Need to Cut carbs? It’s hard when we’re living in a carbohydrate culture
Sugar is fun!
Think fancy birthday cakes with pink, purple, and gold decorations … And those sugary breakfast cereals with the colorful cereal boxes? It’s a party!
Too much sugar in our food? It happens. Fuhgeddaboudit.
How did we get this way? How did we become a carbohydrate culture?
When I was growing up, sugar in foods was pretty much accepted, and the only recommendation about sugar (that I can recall) was simply “don’t fill up on that flashy, irresistible Halloween candy.”
How easily we forget that eating too many carbohydrates can not only cause weight gain by storing calories as fat but may also cause you to develop “insulin resistance,” which brings on type II diabetes.
And you could be carb-intolerant … carb intolerance happens when just looking at that donut makes you experience tiredness, bloating, flatulence, and/or abdominal discomfort. (OK, you have to eat a little bite of the donut, but not much!)
While sugar and added sugars are obvious factors in the over-consumption of carbohydrates, it often seems that other sources of carbohydrates are often overlooked. Bread (including bagels and (yes) donuts, what?), pasta, rice, and cereals (often with added sugars.)
You go out for a pasta meal and what comes with it? Free bread sticks. You order a pizza and what is offered as dessert? Chocolate Lava cake with a bazzilion carbs. You go out to a work lunch, and what comes with? French fries and those sweet cinnamon roll bites you can’t resist. It seems like there’s a culture war between carb-loaded menus and your waistline.
In a book by Robert Lufkin he points out that in 1977, US Health and Human Services created the original dietary rules to live by, urging the American public to increase their carbohydrate consumption up to 55 or 60 percent of their regular caloric intake per day, and to decrease their fat intake to 30 to 35 percent of daily calories consumed. In fact, the advised increase in carbohydrates turned out to be six to eleven servings per day!
Based on this government-sponsored health information, people seeking a healthier lifestyle began to load up on carbs and decrease fat consumption. And while there’s nothing wrong with cutting down on fat, increasing the amount of carbs in the daily diet could present some problems.
In fact, being raised by diet-conscious parents, who conscientiously followed all the rules (you were proud of them for this,) you may have developed unhealthy eating habits simply because they were abiding by the official dietary guidelines, which over emphasized carbohydrate consumption.
I remember when a friend of mine who worked in a bank decided to visit a nutritionist, trying to figure out why he could not lose weight. His mother had been a nurse, who raised him to follow society’s accepted dietary advice. He was surprised to learn that he was consuming too many bagels in his daily diet. So, he cut back on the bagels and lost the weight.
As it happens, if he was eating according to food pyramid suggestions, he would have been encouraged to eat four to six full-size bagels each day! According to the guidelines, this should have made him lose weight and become healthier, but surprise! Over emphasizing breads in his diet made him gain weight.
My question here is … with all of the official dietary advice he must have been exposed to in required health classes – why did it surprise him so that the bagel was his dietary nemesis?
Fun fact for you, many commercially available breads have a glycemic index that is on the high side.
The glycemic index is a system that rates foods according to the effect they should have on your blood sugar. For instance, non-starchy vegetables like broccoli and green beans have a low glycemic index, shown as fifty or below, while potatoes (a starchy vegetable) white bread, donuts and greasy fast food (tastes so good) all have a glycemic index listed as 70 or above, or a high glycemic index.
So, when the original food pyramid came out in 1992, it was mostly based on those same (stinky old) government-sponsored health guidelines from 1977. In fact, I have had several “regular curriculum” health classes that made me memorize the food pyramid and reproduce it for a test.
Not only can I recall the food pyramid clearly, but I think that memorizing it repeatedly may have made it sink into my subconscious mind, and I doubt I’m the only one in this predicament.
What I’m thinking this: considering all of this educational emphasis on the food pyramid diagram, it may be that many people made friends with the food pyramid, graduated, and never questioned their nutrition again. They knew the food pyramid and according to the powers that be … that was enough. They were completely prepared to go forth and make dietary choices on their own.
Reading Lufkin’s book, it dawned on me that although dietary guidelines have changed somewhat over the years, many people are stuck back in the mentality of the original food pyramid; and that this high-carb-equals-healthier myth has become ingrained in the culture, due to an abundance of misleading nutritional advice given out over the years.
For example, if you ate two pieces of toast and/or a big bowl of cereal for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch (a several pieces of bread) — a cookie in your lunch Tupperware — a dinner roll and some white rice, plus dessert at dinner … This doesn’t sound outrageous but any way you slice it, that’s a lot of carbs.
So, how many carbohydrates should you eat each day? Well, nobody really knows the answer to that question. While some suggest it is one hundred grams, I have heard recommendations for daily carb intake amounts that range from 25 to 60 grams per day.
In my experience, the most successful diets have protein, non-starchy vegetables, and easy, homemade keto snacks as basic components.
Using the example of Genghis Kahn, Lufkin points out that Kahn and his hugely successful Mongolian warriors ate a carnivorous, high protein diet composed mostly of mutton (sheep steaks) and dairy products.
It is thought that the Mongols’ diet — based on animal products — gave them an advantage over the carbohydrate laden grain-based diets of those they subdued.
(I am not discouraging veganism, but as a former vegan, I have learned the value of allowing some protein from animal sources, especially dairy and eggs.)
Three points – from personal experience — I’d like to leave you with:
- If you eat fast food every day for lunch, you probably will not lose weight.
- If you do not become laser focused on the amount of carbohydrates you eat every day, you probably will not lose weight.
- If you are under the false impression that when you do a whole lot of cardio, you can eat anything you want, it is still quite possible that you will not lose weight. I will address the issue of cardio and weight loss in a future article.chocolate
Baking with Almond flour is a great way to cut carbs. Check out my article on how to make my Chocolate Almond flour mug cake.
Click here to access my Chocolate Almond flour mug cake recipe!
Please note that Simply Natural Medicine’s work, promoting accessible natural health information, is assisted by being an Amazon Associate.
I’d like to share my favorite Keto diet book with you. It’s by Clinical nutritionist, Josh Axe … Keto Diet: Your 30-day Plan to Lose Weight, Balance Hormones, Boost Brain Health, and Reverse Disease. This book is a complete guide to the Keto diet, which is like a balanced diet with a spotlight on cutting carbs. I’ve used it myself with awesome results!
Click here to access Josh Axe’s Keto Diet book on Amazon!
And, as mentioned above, here’s medical doctor Robert Lufkin’s book … Check out Lufkin’s Lies I taught in medical school: In this book, Lufkin relates the way some of the rigid, medically-accepted ideas he learned in school didn’t work for him when he, himself, got sick, and then explains how he modified some of that information to deal with illnesses he developed over time.
Click here to access Robert Lufkin’s insightful book on Amazon!
REFERENCES
Glycemic Index. (n.d.). National Cancer Institute.
https://www.cancer.gov/publications/dictionaries/cancer-terms/def/glycemic-index.
Grant, Kara. (n.d.) What counts as a low carb diet and is it right for you? WebMD. https://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20240207/what-counts-as-low-carb-diet.
Lufkin, R. (2024). Lies I taught in medical school: How conventional medicine is making you sicker and what you can do to save your own life. BonBella.
Raikar, Sanat Pai. (2024). Food pyramid. Encyclopedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/science/food-pyramid.
Weinandy, L. (2017). Carb intolerance could be the reason weight loss is difficult. The Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center.
https://wexnermedical.osu.edu/blog/carb-intolerance.
What is the glycemic index? (2021). The Cleveland Clinic. https://health.clevelandclinic.org/glycemic-index.1