181.2 Carbs and Fat - Yikes!

My brother in law Phil sent me this article from Men's Health magazine. (http://www.menshealth.com/travel-center/diet-strategies-travel-and-weight-loss?cm_mmc=Twitter-_-MensHealth-_-Content-BestLife-_-TravelingMansEatingPlan.) I am reprinting a portion of it, because it really makes sense about the carbs in our diets and how they work against us as we try to control our weight.


"Rules of the Road

Any man who travels regularly needs a flexible, no-thought eating strategy. So we asked Jeff Volek, Ph.D., R.D., a nutrition researcher at the University of Connecticut, to create an effective diet that allows for indulgence without the need for calorie counting. His solution: a low-carb diet with benefits.

A quick explanation: Every time you eat high-carb foods—bread, pasta, rice, any product made with sugar or flour—the level of insulin in your blood rises. Insulin is a powerful hormone that signals your body to stop burning and start storing fat. How powerful? Volek and his colleagues asked 20 men to follow a strict low-carb diet for 6 weeks. But instead of telling them to downsize their portions, the scientists encouraged the study participants to eat all they wanted. When the results were tallied, the men had still dropped an average of 7 pounds of fat and had significantly lowered their risk of heart disease. "We calculated that 70 percent of the variability in fat loss was explained by the reduction in insulin levels," says Volek. "That's a powerful effect."

Now think about that in reverse. If you're constantly downing carbs, as most Americans do, you'll be in fat-storing mode all day long. And you don't need a study to tell you what that's done to our collective waistline.

So Volek counseled Baier to adopt low-carb eating as his default diet and to make high-carb meals an exception. Try it yourself and you'll limit your number of daily insulin spikes, keeping your body in fat-burning mode most of the time. After all, when it comes to your gut, "most of the time" is what matters."

This explanation of carbs in relation to storing fat will really make me think twice before eating carbs. I'm still hung up on wanting to eat a lot of fruit, but I guess I will have to become very aware of how many carbs a given serving of fruit has and plan well.