Carbohydrates

There are two main carbohydrate groups:

Simple carbohydrates – carbohydrate foods that contain sugars including glucose, fructose, and sucrose. e.g., cakes, sweets, biscuits, but also some fruits.

Complex carbohydrates – carbohydrate foods that are starches including rice, bread, pasta, potatoes, or oatmeal.

How do carbohydrates work?

When we eat, our body converts carbohydrates into glucose (sugar) before being absorbed into the bloodstream. Glucose is used by our body for energy, fuelling all our activities, whether it’s going for a run or just breathing.

High fibre, starchy carbohydrates release glucose into the blood more slowly than sugary foods and drinks. Unused glucose can be converted to glycogen and stored in the liver and muscles. Once glycogen stores are full, unused glucose will be converted, for long–term storage of energy – the fat stores in our body.

Carbohydrate contains fewer calories gram for gram than fat, and starchy foods can be a great source of fibre, which means they can be a useful part of a weight loss plan as they fill you up for longer.

Ideally, you should choose wholegrain carbohydrates (such as brown bread or pasta, but also other grains such as quinoa, buckwheat, bulgur, cous cous, etc.) where you can as these will contain much more fibre and also some vitamins and minerals that are stored within the outer layers of the grain, which gets stripped in the process of making white carbohydrates (white bread, white pasta, etc.).

Sugar facts

Sugar isn’t the ultimate villain or even a ‘drug’, but we do generally consume more of it than we should. That can bring about some issues in the long-term – one of them is tooth decay and the other one, as you probably can guess, is putting on weight. The latter would happen if we overconsumed any type of nutrient though, that one isn’t exclusive to sugar.

There are two main kinds of sugar:

Natural sugar – sugar that is naturally present in foods, such as fruit and milk. That is sugar we don’t need to worry about too much as the foods that contain it give us other important nutrients such as vitamins, minerals and fibre.

Free sugar – or added sugar, sugar that has been added to foods (in the process of manufacturing, cooking, or at the table) or sugar in honey, syrups and fruit juice (sugar in whole foods is classed as natural sugar but when we blend it into a juice or a smoothie, the sugar becomes free). This is the one we should look out for and limit.

It is recommended that adults do not consume more than 5% of their total daily energy from free sugars. To make this recommendation less abstract, the general rule is to not have more than 30g of free (added) sugar a day – that equates to about seven sugar cubes or six teaspoons of sugar.