foods don’t.

So there is a problem in this classification.

The classification has to be like this:

Good carbs: All natural unprocessed items like fruits, vegetables, whole grains etc.

Bad carbs: All artificially processed, refined and altered food articles like table sugar, glucose powder, all fast food items like pizzas and burgers and biscuits, cold beverages like coke, all sweet items having added sugar etc.

This new classification indeed exists and is based on the concept of the so called “glycemic index”. For more discussion on glycemic index go to our glycemic index page

A word of caution for diabetics: Although almost all fruits and vegetables are good for health, the paramount concern for diabetics should be blood sugar control and they should choose the type and quantity of fruit(s) very carefully. Diabetics should minimize the consumption of certain fruits like ripe bananas, ripe mangoes etc. They can taste these fruits but they should not eat them to hearts content (otherwise heart may complain one day!)

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