Lets talk about carbohydrates.
Having talked about protein and fats in previous blogs, today we’re going to talk about carbohydrates.
So if you ever see CHO that is just shorthand for carbohydrates and when we’re thinking of carbohydrates we’re thinking of foods such as potatoes, sweet potato, pasta, breads, oats, rice, fruits etc and then we also have other kinds of carbs which are the more processed ones which are foods such as sweets, cakes, some other sugary foods etc.
Here are some more insights into carbohydrates themselves:
Carbohydrates provide 4 calories per gram, the same as protein does but as we said in the previous blog about protein, protein takes more calories to digest.
Carbohydrates aid in digestion which is very important as we have fibre which is very important for your digestive health.
They provide volume to the diet so often when we think of our minimally processed carbohydrates they provide size and bulk without too many calories, often so they can help to keep us feel full.
They can aid sleep as they can aid in the release of serotonin and by having a high carbohydrate meal before bed helps people go to sleep. Also whilst we’re on this subject, some people say that carbohydrates make them feel really sleepy but regardless of what type of meal that you have, well the chances are that it’s just because that person has had a big meal in general because when we have large meals it takes a lot of calories to digest that meal and so then our body starts to feel lethargic and tired, this is known as postprandial somnolence and this is basically just the effort of your body to digest your food and you’ll find that it’s not just carbohydrates for a lot of the time it’s also just any large meal whether that be a high-fat meal or a high protein meal that actually makes you slightly sleepy.
Carbohydrates are fuel for the brain. Our nervous system and our brain pretty much thrives only on glucose so on carbohydrates and it can adjust after long periods of very low carbohydrates and this is something called ketosis but predominantly your brain prefers carbohydrates.
Carbohydrates are what we call non-essential (this is where some of the debate comes in when it comes to carbohydrates) and this is because we can make carbohydrate from proteins as well and our liver can also help to produce lots of glucose which our blood sugar can be controlled and our brain can use the glucose so actually you could live on a zero carbohydrate diet but you’d probably be pretty miserable on it as who doesn’t love carbs right?
But you could do this so they are actually non-essential but again, there’s that difference between surviving and thriving and if you want to be able to enjoy a varied diet, if you want to be able to train hard and if you want to be able to function optimally then carbohydrates are a must.
We use carbohydrates by storing them in our muscles to use as fuel when we exercise. Any hard training, anything that’s beyond a gentle jog we have to use carbohydrates to produce the energy and so if you’ve got low energy within the muscles so low carbohydrate you’re not going to be able to train hard and if you want to reshape your body, if you want to burn fat or if you want to perform and get stronger for whatever reason like for an event for example, well carbohydrates will probably be very important.
We also store carbohydrates in our liver to control blood sugar and to keep it stable. There’s this kind of fad/idea that you eat a high carbohydrate meal and then your blood sugar shoots up then it crashes down and then you get hungry or tired and so then you have to eat some more sugar and it shoots up again, well actually blood sugar is controlled pretty well in most people that are healthy and we have peaks and troughs but that's with any meal.
Simple vs complex carbohydrates
Simple carbohydrates are single molecules that attach together so they’re faster digesting and they’re things like glucose which you’ll get in drinks like Lucozade which are also actually marketed quite well. You might see people in a gym drinking them in an aid to work harder but actually if you’re fairly overweight and you’ve eaten a sufficient diet anyway then they are just not needed in the gym unless you’re training for a couple of hours.
On the other side of things, we have complex carbohydrates which kind of links carbohydrates together which is like our starches or you may hear it called glycogen which is how we store it within our muscles and because there’s kind of these complex chains linked together it takes longer for your body to digest them so they get released into the bloodstream slower hence complex carbohydrates have a slower release and simple carbohydrates have a faster release.
However, this doesn’t really give us the full picture. We often don’t eat carbohydrates in isolation on their own as we tend to eat them with certain fats or vegetables which have fibre in and we also eat them with protein and so paying attention simply to the glycemic index, if you’ve ever heard of that, to a meal doesn’t make too much sense and once again if we’re getting 70-80% of our food from minimally processed, natural foods then we’re probably going to be doing okay in terms of the glycemic index of the carbohydrates that we’re getting, obviously all with the caveat that it’s all within our caloric budget.
When it comes to carbohydrates our needs are going to differ absolutely hugely from one individual to another and this will be dependant on the following:
Bodyweight - if you’re a bigger person and you’re training hard then you’re going to need more carbohydrates than someone who’s smaller.
Training volume - this is probably the biggest indicator. This goes hand in hand with the type of training but if someone is doing hours and hours of triathlon training then they’re going to need bucket loads more carbohydrates compared to someone who just goes in and is doing like a powerlifting program where they just tend to go in and do a set, then rest for 5 minutes and repeat that in their workout session so for example, they’re doing 1 or 2 repetitions then they’re resting so that will use very little carbohydrates whereas if you’re doing hard training such as hard swimming, running, rowing you’re going to need far more carbohydrates.
Your goal - if my main goal is for performance and to perform well then I need to fuel my training as much as I can with carbohydrates, however, if I am simply looking to lose fat then I may actually allow slight suffering of my performance in the gym to allow me a greater calorie deficit to lose more weight so it really is dependant on your goal.
Here’s a brief summary taken from a brilliant course which is from MNU that people can do in order to become certified nutritionists but we can see here from the table of what the varying ranges of carbohydrates that we may have are
For example: if you’re a performance athlete then you might be having 3 all the way up to 10 grams per kilogram and that could be someone who’s like Mo Farah who’s doing an exceptional amount of training like 5,6,7 hours per day.
If your goal is fat loss then you may come down from somewhere between 1 to 3 grams so again that 100kg individual would have between 100 - 300 grams per day, but the more that you exercise, the more carbohydrates you’ll need within that context and the same goes for muscle gain and as said before in order to stay alive it’s non-essential to have carbohydrates but again there’s a big difference between surviving and thriving.
Do excess carbohydrates make you fat?
There’s been a very popular idea over the course of probably the last 10 years especially with the advent of things such as Atkins, low carb diets etc and it’s that excess carbohydrates make you fat.
Firstly let me say that it is very very hard to convert carbohydrates to fat. The process is called de novo lipogenesis and you have to perhaps be eating upwards of like 500-600 grams of carbohydrate per day over what you’d normally eat to try to convert anything to fat.
What actually happens is that if you eat more carbohydrates than you burn more carbohydrates but you might store any fat that you eat as fat but you’re not going to be converting those carbohydrates into fats and so it comes down to energy balance.
As long as you stick with your calorie budget and let’s say that’s 3000 calories to maintain my current weight, well it doesn’t matter if I’m getting 70% of that from fats or 70% of that from carbs as long as I’m getting enough of each one of them within that narrow range that we said so at least 0.5 grams per kilogram for fats and at least my 1.2 to 1.5 protein, then where the rest sits really doesn’t matter too much based on your personal preference and training goals etc.
The more active that you are, the more carbohydrates you need and for some of you that might be a little bit more inquisitive and you want to know more than this well there’s a piece by a gentleman called James Krieger on weightology.com that may be difficult to break down but if you want to know more than you could read this too and understand that carbohydrates are really not the bad guy.
What are our carbohydrate takehomes?
Needs will differ hugely from individual to individual.
They are not essential for living but they are essential for optimal performance.
They are not inherently fattening - we know in fact it comes down to energy balance instead.
We do have a tendency to overeat on them though especially when we’re inactive as we live in what we’d call an obsesengic environment where we have high calorie, highly palatable foods so when something is high palatable it just means that it’s very very easy to overeat it and so some of these foods well they are really easy to over consume, for example like a bag of haribos or chocolate sweets, it’s going to be like 400, 500-600 calories with actually very little indicator that you’ve eaten something, so for example it’s not going to make you feel full so it’s very easy to overeat them and if we think of this idea of a bowl of rice, well if I asked you to eat as much plain rice with no sauce or anything and to eat as much of it that you could then you’d probably stop at say somewhere between 1-2 bowls because it’s quite a bland taste, however if we put something on the rice that was more sweet like sweet chilli sauce well there’s a very good chance that you could now eat more of it because your appetite is sensory specific and so your brain naturally craves high sugar/high salt foods so this is where carbohydrates, as long as we’re eating within our calorie budget then they’re not a problem however sometimes they can promote us to actually overeat more than we normally would so they kind of override some of our body’s natural hunger signals.
Sugar is in foods that are easy to overeat like I just mentioned, they're hyper-palatable but carbohydrates themselves are not bad.