The Confusion With Carbs

There is a huge confusion about carbs. Are they healthy or not?

There seems to be a lot of confusion about what carbs are.

Carbs, or carbohydrates, are everything that comes from a plant. The name doesn’t differentiate between good carbs and bad carbs. For example, kale and all greens are carbs. White sugar and white flour are carbs.

When you get people telling you to avoid carbs, what they mean (perhaps unknowingly themselves) is to avoid the PROCESSED carbs. Processing that involves stripping away all the good parts (eg molasses from sugar cane, husk from whole wheat).

When you want to remove part of a whole food, it has to undergo a process. That process of removing part of the whole food causes the end user a problem. Why? Because we evolved (ie our body needs the whole and knows what to do with it) consuming the whole food.

In addition, the act of processing almost invariably uses harsh, or even hazardous, chemicals. Even when this is washed away, some will inevitably remain.

Over time, that can accumulate, causing health problems, that no medic will consider.

Whether you agree or not, essentially we are plant eaters, herbivores. It isn’t an opinion. There are a host of anatomical and physiological facts showing this to be true (see my free ebook).

Apart from this ridiculous notion of making sugar, flour and rice white, oils also go through a tortuous processing. Seed oils, fish oils. Yet seeds, in their whole state, are abundantly healthy. Look at chia seeds and flaxseeds, pumpkin seeds. All seeds are sproutable. And sprouting offers a whole new level of nutrition.

Not only are the parts that are stripped away needed to digest the digestible parts, the fibre is needed to ensure a healthy passage through the digestive tract.

People are far too focused on protein. Protein levels in plant foods is abundant. A healthy, varied, plant based diet will never be without adequate protein for us.

A more worrying area is fibre. People need to consume a diet high in fibre for optimum health. As Denis Burkitt delightfully commented “a nation with small stools need big hospitals.”

And fibre comes from CARBS! Eat more carbs! But the unprocessed carbs. The WHOLE carbs.