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As it turns out, it’s not just how much you eat that matters, what you eat is important as well. Basic common sense should tell you that a diet composed of donuts is not going to be as healthy as one of meat and vegetables. Common sense isn’t enough though, so lets talk a bit of biochemistry.

Food is composed of three main components: Carbohydrates, Proteins, and Fats. Proteins and Fats play important roles, but today we’re going to talk about Carbs. All carbohydrates are either sugars, starches, fibers or sugar alcohols. They’re formed by adding saccharide molecules together. As they grow more complex they tend to become harder to digest, though that process isn’t completely linear. Here is a list showing the basic forms:

Monosaccharides - glucose(dextrose), galactose(Glucose and galactose require no digestion and are directly absorbed), fructose(lower GI index)
Disaccharides - Sucrose (brown suger and molasses plus some vegetables), lactose (found in milk), maltose (not found in nature, it is a intermediary form of starch breakdown)
Trisaccharides - Raffinose (molasses, beans, legumes), maltotriose (an intermediate product of starch digestion)
Polysaccharides - Starch (amylase & amylopectin, found in cereal grains and vegetables), fiber, inulin (found in Jerusalem artichoke, onions, and garlic), cellulose (can’t be broken down by human enzymes), hemicullulose, pectin (found in apple cider vinegar and lemons, cannot be digested), gum, mucilage, dextrin (intermediate product of starch hydrolysis, often formed when toasting breads or cereals), glycogen (animal starch, found in liver and muscle tissue)
Oligosaccharides - Stachyose (found in beans and legumes)
Sugar Alcohols - Mannitol (absorbed very slowly)
Indigestible - Fiber, cellulose, pectin, etc.

Ok, so all that is interesting, but why is it important? Insulin is a hormone used by your body to regulate your carbohydrate metabolism. Any food consumption produces an insulin spike, but carbohydrates produce more than fats or proteins, and the more quickly it’s digested, the bigger the spike. Simple carbs like sugar and those that have been heavily refined like white flour are processed so quickly that your body’s normal control systems don’t work properly. You get a huge insulin spike, the energy is moved out of your bloodstream, and then your insulin level crashes causing you to get hungry again.

Now insulin is also responsible for moving the energy in your blood to appropriate locations. First it will fill your intramuscular glycogen stores, which are used for short term activities. Second it goes to your liver which has a glycogen reserve that it used to help keep your blood sugar levels stable. Third, once the other two locations are full, any excess is shuttled off to be stored in your adipose tissue, otherwise known as fat.

As you can see, and any diabetic could tell you, insulin spikes are bad mkay? So one facet of your diet program is going to need to be insulin management. How do we accomplish this? Well, first of all you’ll want to eat high quality, slow digesting carbs like oats, whole wheat (not enriched flour which basically means they’ve stripped off the husk), sweet potatoes, vegetables, and the like. You’ll want to avoid fast digesting carbs like sugar, high fructose corn syrup, white flour, potatoes, and corn. (Potatoes are very starchy and tend to spike insulin levels, while corn is not actually a vegetable, it’s a grain, and has similar effects).

In addition to eating slow digesting carbs, you’ll want to space your calorie intake out through the day in order to have more numerous shallower spikes. You should eat approximately every three hours, about six times a day. This will allow your body maximum opportunity to use that energy for things other than fat storage. Lastly, you’ll want to pay attention to carbohydrate timing. Breakfast and just after working out are good times to have carbs since you’ll have depleted glycogen reserves, while just before bedtime is a terrible time to have carbs as they’re almost guaranteed to be converted to fat.

Some people have taken this whole idea a bit too far, and moved to a ketogenic diet like Atkins where carbohydrates are highly restricted. Ketosis is a metabolic state wherein your liver converts fats into fatty acids and ketones in order to ensure that your brain doesn’t starve. While breaking down fats sounds like a good thing, and ketogenic diets are great for losing WEIGHT, they’re also very catabolic (muscle wasting) and so pretty terrible for losing FAT. Muscle tissue is metabolically expensive and when faced with a critical energy shortage, your body will often try to economize by cannibalizing it. Long term, ketogenic diets are less effective than insulin management at body recomposition, and for the most part should be avoided.

Tags: Carbohydrates, Insulin

This entry was posted on Monday, November 19th, 2007 at 11:08 am and is filed under Fitness. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.