What are Refined Carbs?

Understanding the difference between refined carbs and those other ones.

You're bombarded with information about carbohydrates. You may have even been frightened of them at one point - or maybe you are right now. However, not all carbs do the same thing. Actually, some carbs are good for you and necessary to keep your body going strong. Where do refined carbohydrates fall on the health scale? You're about to find out.

Not the Best

To get a refined carbohydrate, a food is taken that contains carbs. Then, everything else in the food is taken away, leaving only the refined carbohydrate, which is either a starch or a sugar.

When eaten, refined carbohydrates give your body a quick boost in glucose (a.k.a. sugar), which can be helpful right before you get started in some sort of athletic endeavor, such as a sprint or a soccer game. However, eating refined carbohydrates on a regular basis, regardless of what you're doing afterward, can leave you with a rather useless store of carbs.

See Them Now

To avoid eating too many refined carbohydrates, you should know what they look like and where they're most often found. Thankfully, they're rather easy to see, so you can sidestep them with ease. Most often, refined carbs are white on their own, but they can hide inside various foods without being recognized.
The following are a few common foods that contain refined carbohydrates:

• white bread
• white rice
• foods ending with the word “starch”
• foods that use puffy or shredded grains

What to Choose Instead

Since refined carbohydrates aren't doing your body much good, you ought to do your best to go for foods with the other kind of carbohydrates. Whether you call them good carbs or all-natural carbs doesn't matter. What matters is what comes with these carbohydrates that is stripped from their refined peers.

One of the items that gets stripped from carbohydrates during the refining process is fiber. Since fiber is helpful in your goal of good bowel health; avoiding diseases such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and kidney stones; and obtaining and maintaining a healthy weight, you don't want to spend much time eating foods that have gone through a fiber-stealing process. Instead of going with fiber-stripped carbohydrates, choose foods that contain fiber-rich carbs. Good choices include fruits, vegetables, beans, and whole grains.

Your Need for Carbohydrates

Still not convinced that you need carbohydrates in your diet? Has the popular no-carb diet craze messed with your head so much that you continue to fear this necessary part of your daily regimen? Then there's something you should know.

While you don't want to fill up on refined carbohydrates (as you already know), you do want to eat plenty of good carbohydrates. In fact, otherwise healthy adults ought to use as much as 65 percent of their daily intake of calories to consume carbs. That means that every other bite you eat should contain healthy carbohydrates for optimal health. So what are you waiting for? Wave goodbye to those white, worn out refined carbohydrates, and open your arms and your mouth to health-boosting whole grains, fruits, and vegetables!

Why No-Carb Diets Works

If you've ever gotten into a diet that cuts you off from all carbohydrates, you probably lost some weight. If you're supposed to need carbs, why did you have such great weight loss success when you cut them from your diet? There are three reasons.

The first is that cutting carbohydrates from your diet often results in a loss of water weight, as not eating carbs may cause you to urinate more frequently and with greater volume.

The second is that any diet that forces you to avoid one sort of food altogether will result in eating fewer calories. While this is a good thing at first, it's healthier to trim calories from all the food groups instead of picking on carbohydrates only.

The third is that diets that trim carbohydrates do not trim protein or fat, which both cause you to feel full faster and longer, reducing your desire to eat.