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Shak
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Hi All -
I recently read an article on the book, "The South Beach Diet." It talked about carbs and their affects on the body and obesity. Although most of us already know this information, I found it was so simply stated and easy to understand that it was worth posting for everyone to read....
The following is an excerpt from the book The South Beach Diet by Arthur Agatston, M.D. Published by Rodale. © 2003 by Arthur Agatston, M.D.
As we've seen, the equation behind most obesity is simple: The faster the sugars and starches you eat are processed and absorbed into your bloodstream, the fatter you get.
Therefore, anything that speeds the process by which your body digests carbohydrates is bad for your diet, and anything that slows it down is good. Digestion is simply the action of your stomach breaking food down into its components; anything that keeps food intact longer is beneficial for people trying to lose weight.
Keeping that in mind, it's important to recognize that the process of digestion begins even before you swallow your food. In fact, it starts the moment you start preparing it. Example: Raw broccoli is crunchy, hard, cold, and covered with a layer of nutritious fiber. If you eat it that way, your stomach has really got to work in order to get at the carbs. That's a good thing. Of course, outside of a cocktail party's crudit table, we almost never eat broccoli raw. First we wash it, then we throw away the toughest part of the stalk, and then we cut it up and boil it or steam it until it's soft and warm.
That's also a fair approximation of what your stomach does to food -- through the combination of churning muscles and the potent gastric juices and acids it produces, your stomach physically tears food to shreds and partly liquefies it. Whether it's in a pot on the stove or in your stomach, the same essential process happens to the broccoli and everything else you eat.
In the case of processed foods, digestion begins even earlier -- in fact, it starts long before the food hits the supermarket shelf. Consider that loaf of sliced white bread. First the wheat is stripped of the bran and fiber. Then it's pulverized into the finest white flour. The baking process puffs it up into light, airy slices of bread. No wonder your stomach makes such quick work of it. A slice of white bread hits your bloodstream with the same jolt you'd get by eating a tablespoon of table sugar right from the bowl! Marie Antoinette would have a hard time telling it from cake, and the truth is that there's not much difference.
Whereas real, old-fashioned bread -- the coarse, chewy kind with a thick crust and visible pieces of grain, the type you can only buy from a bakery or a health food store -- puts your stomach to work. It, too, is made of wheat, but the grains haven't been processed to death. You may even see pieces of bran there in the bread. It contains starches, which are just chains of sugars, but they are bound up with the fiber, and so digestion takes longer. As a result, the sugars are released gradually into the bloodstream. If there's no sudden surge in blood sugar, your pancreas won't produce as much insulin, and you won't get the exaggerated craving for more carbs.
This is crucial to understanding how your body operates: The more food is preprocessed, the more fattening it will be.
The good news, of course, is that you can partly control the glycemic index of your food just by choosing how you'll prepare it.
Take a potato, for instance. An incredibly versatile vegetable. You can do a hundred things with it, from soup to vodka. And what you do with it determines how fattening it is.
The worst way, from the glycemic index perspective? Baked. The process of baking it renders the starches most easily accessible to your digestive system.
Slightly better? Believe it or not, that baked potato will be less fattening topped with a dollop of low-fat cheese or sour cream. The calorie count will be slightly higher, but the fat contained in the cheese or sour cream will slow down the digestive process, thereby lessening the amount of insulin that potato prompts your body to make.
(Still, don't think that when you're at the mall and stop for a quick baked potato at one of those franchise places that you're having a healthy snack. A baked potato in midafternoon practically guarantees that you'll be starving for carbs by dinner. You'd be better off having a small ice cream or even a dark chocolate bar instead of that baked potato.)
Better than baked? Mashed or boiled, due to the difference in the cooking process, but also because you'd probably eat them with a little butter or sour cream, and the fat slows the digestive process. Even French fries are better than baked, believe it or not, because of the fat in which they're cooked. Of course, the same is true of potato chips, but don't be misled: None of these are good choices for someone on the South Beach Diet. The type of potato you eat is also a big factor in all this. Red-skinned potatoes are highest in carbs. White-skinned are better. New potatoes, better yet -- in every vegetable or fruit, the younger when picked, the lower the carb count. If you must indulge, do so sparingly. And try sweet potatoes instead of white.
I recently read an article on the book, "The South Beach Diet." It talked about carbs and their affects on the body and obesity. Although most of us already know this information, I found it was so simply stated and easy to understand that it was worth posting for everyone to read....
The following is an excerpt from the book The South Beach Diet by Arthur Agatston, M.D. Published by Rodale. © 2003 by Arthur Agatston, M.D.
As we've seen, the equation behind most obesity is simple: The faster the sugars and starches you eat are processed and absorbed into your bloodstream, the fatter you get.
Therefore, anything that speeds the process by which your body digests carbohydrates is bad for your diet, and anything that slows it down is good. Digestion is simply the action of your stomach breaking food down into its components; anything that keeps food intact longer is beneficial for people trying to lose weight.
Keeping that in mind, it's important to recognize that the process of digestion begins even before you swallow your food. In fact, it starts the moment you start preparing it. Example: Raw broccoli is crunchy, hard, cold, and covered with a layer of nutritious fiber. If you eat it that way, your stomach has really got to work in order to get at the carbs. That's a good thing. Of course, outside of a cocktail party's crudit table, we almost never eat broccoli raw. First we wash it, then we throw away the toughest part of the stalk, and then we cut it up and boil it or steam it until it's soft and warm.
That's also a fair approximation of what your stomach does to food -- through the combination of churning muscles and the potent gastric juices and acids it produces, your stomach physically tears food to shreds and partly liquefies it. Whether it's in a pot on the stove or in your stomach, the same essential process happens to the broccoli and everything else you eat.
In the case of processed foods, digestion begins even earlier -- in fact, it starts long before the food hits the supermarket shelf. Consider that loaf of sliced white bread. First the wheat is stripped of the bran and fiber. Then it's pulverized into the finest white flour. The baking process puffs it up into light, airy slices of bread. No wonder your stomach makes such quick work of it. A slice of white bread hits your bloodstream with the same jolt you'd get by eating a tablespoon of table sugar right from the bowl! Marie Antoinette would have a hard time telling it from cake, and the truth is that there's not much difference.
Whereas real, old-fashioned bread -- the coarse, chewy kind with a thick crust and visible pieces of grain, the type you can only buy from a bakery or a health food store -- puts your stomach to work. It, too, is made of wheat, but the grains haven't been processed to death. You may even see pieces of bran there in the bread. It contains starches, which are just chains of sugars, but they are bound up with the fiber, and so digestion takes longer. As a result, the sugars are released gradually into the bloodstream. If there's no sudden surge in blood sugar, your pancreas won't produce as much insulin, and you won't get the exaggerated craving for more carbs.
This is crucial to understanding how your body operates: The more food is preprocessed, the more fattening it will be.
The good news, of course, is that you can partly control the glycemic index of your food just by choosing how you'll prepare it.
Take a potato, for instance. An incredibly versatile vegetable. You can do a hundred things with it, from soup to vodka. And what you do with it determines how fattening it is.
The worst way, from the glycemic index perspective? Baked. The process of baking it renders the starches most easily accessible to your digestive system.
Slightly better? Believe it or not, that baked potato will be less fattening topped with a dollop of low-fat cheese or sour cream. The calorie count will be slightly higher, but the fat contained in the cheese or sour cream will slow down the digestive process, thereby lessening the amount of insulin that potato prompts your body to make.
(Still, don't think that when you're at the mall and stop for a quick baked potato at one of those franchise places that you're having a healthy snack. A baked potato in midafternoon practically guarantees that you'll be starving for carbs by dinner. You'd be better off having a small ice cream or even a dark chocolate bar instead of that baked potato.)
Better than baked? Mashed or boiled, due to the difference in the cooking process, but also because you'd probably eat them with a little butter or sour cream, and the fat slows the digestive process. Even French fries are better than baked, believe it or not, because of the fat in which they're cooked. Of course, the same is true of potato chips, but don't be misled: None of these are good choices for someone on the South Beach Diet. The type of potato you eat is also a big factor in all this. Red-skinned potatoes are highest in carbs. White-skinned are better. New potatoes, better yet -- in every vegetable or fruit, the younger when picked, the lower the carb count. If you must indulge, do so sparingly. And try sweet potatoes instead of white.
