heart attack and stroke.
RELATED: Cutting Carbs? Try These Veggie Swaps to Fill Your Plate
Where you get your carbs matters
Odegaard says it’s not necessarily the quantity of carbs in your diet that’s most important; it’s their quality.
Where you get your carbs matters. Yes, that doughnut and your caramel-flavored coffee drink are full of them. But fruits and vegetables also contain carbs. The difference is: Fruits and vegetables are also full of many nutritious things that are not carbs – and are considered essential to a heart-healthy diet.
This is why putting carbs into context matters. A candy bar and a banana might have similar amounts of carbs. But that banana comes with nutrients such as potassium, magnesium and dietary fiber without the added sugar. By weight, you can also eat about twice as much banana as candy bar for the same amount of carbs.
Although carb talk often has focused on simple versus complex, Odegaard says many nutrition experts now emphasize the role of processing. Some even blame carbohydrates from highly processed foods for obesity, although others say it’s not that simple.
But the basic premise of why processing matters is easy to grasp, he shares.
If you eat an apple, you’ll get carbs, but also fiber, vitamins and minerals. If that apple is turned into apple sauce, the processing might add sugar while taking out some nutrients and much of the fiber, and your body will process it into blood glucose more quickly. Process it further into apple juice, and you’ll have no fiber and an even faster bump to your blood glucose, because nothing is slowing down its digestion or absorption.
“It’s the same thing with oranges and orange juice,” Odegaard adds. And with grains.
Whole-grain foods – such as brown rice, oatmeal and some popcorn – are considered heart-healthy. When grains are milled, as with white rice or white breads, it strips out healthy fiber and other nutrients. One cup of cooked instant white rice, for example, has 44 grams of carbs but only about 1 gram of fiber. A cup of cooked brown rice has about 52 grams of carbs but more than 3 grams of fiber.
Odegaard does not think carbs are inherently villains. After all, he says, “as a species, we’ve evolved the ability to