Identifying the good carbs

If there’s one thing every seemingly health conscious person loves to hate these days, it is not fat, but carbohydrates, or ‘carbs’ as they are (not) lovingly called. There was a time when fats were the enemy and a low-fat diet was touted as the best way to stay healthy. Then along came Dr Atkins, who broke every rule in the book to announce that you could eat all the butter and bacon you want, but it was the bread that was the enemy, throwing people into a confusion as to what exactly to eat. Heart-attack-inducing, saturated fats, or type 2 diabetes-inducing carbohydrates? It was
indeed a tough choice.

The answer is simple and yet not so simple. Any blanket statement like ‘carbs are bad’ can only be erroneous. Grains, fruits and vegetables are not just carbs but they also provide other vital nutrients like fibre, minerals and vitamins.

 Rather than just dividing carbohydrates into two groups — simple and complex — it is far more useful to classify them on basis of their glycemic index (GI), which indicates how quickly a certain food increases blood sugar in comparison to pure glucose. Lower the GI, better the carb. Usually, coarser grains, lesser processed and high fibre, acid or fat content are some of the criteria that lead to a lower GI food. Check http://www.glycemicindex.com/ for searching the GI of most food items. Focussing on eating a balanced diet with good carbs could benefit not just diabetics, but most of our population.

Five ways to make your diet rich in good carbs
1 Start your morning with a bowl of oats upma or a high fibre cereal which specifies that it is made using whole grains

2 Avoid the juice and eat the fruit. One glass of orange juice has at least 3-4 oranges and that is too much sugar (even without any added sugar) and hardly any fibre.

3 If you love potatoes, mix them with other low carb or high fibre items like bottle gourd or bitter gourd or soya chunks, so collective glycemic index of the dish is brought down. Adding vinegars or lemon juice to potatoes and eating them like a cold salad makes them release their sugars slower than eating hot mashed potatoes.

4 Buy authentic whole grain bread and use it for lunch-box sandwiches. Most commercially available ‘brown bread’ is just caramel colouring.

5 If you find red rice unpalatable, choose from grains like broken wheat, pearl barley, quinoa, buckwheat, millets either whole or as flour to make burgers, pancakes, breads and rotis.

6 Choose from a variety of dried beans every day, like rajma, sprouted moong salad, hummus, black-eyed peas soup for an excellent source of carbs plus protein and fibre.
    

Nandita Iyer blogs at www.saffrontrail.com