Everyone knows what a sugar high is. You eat a couple pieces of cake, and the next thing you know you’re bouncing off the walls. And what happens afterwards? Your energy level plummets and you feel lethargic. If it’s really bad, you feel like you’re getting the shakes. The temptation is to treat these withdrawal symptoms with more sugar.
Sound familiar? Withdrawing from a sugar binge can feel a lot like withdrawing from a lot of other drugs, like alcohol. And we often treat it with the same homeopathic cure, a little hair of the dog. Of course, there are other options. To avoid hangovers, you could drink less or none at all. Or, alternatively, you could avoid the spikes and valleys by maintaining a more constant blood alcohol level. You could modulate your dose by drinking more often, starting first thing in the morning. It would really be convenient if you could find some kind of a “complex” form of alcohol, one that takes time for the intestine to break down so that four or five drinks, downed all at once, could provide a nice, steady buzz for the rest of the day. If there were such an alcohol, no doubt we’d call it the “good” alcohol, the one preferred by all health-conscious alcoholics to avoid ever waking up with a hangover again.
Sugar is a “simple” carb. String a bunch of sugars together and you’ve got starch, a “complex” carb. There’s much ado about complex carbs being healthier than sugars but, nutritionally, there’s no difference whatsoever. The only difference between simple and complex carbs is how quickly they get into your bloodstream. So if you have diabetes or are just trying to avoid sugar swings, understand that when dietitians encourage choosing complex carbs for breakfast, it’s very much as if they’re telling a binge drinker to pace himself and get started first thing in the morning.
When you’re eating pasta or a cracker, you don’t feel as though you’re doing anything naughty, because it doesn’t taste sweet, like candy. But the molecules that make up starch are naughty; they’re sugar. And once in your bloodstream, they’ll be up to no good. Starch is like a chain gang which, when bound together in a long molecule (too long to fit into your taste buds) won’t cause any harm. But if you let a cracker sit on your tongue long enough—or get broken down by digestion—the starch molecules turn into the very same sugar that you know is bad for your body.
sugar. This stems from the fact that there’s a big difference between ingesting and absorbing nutrients. You can swallow a small marble and say you’ve eaten it, but you’ll never absorb it. Technically, eating refers only to the act of swallowing, whereas absorption refers the act of bringing chemicals into your body. The point is, whether you eat sugar or starch, your body winds up absorbing sugar.
When we’re talking carbs and sugar, we need to define our terms clearly. All carbs are composed of individual sugar molecules, called monosaccarides. Table sugar is made from glucose and fructose monosaccarides bound together into a disaccharide called sucrose. Mono- and disaccarhides are simple carbohydrates, a.k.a. sugars. If more monosaccharide units are added to the chain, the name changes to oligosaccharide, oligo meaning few. Starches have hundreds of monosaccharide units connected together and are called “complex.”
Foods like bread, pasta, potatoes, and rice are little more than containers for sugar. A seven- ounce serving of cooked spaghetti is converted into the amount of sugar contained in four 12-ounce cans of Pepsi. Unlike Pepsi, the pasta has been fortified with iron and a few vitamins. The starchy parts of plants also carry small amounts of protein and minerals, but white flour and white rice have had most of that removed. Whether the rice and bread are white or brown, whether the starch is in the form of breakfast cereal or tortilla chips, pasta or pancakes, complex or simple, you’re mostly eating sugar.
The Four Pillar foods tend to have fewer carbs than their modernized counterparts. For instance, a slice of sprouted-grain bread has 70 calories. A same size slice of regular wheat bread has 110. This is because during the process of sprouting the seed converts its storage starch into nutrients. Seeds can do this easily. Our bodies can’t.
I am not a big fan of breaking foods into carbs, protein, and all that. But because starchy, empty- calorie foods fill so many shelves in the store, it’s one category we have to be aware of. I advise my patients with diabetes, or those who want to lose weight, that they should keep their total average carbohydrate intake under 100 grams per day. That means one small bowl of pasta, or four pieces of bread, or two apples, and that’s it. If you are eating plenty of foods from the Four Pillars, exercising regularly, and are not worried about weight, then you can eat all the carbs you want.