some answers for your questions, which may not match Bluesky & Frank
1)The importance of carbohydrates!
One of the 4 main macronutrients, somebody forgot to mention alcohol
. The body's primary short term fuel is glucose. It's used solely by brain and neural tissue - the brain can use ketones, but it usually takes a couple of days of starvation to enable ketone metabolism by the brain. It is important for muscles. The major benefit is that energy can be derived from glucose without an adequate blood supply or oxygen - fat metabolism needs oxygen. Sprinters are primarily burning glucose.
2) What happens if we don’t get enough carbohydrates?
Simple, glucose is so important to the body, it will synthesize it from other sources - usually protein, but the body can also derive glucose from glyceride (a component of fatty acids)
How do we get carbohydrates from our diet?
mostly starches - grains, pototoes etc. But also simple sugars as found in fruit, honey, and the stuff that is added to bread cakes sweets etc. Starch is simply a long chain of glucose bonded together. Much is made of simple versus complex sugars. According to your body there is virtually no difference - starches are broken down about as quickly as regular sugar.
How much carbohydrates should we eat?
There is the recommended ADA daily allowance - my personal opinion is that this is largely hogwash. The simple fact is that humans consume a very wide variety of foods and seem to thrive quite happily on a wide variation of food intakes. What we can't tolerate is a very low fat intake (10% is about minimum) or a very high protein intake (35% or more as daily intake).
It is possible to survive on an extremely low carb diet. The problem with this diet (also called ketogenic - and advocated by Bernstein et al) is that few people can tolerate it, and the problem is consuming enough vegetables etc to ensure adequate vitamin intake. The few indigenous peoples that eat ketogenic diets (inuit) have very specialised diets to ensure adequate vitamin intake. You will not run out of carbs - although your ability to sustain high intensity exercise would be compromised.
Aren’t carbohydrates fattening?
Well this is the theory of Taubes - and I know he is very popular, but there is no evidence that his hypothesis is correct. I read an article by Taubes and tracked down study authors (referred to by Taubes) looking at low carb versus low fat diets. After 12 months there was no difference between the 2. This finding is typical of studies comparing low-fat versus low carb diets. There is overall a slight advantage in favour of low-fat diets for weight loss (by slight I mean a few pounds). There is the Israeli study which gets referred to in this forum, which shows an advantage to the low carb diet but the way the results are calculated produce a low-carb bias
What does the glycaemic index of carbohydrates means?
This was a popular notion, along with the idea (unsubstantiated) that kids eating sweets would induce hypoglycemia and therefore concentration problems due to high levels of insulin.
In truth nobody sits down and eats 100g of potatoes at single sitting without eating anything else. By the time your potatoes are mixed with gravy and a steak, the GI is anyone's guess.
Can low carbohydrates diet really help with weight-loss?
no better than a low-fat one. I refer you to above.
In type 2, weight loss and exercise are the 2 things that come up time and time again and have been shown to achieve an improvement in symptoms in real studies with real people (rather than rats).
