What Is Good Carbs and Poor Carbs

Carbohydrate is one of three macro-nutrients. We cannot live without it. Your digestive system changes carbohydrates into glucose (blood sugar). Your body uses sugar as energy for your cells, tissues and organs. It's a fast and effective energy sources. But due to civilization, people pay more attention on the taste of foods. Food industrial refines all kinds of foods to make it with better taste, smell and looks by additives, colorants and preservatives to keep it longer time. Food industrial also process the food to make it cheaper, such as the refined oils. Do you know the plant oils can maximum sustain about 130~150 degree Celsius of heat. But in order to extract more oil from plant seeds, refine oil factory need to use chemicals to extract most of oils from seeds, and then increase the oils to 500 degree to remove the chemicals. At this high temperature, the oils are totally damaged with poor colour and bad smell. Factory again uses other technologies to remove poor colour and bad smell. It's like a piece of meat put under sun for days, the meat was rottened. But by using chemicals to remove the bacteria and poor smell, the meat become edible. Refined oils just like the rotten meat and become very poor quality and harmful to our body. It cause people have chronic pain, blood lipid issues, etc.

Food industry also processes the crops to refine flours to remove the fibre, to make cornflakes, instant oatmeal, instant noodle, etc. It give us convenience and good tastes but most of the nutrients gone. Most important, these processed carbohydrates foods will fluctuate our sugar level and cause over supplied insulin. Then it cause obesity and having sugar problem. please check below chart, from my previous post" Healthy Lifestyle Happy Life". My client's food habbit was taking more high index and high load foods which cause fluctuation of her suggar level and insulin was always on high side. She double her weight from 65kg to 115kg in 7 years time. A small lady is 5' tall, but size was huge.

How we define good carbs? Good carbs should provide good nutrition and also will not fluctuate your sugar level. How do we know the carbohydrates will fluctuate our sugar level or not? Scientist defines Glycemic Index and Glycemic load of foods to measure the timing to digest foods and convert to glucose. Glycemic index and Glycemic load offer information about how foods affect blood sugar and insulin. The lower a food’s Glycemic index or Glycemic load, the less it affects blood sugar and insulin levels. You can check this link from Harvard Medical School regarding the Glycemic index and Glycemic load of 100 common foods. URL: http://www.health.harvard.edu/healthy-eating/glycemic_index_and_glycemic_load_for_100_foods

From the table, for Glycemic Index, below 40 is low, 40~55 is medium, more than 55 is high. For Glycemic Load, 0~10 is low, 10~20 is medium, above 30 is high. Both indexes are lower the better. I highlight some items in red colour which we eat often. For example, multi-grain bread is better than white bread. Cornflake and instant oatmeal have very high index and load. White rice, index is 89, load is 43. But brown rice, index is 50 and load is 16. Brown rice is much better than white rice. Beans and Nuts have low index and load. For root vegetables, such as potato, sweet potato, and yam, their index and load is high. But due to their higher nutrition value, if we can control the quantity, these root vegetables are still good to us. Hope this post can help you to select good carbs.