why are Carbs considered ‘fattening’ when they have the same caloric count as proteins ?
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Carbs are fattening because your body can burn them very fast and then you’re hungry again just 2 hours after your last meal.
Fat and protein take longer to break down, and also not all carbs are equal, longer chained carbs like starch take a bit more time than short chained carbs like sugar
Your body will use carbohydrates first because it wants to get rid of them. Let’s say you eat 50g of fat, 50g of carbohydrates, and 50g of protein at once. Your body begins using the carbohydrates/protein and holds the fats to the side until they’re all that’s left. Now, let’s say your body has used 45 of the 50g grams of carbohydrates you fed it and you decide to eat again—you never gave your body a chance to use the fat and it’s stored as body fat.
Carbs have 4 calories but only give you 1 unit of satiety. Protein has 4 calories but give you 5 units of satiety, and fats have 9 calories and give you 10 units of satiety.
It’s much easier to over eat carbs. 200 calories of chicken breast vs 200 calories of chocolate bar, huge difference.
Not all carbs are equal, but even the best carb isn’t as good as protein or fat if you’re comparing calorie : satiety ratio
The “bad” carbs are the refined/simple carbs like from white flour and sugar – so anything processed. The problem with them is that they provide little to no nutrition except for the calories. They also digest fast and spike blood sugar, but leave you hungry so you end up overeating.
Complex carbs like from whole grains and fruits are good for you. They contain vitamins and minerals as well as dietary fiber, and don’t digest as fast. Eating fewer processed carbs and more healthy carb, protein and fat sources will help you feel more full and overall be healthier.
Prepare to get a lot of bad answers from people claiming to know a lot. They don’t.
Carbs aren’t evil. No food is evil. Food is food.
People who say carbs are evil are either trying to sell you a diet or have bought into the diet people are trying to sell. Same with people who demonize fat.
There are lots of more in-depth answers, but very few adults actually understand them. There’s no good way to explain those answers like you’re five.
Carbs are not fattening *per se*.
No food is fattening *per se*.
What matters is amount.
You will be fatter eating 10 salads than a pack of french fries or an ice cream cone.
It’s simply a lot *easier* to fatten on carbs compared to protein because unless you’re guzzling huge volumes of protein shakes, you are unlikely to consume 1,000 calories worth of proteins the same way you can easily consume 1,000 calories of carbs.
Carbs cause insulin to be secreted in our body to deal with it. Insulin levels takes couple of hours to down once risen. With our lifestyle of having 3 main meals plus snacking in between, the insulin levels don’t get a chance to down. If this happens very frequently, our cells get used to the levels of insulin and become resistant. It now takes more insulin to deal with same about of carbs. Eventually it reaches a stage where the max insulin that our body can secrete is not enough to deal with carbs. Which means more glucose is now present in blood than normal. Bam, you’ve got type II diabetes.
Also type of carbs play a big role. Complex carbs digest slowly because of presence of fiber. It also causes less glucose to be absorbed. Simple carbs like sugar or refined flour cause a immediate massive spike in blood glucose levels.
Okay. Insulin is the fat storing hormone. Your body produces insulin when there’s too much sugar in the body. Carbs – all kinds get converted to sugar. Depending how much sugar in the blood stream, your body releases insulin to combat the spike. Its why diabetes patients take insulin injections cause their body doesn’t produce enough or insulin at all.
A diet high in fats and proteins negates the need for your body to produce insulin. Controlling insulin is the key to weight loss and weight gain. In directly that’s what make carbs evil.
Sure carbs can be split into fast acting or slow acting carbs. Fast acting carbs are foods high in natural sugar. Your body breaks it down easily. Slow acting carbs are carbs like vegetables low in sugar with a lot of fibre.
So carbs, protein, and fats are all organic compounds but they each require different time and energy to digest it for use in the body.
Simple carbs are readily accessible and require maybe a few steps before your body is using it.
Complex carbs takes a dozen steps more than the simple carbs.
Protein will require a couple dozen more steps than complex carbs as it takes awhile to break down all that amino acid to usable forms.
Fats take a couple dozen steps to breakdown but not much more than protein and has to wait for carbs or protein to be used first.
My explanation isn’t solidly scientific but is a framework for how to differentiate between these compounds.
If you think of each step as time or energy required before use, then you get the idea of these compounds giving you varying calories per hour rates.
They aren’t.
What matters is energy intake vs energy burnt that’s all.
The anti carb speel is just another fad diet.
Not all carbs are the same so lumping them together as all bad is in a word stupid. A lot of the confusion about how much to eat is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the 2000 calorie a day “need” really is.
2000 calories is not a biological fact needed for life it never has been.
2000 calories is the average food need for a manual industrial worker from around 1990. It was used as a base line to show everything else on a nutritional label and became the standard when the FDA started requiring nutritional content labels.
Why is obesity a problem? To be blunt? we currently eat to much for our level of activity so we get fat. On average? a modern north American person is 300-500 calories in surplus per day.
The FDA labeling program caused this epidemic because it put it in our brains that we need 2000 calories to live so by default you’re chronically over eating.
Why is it false? We live very sedentary lives. We are no longer a world of manual industrial workers.
You do not need 2000 calories to sit behind a keyboard.
You do not need 2000 calories to sell something.
The amount of food needed depends on what you do.
You should always tailor your food intact to activity. Lazing around the house does not require as much fuel as a day spent hauling roofing shingles.
The number of calories a person needs has never been universal making it appear so was a huge mistake. They were well intentioned showing how much of every nutrient you need but it messed things up so badly.
A 2000 diet calories would have been a starvation diet for a medieval peasants. They ate 4000-4500 calories a day to keep warm and due to the amount of labor. Their diets were largely carbs yet they were not fat nor were they always hungry.
Why did they need more food? they did a hell of a lot more physical work than we do and spent more time out doors so they burnt more fuel.
The key to staying in shape is to tailor your consumption to your activity level.
Ignore the fads.
Think on what you’re going to be doing and eat accordingly that’s it that’s the secret.
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