Pass The Carbs, Please?
The Gazillion Dollar Question
If there is one topic that has such a subjective and wide range of answers, it’s this. Has anyone asked you what your diet is like?
Follow up question to that is, what did you tell them?
“Oh yeah, I eat pretty healthy.”
Well, I politely disagree with that statement.
Picture a sliding scale of 0–100.
0 being the most unhealthy eater and 100 being the most healthy.
That’s a pretty broad range of interpretation, isn’t it?
It is such a gray topic that doesn’t deliver as black and white of an answer as we would like to assume.
The fallacy with that, especially for healthcare providers, is that we take the individual’s subjective interpretation as truth in the most superficial understanding possible.
Our healthcare system is not meant to educate individuals on proper dietary health. Rather, we are instilled to ridicule our patients based on their dietary habits and talk down to them in the most insecure fashion.
Here is something that seems pretty unlikely, but is the unfortunate truth. Most healthcare providers have a nominal understanding of nutrition, at best. We are so quick to “punt” those questions to a registered dietician or nutritionist to save our ego and preserve our “all-knowing authority” that those questions are below our medical focused minds.
Can We Embrace The Change?
Fortunately, more and more providers are becoming increasingly aware of how impactful macro and micronutrients are for our FOUNDATIONAL health and well being.
We spend, at best, 1 semester learning about nutrition in a post-graduate educational institution so we can focus on pathophysiology and biochemistry with medication prescription.
Doesn’t that seem like the scale is tipped a bit?
I mean, what ass-backward program emphasizes prescriptive medications over educating their patients on how to eat a well-balanced diet that could easily prevent chronic disease and cardiac issues?
We prioritize a pharmacy driven system because we don’t want to put in hard work and change our lifestyle. We want a magical “pill” to do all the hard work for us.
We have evolved into a self-entitled society that doesn’t cherish hard work, rather we reward laziness and whinners.
What happened?
We placed too much power and trust in a system that never had our best intentions in mind. We lost our self-respect, self-dignity, and self-worth and gained self-entitlement, ignorance, and self-loathing.
Not exactly a good thing here….
2+2=5
Getting back to healthful dietary choices… it never fails that when I ask someone what they eat on my initial evaluation, 9 out of 10 times I hear “good.”
Upon further questioning of their “good diet,” I find out how far from “good” it really is.
Why is that?
Our society and FDA have almost completely brainwashed us into thinking we need a diet full of whole grains, low fats, and minimal proteins.
That has transcended for years across many different lifespans. Thankfully for us, there has been unbiased and unequivocal science that can now thwart those OLD ideologies and bring to light the truth.
It’s really not that hard, and we make it much more complicated than we need to.
The same rule will always apply in every single situation. If it has a nutritional label…DON’T EAT IT.
By default, there will be an increase in consumption of healthy foods and a drastic decrease in mass-produced foods that have gluten, industrialized seed oils, and numerous other chemicals that we still don’t know the deleterious effects perpetuated on our bodies.
There is no “diet” to get you to where you want to go. Just the facts of what we know.
Highly processed foods have many ingredients that our bodies don’t know how to break down and digest, which leads to inflammation and we know that inflammation is the cause of ALL chronic diseases.
This can include, but not limited to; asthma, arthritis, Crohn’s, high blood pressure, kidney disease, heart disease, Alzheimer’s, diverticulitis, strokes, cancers, etc.
The Essence of Livelihood is Food
Food is the best medicine out there. Somehow we lost that knowledge along the way and decided we need to take a pill for every ailment and continue to ignore the elephant in the room, our diet.
Looking strictly at the pathophysiology of our bodies, we need fatty acids and amino acids as the building blocks of life.
There are no carbohydrate acids that exist. Sure, carbs break down into sugars and we utilize those sugars as energy. False.
Sugar for energy is just a lame excuse. We can and HAVE manipulated our bodies to utilize fats as energy to be more efficient for a source of fuel.
So why are we still stuck in the old paradigm that we need carbs to maintain a healthy life?
We have been manipulated, lied to, and bamboozled for big food’s bottom dollar.
Remember that not all “scientific” studies are created equal. Many studies are unfortunately sponsored by big food companies to help sway the results in a certain way. This is what is known as “bad science.”
It gives a bad name for the scientific process and shows us that just about anyone can be bought, given the right incentive.
Remember, fatty acids are from fats that we consume like avocados, fishes, nuts, etc. Amino acids are from proteins that we consume from meats.
Chemically speaking, carbs play no role in the “essential” part of our life, yet we continue to eat a diet rich with carbs, trans fats, and minimal protein at best.
I am not saying carbs are bad, but I am saying that not all carbs are created equal.
A carbohydrate coming from broccoli is much different than a carbohydrate coming from a bag of chips.
One is nutritionally dense, whereas the other is nutritionally empty and gets stored as fat and excess triglycerides.
Everything we eat has a downstream effect and we need to understand that process in order to impactfully change our health and wellbeing.
To sum, eat more protein, more healthy fats, and really minimize the PROCESSED carb intake.
It is such a simple concept that our ancestors knew long ago.
In fact, that is how we have survived for so long as a species. Nothing they ate had a nutritional label. Everything was from animals and from the land.
Everything from the land was seasonal and never in abundance.
There were times of unintended fasting due to poor harvest or not capitalizing on the hunt. However, they still thrived in food scarcity because that is how our bodies were meant to live.
We are not well adapted to food abundance and this is where insulin resistance comes into play with chronic inflammation and disease processes.
If it has a nutritional label, don’t eat it.
Be strong. Be brave.
