Secret Sugar
One of the ‘Red Tops’ had an article on the hidden sugar in so-called ‘Health’ drinks this week, but do you know how much sugar (carbohydrate) is hidden in your diet?
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Part of the problem of tracking your carb intake is that sugar has more guises than the Scarlet Pimpernell!
Glucose, sucrose, fructose, lactose, maltose, amylose, cheerios to name a few (OK, that last one was to see if you were still paying attention!).
So what’s the remedy?
Well there’s more than one way to skin a cat but we find limiting our sources of carbohydrate to just vegetables is a deceptively simple means of tracking our carb intake (without painstakingly counting calories). At the same time we maximise the amount of vitamins, minerals and fibre we receive.
Not only does restricting carbohydrate to vegetables (with perhaps a little fruit thrown in the mix) ensure plenty of nutrient dense food, it makes over-eating a thing of the past. Try eating 20 cups of broccoli (the equivalent of 1 cup of pasta) and you’ll see why!
Of course eating 20 cups of broccoli is not our idea of fun, so we tend to include some starchier veg (e.g. butternut squash, sweet potato etc.) as well, especially after training.
What’s more, if you’ve had the good sense to smear some grass-fed butter onto your veg, you’ll also get Vitamin K2, Vitamin A, Vitamin E, B-Vitamins Omega-3, and tonnes of flavour into the bargain. Of course you’ll already be aware (because of all the useful advice from Government health agencies) that some vitamins (such as Vit E) actually require the presence of fat in the digestive tract in order to be absorbed.
Experts’ will argue that this isn’t a ‘balanced’ diet because we’ve removed “entire food groups” (grains, pulses & dairy) from our eating plan. This seems logical until you consider that humans thrived for millions of years before these ‘essential food groups’ were even created!
As for balance, you only have to type a typical day of eating meat, fish, seeds, nuts into any nutritional analysis software (Fitday, Nutritiondata etc.) to observe the sheer variety and density of micronutrients involved.
In short, you couldn’t possibly hope to achieve the same levels of vitamins and minerals from bread, pasta, cereal, beans, and pulses. If you’re still concerned that vegetables alone aren’t enough to sustain your blood-sugar, simply try it for a week and see. If, after a week or two, you still feel like you need more carbs to fuel your activity levels, then ramp them up gradually (some rice or potato after exercise may be enough). This way you learn about your own body’s needs and can observe exactly at what level you best operate, and at what point you start laying down fat.
Here’s a website for further reading on carbohydrate intake. Just remember, you need to find out what works for you (specifically what works for you now, not what worked for you when you were 21 or what worked for you when you were training for the London marathon!).
