If all carbohydrates get broken down to their most simple form, sugar, why is it unhealthy to just eat tablespoons of sugar?
In: Biology
It’s not. In moderation.
But putting sucrose, or worse glucose into your body in large amounts all at once taxes your ability to process it and may lead to some diabetes like stresses due to blood sugar spiking.
At it’s core your body is an incredibly complicated machine for turning potentially millions of different complex combinations of nutrients into a half dozen simple fats and sugars your body can use directly, on the fly, with minimal food wasted.
Many of the things we consider unhealthy are simply more direct routes to these simple fuels our body needs. But this encourages both over consumption and avoids the rate limits of how quickly we can process certain types of food.
Even highly processed food is good for you, in moderation. VERY CAREFUL moderation.
Precisely because it is too easy for those sugars to be broken down. Your body produces insulin to handle sugars, but if there is too much simple sugar, you have an overabundance of insulin. Pure sugar doesn’t appear much in food naturally. You’re putting huge amounts of something in your body that it has not evolved to handle.
Most complex carbs need to be digested first, in order to use them as fuel.
Most fruit has pectin and fiber to slow it down
Most grains and starches have fiber which slows them down
This is why ppl eat brown rice, the fiber slows it down. However, if you eat white rice with butter, the butter slows it down.
It’s actually not that bad for you, to get all carbs from sugars as long as you’re not stupid with it. What is bad is having a lot in one go and spiking your blood sugar.
This triggers a big insulin response, which is gonna get you that sugar low after.
Plus a lot of this will lead to an insensitivity to insulin, leading to type 2 diabetes
Since car engines run on gasoline, can I make my car go faster just by lighting the gas tank on fire? How about just lighting the engine on fire?
Your body eventually breaks down energy sources into glucose, but you want the body’s systems to deliver the right amount of glucose to the right locations at the right times. That metered, accurate delivery gives the best performance, both in the human body and in a car’s engine.
Not all carbs do. Some fibers get broken down to component parts only by the bacteria in your colon, at the very end of the digestive tract. Others are somewhere in the middle but are still used mainly by bacteria without resulting in sugars that get absorbed. These bacteria are very important for your digestive and nervous systems as a whole.
If I threw 10,000 tennis balls at you, one after the other, you would be be fine. If they all hit you at the same time, you would be dead.
Sugar goes in all at once, complex carbs break down over time, and hit your blood like the tennis balls thrown one at a time.
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