Crazy about carbs (Road to healthy part 3)

I bring to you the pure basics of eating

Picture is from here.

Today I thought I'd start talking a bit more about good nutrition. I feel like a great start would be to talk about our macronutrients, which are carbohydrates, fats and proteins. Since I don't want to make these too long, then I'll make a separate post tedicated to each nutrient.

It was one of the first things we studied about in our nutriton class and I think it is important to know, why we need each one of those nutrients in our diet.

The recommended amount of each nutrient, that we should we get can vary from person to person, it depends on how much you work out, your gender, weight and many other factors. Therefore the recommendations are not given in grams, but in percentage of your energy requirement.

So I'll start with carbohydrates or carbs as they are more commonly known. I feel like carbs get a lot of injustice, because they're thought to be unhealthy and a lot of people, when they're on a diet, decide to cut down on carbs. I'm still not quite sure, where such a habbit has stemmed from, since in reality about 50%-60% of our energy should come from carbohydrates. They're our main source of energy.

It depends a lot on the carbs that your having, though. Refined carbohydrates, such as in white bread and white sugar, are not nutritionally very good in quality, because of all the processes they go through, a lot of the nutrients are also stripped away. But energy wise, they give us the exact same amount of energy as proteins, for example.

Also fruit and vegetables consist of mainly carbs and I think every person could do with eating a bit more of them. Foods high in carbs are usually also high in fiber, which we need for good digestion.

If our body doesn't have enough carbohydrates, then it'll have to find energy elsewhere and often the body starts to brake down glucose from the proteins in our body and that can lead to a weakened immunesystem.

Eating too much carbohydrates can  lead to hightened blood sugar levels and if they're constantly very high, then that can cause type II diabetes for example.

So as a conclusion I don't think the carbs that we have in our diet are necessarily bad, it's more often the things that we have alongside the carbs, that might be more harmful to our health. 

It's important to know, that there's nothing that you should completly cut out from your diet, there aren't good and bad foods, there are foods that we should eat more of and foods that we should eat less of, moderation and balance is the key in everything, also in good nutrition.

At least that's how I feel, I'm sure there are still a lot of people who think that carbs are the devil and obviously every person is entitled to their own opinion. These are the facts that I've learnt and believe in myself, when it comes to my diet.

So that's it for today, tomorrow I'll write more in depth about the complicated life of fats.

Until next time, 

Kaiela :)

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