Carbohydrates | The Nutrition Guru!

How the Body Uses Carbohydrates

Kiwi

One of the most misunderstood concepts is how the body uses carbohydrates.

Your body breaks down carbohydrates into glucose, which is the best fuel source for your body. Carbohydrates are classified two ways - simple and complex. While complex carbohydrates should make up the majority of your calories, a smaller amount can come from simple carbohydrates without health issues.

Complex carbohydrates are long chains of glucose. Because these chains are long your body uses more effort and takes a longer period of time to break into glucose molecules. This 'delay' causes a slow release of glucose into the blood stream. As a result, long-chain carbohydrates can provide usable fuel for about three to four hours, with a moderate increase in insulin.

In addition, complex carbohydrates also provide:

fiber
vitamins
minerals
phytochemicals

Food sources of healthy carbohydrates are:

breads (100% whole grain)

whole grain cereals

whole grain pasta

brown rice

beans

nuts (contains significant level of dietary fat)

all vegetables

seeds (contains significant level of dietary fat)

For maximum health benefits, focus on green leafy vegetables, and whole grains. The body uses carbohydrates, especially long-chain, to provide sustained energy and a host of micro-nutrients.

In contrast, simple carbohydrates are a small chain containing two molecules of sugars. These smaller chains of carbs act to provide quick energy when digested in the body. This quick energy makes them a good choice for fast fuel, and are a preferred source of fuel for athletes during training and competition. Do not expect to feel satisfied for more than thirty to sixty minutes.

When eaten indiscriminately these can cause a 'rebound' of rapidly increasing your blood sugar and your body overcompensating with insulin. Your insulin pushes excess blood sugar into the fat cells and causes a significant drop in blood sugar. You then may feel faint and crave more sugar to get the blood sugar back up. This creates a very nasty cycle that can be difficult to break.

Small-chain sugars are found in:

fruits

milk

candy

table sugar

processed grain products

Contrary to popular opinion, carbohydrates in and of themselves will not make you fat. The reality is, your body uses carbohydrates for fuel. If you eat only the amount of carbohydrates you need these aren't stored as fat.

Key Points:

main source of fuel

two types: complex and simple

provide a variety of vitamins and minerals

found at the bottom of the Food Guide Pyramid

healthy carbohydrates can be found in your grocer's produce section

Using a Meal Planner

One of the most important tools you can use to determine the right amount of carbohydrates is a meal planner. These come in all types but an online meal planner works best for most people.

At The Nutrition Guru! we recommend and endorse the VitaBot Online Meal Planner.

For you to reach your goals you must have the most accurate up-to-date food nutrient information. You could take a spreadsheet and get access to the USDA Food Nutrient database. However, you would have to look up each food individually and then transfer that data to your spreadsheet.

The amount of work involved keeps most people from creating meal plans manually. But that's not the end of it.

Once you collected enough food data to put a meal together, how do you know what amounts of carbs, protein, and fats to have in a healthy meal? And what about the right amount of micro-nutrients, vitamins, minerals, etc.?

Fortunately the VitaBot Meal Planner does this all for you. By selecting your favorite foods VitaBot lets you know instantly if you are reaching your nutritional goals.

VitaBot is designed to take meal planning to a whole new level. In an industry focused primarily on counting calories, VitaBot was designed to shift the focus toward balanced nutrition.

How does VitaBot do this?

VitaBot lets advanced mathematics "think" for you, and helps you easily put foods together, not just to balance calories, but to balance micronutrients as well.

VitaBot performs hundreds of thousands of calculations for every set of nutritional suggestions.

The equations and the resulting suggestions are designed to allow the nutritional data to speak directly to you, without any predetermined bias.

And how does VitaBot know what your nutrient recommendations should be?

The National Academies of Science, through the Institute of Medicine, routinely releases detailed reports summarizing the findings of thousands of the world's top nutrition researchers. VitaBot uses some of the advanced mathematical methods from robotic science to make it much easier to apply the full richness of these findings to your daily life.

This approach creates an amazing new way to look at foods. Allowing the data to speak for itself reveals basic truths such as, "Apples for Fiber", or "Almonds for Vitamin E and Omega 6". But by allowing the system to search the full range of nutritional data, without human bias, a wealth of nutritional knowledge is revealed that most of have not been privileged to experience.

VitaBot takes this highly advanced technology, and through an extremely straightforward set of user-friendly interfaces, makes it accessible to you, right now.

Try VitaBot risk free!

Create your VitaBot account today, for less than the cost of a medium cheese pizza, and try VitaBot for yourself. Use it for 5 full days. If you don't think that the VitaBot meal planner can change the way you approach your meal planning and impact your nutritional goals for the better, then cancel your account within 5 days and receive a FULL - 100% REFUND, guaranteed, no questions asked.

You have nothing to lose! Click the subscribe button above and receive instant access to VitaBot!

Happy Nutrition!

Discover VitaBot Meal Planning

Low Carb Diet

Please Give Us Your Feedback Below

The Nutrition Guru!

Healthy Meal Planner

Join VitaBot Now!

Guide to Meal Planning

Articles on Carbohydrates

Suggested links