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What do Carbohydrates Do For You?
By gems4friends | September 16, 2008
Carbohydrates (carbs, for short) are one of the three macro-nutrients that your body needs for proper functioning. (Micro-nutrients are things like vitamins, minerals, etc.) The other macro-nutrients are proteins and fats.
Proteins are the building blocks for your muscles, organs, tissues, etc. Fats are necessary for long term energy storage, they carry certain forms of vitamins and nutrients (Vitamin E, for example) and your body needs fats for many of its metabolic processes.
Carbohydrates are the fuel that your body uses for energy. While it can use proteins and fats for that energy, which is why low-carb diets work, it prefers to use the carbs. They are easier to process for energy than either the fats or the proteins and your body gets more energy “bang for the buck” with carbs.
The Rings
On the molecular level carboydrates are ring molecules. A “simple” carb, like glucose, is one ring of six carbon atoms. Just like the ring on your finger. Table sugar is two of these rings. Starches and “complex carbohydrates” are made up of many of these rings. This is why your body takes longer to digest the complex carbs, it has to break them down into the individual rings first and then use them for energy.
This is also why a meal of simple carbs will blast your blast your blood sugar sky high. Your body can use them almost immediately. Have a glass of glucose or a soda and wham! Sugar is immediately pumped into the system and your blood suger levels leap. Insulin is secreted into the blood and the insulin causes the sugar levels to drop, along with your energy.
A meal of complex carbs takes longer to digest and as a result doesn’t slam sugars into your system, rather the complex carbs provide longer term energy. Fats and proteins take even longer to digest and convert into the carbs your body needs.
update: A dietician (in the comments) pointed out something with that last line, said line not being strictly accurate. Proteins are metabolized to glycogen then to glucose. Fats are broken down to ketones. Your body uses both, for energy, just fine. See the comments for more.
No Carbs?
Extreme low-carb diets, such as they first part of the Atkins Diet, are not recommended for anything other than short term use. Even the Atkins diet brings you back into carbs after than first section, but they are the complex carbs. Simple carbs are almost completely abandoned.
As far as energy goes, though, your body only needs so much at one time and it can only store so much at one time. An athlete needs more than someone sitting in front of a computer all day, but even they have limits to how much they need right now. Those extra carbs are stored in two ways.
One way is conversion into glycogen, a type of starch, which is then stored in the muscles for near term energy reserves. The other way they are stored is fat. Your body can only store so much excess carbohydrate as glycogen, the rest goes to fat. (This is a little over-simplified, but close enough.)
In addition to being converted to fat, excess simple carbs over a long period of time can lead to a variety of health issues, diabetes and heart issues being among them.
So What’s a Simple Carb?
So what foods are the simple carbs? Any kind of sugar, rice, white flour, potatoes, Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, etc. These are all “high glycemic index” (GI) foods. The GI is just a measure of how much a given food will raise your blood sugar as compared to a glass of glucose.
Fruits tend to be in the medium GI range and most veggies are pretty low. Go to Google.com and look for “high glycemic foods” or “glycemic index” and you’ll find charts with examples of various foods and their ratings.
So while you body does needs carbs for fuel it doesn’t need a ton of them and it works best if they come in slowly and steadily, rather than in a burst. You may have heard of the “eat several small meals” plans? This is one of the reasons they work. Your body has the time to properly process the carbs and so uses them, rather than storing them as fat.
Get Big Fast
Want to gain weight fast? Eat one big meal a day, preferably in the evening, and sleep afterwards. That’s how the Sumo wrestlers of Japan do it.
What to do?
There’s no “magic pill” to losing weight, but there are several plans which will speed up your weight loss quite nicely. One system that covers good carbs, bad carbs, and everything else is burn the fat, feed the muscle. Highly recommended, check it out now for the real scoop on how all this really works.
Tags: carboydrates, diets, low carb diets, macro nutrients
Topics: Diet | 10 Comments »
March 25th, 2009 at 6:08 pm
i needed 2 research simple/complex carbs 4 a assignment @ school. this helped a lot!
June 4th, 2009 at 4:00 am
Thank you for sharing this information. I never knew anything about carbs until now.
June 19th, 2009 at 7:32 am
this is a very good post carbohydrates are important to consume each and everyday
October 29th, 2009 at 12:29 pm
As a Registered Dietitian I should point out a misstatement in the above post (in the last paragraph under “The Rings”). Fat and protein DO NOT convert into carbohydrate– they do provide calories (energy) but are broken down into their own components, NOT into blood glucose. Carbohydrates are the only energy source your brain can use as fatty acids and amino acids cannot cross the blood-brain barrier (another strike against Atkins). CW
November 19th, 2009 at 2:40 pm
You’re right, the statement in the article isn’t strictly correct. Proteins and fats don’t directly cross the blood/brain barrier, but their breakdown products do cross that barrier. Proteins break down into glycogen (and then to glucose), which the body uses quite happily, and fats break down into ketones, which the body will also metabolize quite happily. The main issue with the ketones is the foul breath one tends to get on a zero carb diet. This is why various native peoples (Eskimos, Amazonian Indians, etc.) live healthy lives on zero carb diets.
By the way, Atkins works, it’s healthy, and is is not a zero carb diet plan. People stop reading the plan after the cover blurb and miss the many pages of scientific references supporting his views.
January 2nd, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Its mechanics is a practical training discussion, the process more of an existential-experiential, ethereal conversation, and its effects is a concrete discussion.
January 24th, 2010 at 11:03 pm
One must really eat a great mix of both carbohydrates and proteins to achieve a balanced, healthy diet. And I fully agree with your last statement that there’s really no magic pill when it comes to losing weight. It’s just sad that there are still many people out there who are in this illusory bubble, thinking that they can shed all the unwanted pounds (which took years to accumulate) in just a matter of weeks or months! Anyway, this is a very informative post. Thank you!
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February 21st, 2010 at 3:15 pm
i googled this subject because i knew very little about carbs and wanted some facts to back up my statements. one thing i think you may have left out is that with ANY diet a little exercise (cardio, muscular) is needed to properly utilize the intake.
March 2nd, 2010 at 10:10 am
Roy that is a really good point. Carbohydrates are really important for utilizing your work out and likewise exercise is extremely important for implementing your carb intake.
one of my favorite things about this article was the mention of eating little amounts of carbs throughout the day and not eating a lot at one sitting. I sometimes struggle with this and although it seems obvious, I have never read it so clear. I am going to follow this advice. so thank you!
February 21st, 2011 at 3:13 pm
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