Getting all your carbs from sweets.

[Snowdog63]

So, seeing as I'm new & I don't know sh*t, I'm curious, seeing as it's so easy to eat a virtually carb free diet, on why it would be wrong to for all meals to consist of meat & veg & just get all my carbs from carefully rationed chocolate bars. Seeing as sugar is sugar, as far as the body is concerned.

I mean, that's not what I'm doing, I just curious as to why that would be bad.

It is bad, right?

 

[Annette]

So, seeing as I'm new & I don't know sh*t, I'm curious, seeing as it's so easy to eat a virtually carb free diet, on why it would be wrong to for all meals to consist of meat & veg & just get all my carbs from carefully rationed chocolate bars. Seeing as sugar is sugar, as far as the body is concerned.

I mean, that's not what I'm doing, I just curious as to why that would be bad.

It is bad, right?

It's not good, certainly. My reasoning would be that the chocolate bars would give you quite high spikes every time you ate them (proabaly more so if that was the only carbs you ate, so your body was used to not eating carbs, then it would have a massive whammy on the intake of a chocolate bar). This would put a sudden massive strain on your pancreas (as a T2). Regular sudden massive strains are less good for anything than a more regular, gentle strain.
Chocolate bars are massively concentrated supplies of sugar, whereas other forms of sugar (complex carbs) are less concentrated, take longer to get into the blood stream, and put less of a shock (even if the same amount of strain, but over a longer period) on an already struggling pancreas.
But that's just my take on it.

 

[HOBIE]

Properly BAD. You should avoid spikes in bg. I everyone knows if you eat like a --- you might end up looking like one Welcome from someone who has been T1 for more than 50yrs 🙂

 

[Martin Canty]

Not all carbs are equal..... The carbs in candy are certainly not "good" carbs as they have been highly refined (and therefore tend to spike the BG).

 

[Snowdog63]

I mean, I was only talking about a square or two of chocolate with a cuppa, not steak & veg, followed by a king size mars bar, but that all makes sense.

Thanks!

Or should I say "sweet!"

 

[DeusXM]

Several things:

1. Your body does not need you to eat carbs. This is one of the biggest myths commonly perpetuated by dieticians. Your body runs perfectly happily on fat. People exercise to 'burn fat'. How they think it burns? It's because you use it for energy.

It is true that your brain does require glucose to operate. However, your body is designed to create glucose from protein, so provided you eat sufficient fat and protein, you don't need any carbs.

2. If you are eating carbs, it's important to understand that you don't eat carbs in isolation. Foods like potatoes, rice, bread, fruit contain vitamins and minerals, which you won't find in chocolate bars. So if you are going to eat carbohydrates, it makes sense to at least get them from sources which offer other nutritional benefits.

3. Not all carbs are equal. Chocolate bars contain sugar, a very simple carbohydrate, that theoretically will enter your bloodstream far quicker than the glucose derived from metabolising starchy carbs. If you have a defective insulin system (ie. you have T2), you probably want carbs to enter your blood at a pace that your body can keep up with. Even though chocolate bars contain fat, which slows down the speed at which glucose gets into your blood, that glucose will still likely enter your blood quicker than if you'd eaten a couple of slices of brown bread.

4. One of the points that even low-carbers tend to forget is that fat and carbs together is a lethal combination. Your body metabolises energy sources in the following order: alcohol, sugar, complex carbs, fat. So if you eat something that is high fat and high sugar (like a chocolate bar), the sugar will be used for energy and the fat will likely go straight to 'storage'. In fact, unless you're burning up a lot of energy, most of the sugar will also go straight to storage too. The presence of glucose encourages the production of insulin (unless you're a T1). Insulin promotes fat storage and blocks fat metabolism. Insulin also converts excess blood sugar that isn't metabolised into fat. Then for an encore, it also tells your liver to produce a bit more cholesterol. So a high carb, high fat food (and by that, I mean pies, pizzas, chocolate, cake etc.) is like a perfect weight-gain bomb. We instinctively know this. No-one ever says you get fat from eating steak. We all know pies, crisps, burgers etc. make you fat - and all of those are high carb, high fat foods (don't forget that burgers come with big buns!).

So there's a whole bunch of reasons! That doesn't mean however you can't have a square of dark chocolate etc. now and again. But again, you don't *need* carbs - but you can add them in where you wish as long as your blood sugar stays under control.

 

[Snowdog63]

Thanks for the comprehensive reply.

I was given to understand from that "Sugar Conspiracy" article that did the rounds a few months ago, that the body doesn't get fat from eating fat. That turning dietary fat into body fat is simply not something that the body does & that we get fat from storing unused sugars.

If I've understood you correctly, this is not the case, so I obviously misunderstood what the article was saying (or the article was wrong).

But if the body does put dietary fat into storage & then uses it for energy, I assume it has to be turned back into blood sugar at that stage so why does that not present problems with blood glucose levels?

 

[trophywench]

It does! The way the fat gets into your body as 'glucose' is via the liver, where it's kept for emergencies, and it can either trickle it in nice and slowly no prob or it can dump a shedload in at once if it gets the idea you're struggling and need some more. Then it sends your BG rocketing - to infinity and beyond! LOL

Edit - in hindsight, clearly I simplified this to far too great an extent! LOL

 

[Snowdog63]

So then why is a high fat low carb diet beneficial if they both present problems with blood sugar levels? (Up until now, I think I'd assumed that a high fat diet supplied the body with energy without affecting blood glucose.)

 

[DeusXM]

I think there's a problem with language here as we use 'fat' to refer to three different things - dietary fat, fatty acids, and adipose tissue.

When you eat dietary fat, it is metabolised into fatty acids. Fatty acids provide energy, but also flow in and out of your adipose tissue in a process regulated by insulin.

Your body metabolises food groups in the following order of preference:

Glucose
Other carbohydrates
Protein
Fat

You will note that the order of preference is effectively determined by the amount of insulin associated with safely metabolising each group. Glucose, other carbohydrates and protein all require the presence of insulin to be used for energy. Glucose calls for very high circulating levels of insulin, protein calls for low levels.

Insulin prevents fatty acids leaving your adipose tissue and encourages fatty acid storage. Therefore clearly, any food you eat that calls for a significant insulin response leads to the carbs being used for energy first and blocks fat metabolism. That means the dietary fat you eat tends to end up being stored because you don't actually need the energy from it.

I think there may be some confusion here on the liver's role. Fat doesn't have a role in this. Instead, insulin stores excess glucose in the liver as glycogen, and the liver also has a conversion process to transform the amino acids in protein into glucose via the process of gluconeogenesis.

So the simple answer to your question is a high fat, low carb diet can be beneficial for blood sugar precisely because you change the net balance of your where your energy comes from - you effectively force your body to have to use fat, which does not increase your blood sugar.

 

[Robin]

The speed at which the various processes take place also have an effect, and also the metabolism of the body at the time. If you eat a load of glucose (either as sugar or other carb) when you're lying on the sofa, and you don't produce enough insulin, or you are insulin resistant, there will be a lot of it sloshing round in your bloodstream while your pancreas plays catch up. If you need to release more stores of glucose because you're doing something energetic, the body will be in a state where it can accept more glucose into the muscles without the need for so much insulin. Also, the body will release energy from fat stores in more of a trickle as you need it. ( there is an exception here, where some people find when they start to exercise, that the body revs itself up and calls for the liver to dump a load of glucose in the blood, and their levels rise. Diabetes wouldn't be such an interesting and much discussed subject if it didn't throw up some wobblers occasionally!)

 

[Annette]

So, I thought that the brain needed glucose to function (from carbs or protein, or wherever). And thus I assumed that if you didnt have any carbs or protein to get said glucose from, there was some metabolism that got it from fat (or from the fatty acids that fat is stored as).
Is this wrong? Does the brain run on fatty acids in the absence of glucose? Or have I totally misunderstood what happens here?

 

[Snowdog63]

So the simple answer to your question is a high fat, low carb diet can be beneficial for blood sugar precisely because you change the net balance of your where your energy comes from - you effectively force your body to have to use fat, which does not increase your blood sugar.

And that's ketosis, isn't it?

Thanks again. I shall have to read this about 50 times (like the previous post) in order to fully absorb the info.

 

[Snowdog63]

My brain hurts (although I'm not sure this has anything to do with glucose).

 

[DeusXM]

So, I thought that the brain needed glucose to function (from carbs or protein, or wherever). And thus I assumed that if you didnt have any carbs or protein to get said glucose from, there was some metabolism that got it from fat (or from the fatty acids that fat is stored as).
Is this wrong? Does the brain run on fatty acids in the absence of glucose? Or have I totally misunderstood what happens here?

Your brain can run on ketone bodies instead of glucose. However, you would have to be on a very restrictive and unusual diet to have no protein or carbohydrate at all from which to derive glucose.

And that's ketosis, isn't it?

Precisely, and it's important to understand the difference between ketosis and DKA - DKA is quite clearly defined as having a level of ketones in your blood that is unsafe and too high. Much like glucose, there is a 'safe' level and an 'unsafe' level.