Lowcarbezine!

What About "Good Carbs"?

Now that I've finally turned in 500 More Low-Carb Recipes, I've had a teeny bit of free time, and I've started taking a look at The South Beach Diet and the new The Hamptons Diet. I have not read both books through yet, so I will not offer a final opinion, but I will say this about the "good carbs" they both recommend:

If I add even good carbs - coarse ground rye bread, whole wheat pasta, brown rice - back to my diet on any regular basis, I start to gain weight. Indeed, before I went low carb, most of the foods I was eating on my low fat/high carb diet were at least reasonably good carbs - 100% whole grain bread, beans and lentils, brown rice, Cheerios, fruit. I did eat white flour pasta, and potatoes, but with the notable exception of low fat ice cream with Hershey's syrup ("now, as always, a fat free food") I was not eating a lot of highly processed sugary stuff - no Pop Tarts, no Oreos, no Wonder Bread, and I haven't had a sugared soda since I was 11 or 12 years old.

Yet eating carbs that were at least relatively "good" still got me up to 190 pounds at 5'2", with nasty energy swings and borderline-high blood pressure.

What I've seen so far of South Beach and the Hamptons (are we talking nutrition, or real estate?) indicates that they are somewhat narrower in their definition of "good carbs" - my Cheerios would not have made the cut, for example, nor would the potatoes or the white flour pasta. This is just as well, since it turns out that these carbs pack a serious blood sugar wallop. However I have, since going low carb almost nine years ago, tried adding some of these "good carbs" back to my diet - most notably 100% whole grain rye bread, which I adore, and which has a low glycemic index. I'm afraid I found that if I had a slice a day, I started to gain weight, so now I simply don't buy the stuff. (Nor do I bother much with low carb specialty bread, either homemade or purchased. For the most part, I simply don't eat bread, and truth to tell, I don't much miss it.)

For that matter, when I was doing blood sugar tests trying to find out if "carb blockers" work, I discovered that one cup of brown rice was enough to drive my blood sugar into the diabetic range. That's a bigger serving than these diets recommend, and I was eating it without the protein and fat that would have moderated its effect on my blood sugar, but it still was a pretty clear demonstration to me that brown rice is not my friend.

I find that I do best if I simply keep my usable (non-fiber) carb intake under 50 grams a day, and I try to keep it lower than that most days. (I also keep a mild eye on calories.) I get the vast majority of those carbs from vegetables, a little fruit, nuts and seeds, seasonings, some dairy products, and the malto-dextrin filler in Splenda. Given the need to keep my carb count so low, I simply have no interest in supplanting, say, 15 grams of carbohydrate worth of vegetables with 15 grams of carbohydrate worth of whole wheat pasta - I'd rather have a huge salad than a teeny portion of noodles. I don't really see the point, nutritionally speaking, since I have yet to find a single vitamin or mineral available in grains and the like that I can't get from lower carb sources.

That, however, is me, and one of the tenets of my low carb writing has been that people differ quite a lot. I do know people who have done quite well on a diet that includes some of the good (ie, low glycemic impact) carbs, and I even included a diet that uses such carbs in How I Gave Up My Low Fat Diet and Lost 40 Pounds - I call it The Careful Carb Diet. (Maybe I should have called it the Bloomington Diet?) I do not mean to voice a blanket objection to diets that do include modest portions of these foods. If you're on South Beach or the Hamptons diet and you're doing well, God bless, and stick with it! I just wanted you to be aware that "good carbs" aren't good for everybody. There are some of you who are going to do far better if you simply stay away from grains and the like pretty much forever, and there are going to be some of you who can tolerate them only every so often, and then only in tiny doses.

There's no substitute for paying attention to your own body.

I also wanted you to be aware that there is no compelling nutritional reason that you need to eat those "good carbs." Every vitamin and mineral found in them can be found in lower carb sources, if that's what your body prefers.

I promise to read both books thoroughly, and report back soon.

Posted by HoldTheToast at May 23, 2004 04:06 PM