The Practical Low Point

Sugar, they say, is not very good for health. Once you have a cola, the sugar in it is converted to glucose in the body. Guess what happens to the rice that you eat? It too gets quickly converted into glu­cose in the body. This is not the case with the other food groups, proteins and fats. What sugar does to the body by spiking blood sugar, so does all carbohydrates, and it is this principle that led to the popularity of extremely low carbohydrate diets ranging from Atkins to Keto. While they are effective, the overwhelming majority are however unable to sustain these diets.

The human body needs glucose for energy but carbohy­drate consumption needs to be tempered drastically because there is an increasing cor­relation with the lifestyle disease epidemic that almost the entire world is going through. If a low carbohydrate diet is good, it was not clear just what exactly it meant. Everyone and every diet had their own definition of what was low. A paper just published in the Nutrients journal on myths and facts about low carbohy­drate diets has an answer: below 130 grams. This, it notes, is a good carbohydrate consumption limit, getting around the problem of the diet not being practical. The peer reviewed paper also came out with a food pyramid that inverts the traditional one. Instead of carbohydrates forming the broad base, the study recommends for those with metabolic disor­ders to have proteins, fats and whole-fat dairy as the biggest component of their daily food intake.

A simple reason why carbohydrates, especially in its simple and processed forms, create health issues is that it is very easy to overeat and as bodies age, the ability to metabolise the glucose decreases. The immediate signal of that is the broadening waistline, which again has a correlation with numerous ailments. Indians have tra­ditionally had an extremely high carbohydrate diet and the effects of it on bodies can be seen by simply looking around while walking down any road in the country. But then also go home and look at yourself in the mirror.

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