Why Refined Carbohydrates Are Bad For You

I recently saw an advert for a beer that is low in carbohydrates. I was struck by the fact that a mainstream advert was actually implying that it's good to lower your intake of carbohydrates.

Of course, it's much too early to assume that the mainstream may be catching on to the fact that if everyone put as much effort into cutting their carbohydrate intake as they put into cutting cholesterol, the obesity epidemic, the type 2 diabetes epidemic, and the cardiovascular disease epidemic might eventually become non-epidemics.

But as an HSI member reminded me in a recent e-mail, all carbohydrates are not the same. So if you're trying to cut back on the carbohydrates in your diet, then it's useful to know which ones are the real culprits, and why.

Carbohydrates 101

The e-mail came from a member named John who said, 'You should be educating the people about the difference between refined carbohydrates and complex carbohydrates. Refined carbohydrates are bad and complex carbohydrates are good.'

John is on the right track here, but we need to tweak the terminology a little bit. I asked our nutrition specialist, DR Allan Spreen, to elaborate on John's e-mail, and he started out by noting that carbohydrate foods are basically broken down into two groups: 'simple' and 'complex' carbohydrates. And both of these groups can be further broken down into 'refined' and 'unrefined.'

Nutrient needs

Let's start with the 'refined simple' carbohydrates - what Dr. Spreen calls 'the sweet stuff' - which includes 'all the sugars of one form or another.' And as he points out, the key word is 'refined' because it represents the removal of nutrients required for the metabolism of the contained sugar. Without those nutrients, Dr. Spreen says, 'Your body must draw from body stores of nutrients to metabolise the sugar. And draw it will. Once those stores are overtaxed disease sets in, or at least undesirable symptoms that hit wherever your body's weakest link happens to be. This removal of nutrients is the key to our demise, in my opinion.

'But, it gets worse. Not only does the refining process remove nutrients, but it also concentrates the sugar within the simple carb food. This causes overstress on the pancreas, the organ responsible for removing sugar (glucose) from the bloodstream and shoving it into muscle cells to be burned as fuel. This overstress manifests as insulin over-secretion, causing (for a while, anyway, until it gives up) low blood sugar swings with a subsequent vicious cycle of blood sugar over-shooting and under-shooting as the body tries to auto-regulate.

'Ah, but it gets even worse. Another problem in most refining processes of simple carbohydrates is the fact that nearly all fibre is removed. The fibre slows the release of the sugar into the system, easing the signal to the pancreas to release too much insulin too fast.'

And it's the fibre in fruits - which are unrefined simple carbohydrates - that helps make the sugar in fruit so much healthier than the sugar in refined carbohydrates. That's why, as Dr. Spreen points out, the same healthy benefits are not found in fruit juice, 'which is concentrated almost universally, and processed in other ways. It's better to eat your fruit, with clean edible skins. That way you've lowered the amount of sugar taken in, along with the fact that the natural fibre is still on board and the sugars are not as concentrated as they would be otherwise.'

The good and the bad

As John stated in his e-mail, 'complex carbohydrates are good.' And generally speaking, there is some truth in that. But Dr. Spreen points out that, 'going complex' may not be all it's cracked up to be.

'The basic complex carbohydrates are the edible starches. That's cereals, grains and the like, along with most vegetables. Most of this group makes up the huge 'base' of the so-called Food Pyramid; that moronic image from government bureaucrats, which is in large part responsible for the unimaginable amount of obesity rampant in this country.

'Starches are simple carb molecules (sugars) that are linked together by special bonds before they can be used by the body as sugar. That can be a good thing, since the enzyme process needed for that breakdown takes time to work, and that delay slows the release of the sugars into our system (the same problem caused by refined simple carbohydrates).

'Unfortunately, the same principles apply in the case of refined complex carbohydrates as to the simple ones: the sugars can be concentrated; they can have the necessary nutrients as well as the fibre removed.

'As soon as a starch hits enzymes in your mouth, the starches begin the digestion process, and breaks down to (you guessed it) sugar. If those starches start without the nutrients and especially the fibre they originally contained, they are not only inferior foods, but they're also inferior foods with automatically concentrated starches, because the fibre's gone. As soon as the starch breaks down to sugar, you're back to a refined simple carb.'

Hot potato

Nearly all our starches today are refined. And according to Dr. Spreen, it's extremely difficult (if not impossible) to find 100% unrefined pastas, breads or cereals. Yet we're told that pasta and bagels are excellent 'diet foods'!

And then there's the baked potato. Writing about this 'third food item thrown into the daily 'diet' lunch,' Dr. Spreen says, 'The baked potato is as close to a pure, refined starch as you can get without actually refining it. I'd tell patients, if they felt obliged to eat a baked potato, to shell out most of it, add some butter, and eat the remainder, including the skin. That's not only where the fibre is, but also where much of the nutrition is, too.

'So, be careful when you dig into a load of pasta or bagels. In terms of trying to lose weight, you're literally playing with a 'hot potato'.'