Below is a chart from “Components of a cardioprotective diet: new insights” by Dariush Mozaffarian at Harvard University, Associate Professor of Medicine and Epidemiology in the departments of Departments of Epidemiology and Nutrition. It gives you a good idea of what carbohydrates are healthy and unhealthy, based on their quality.
The darker the green the better, the darker the red, the worse. If you mill your own flour with a Family Grain Mill, you can bump it up a notch from the milled whole grains into the minimally processed whole grains category.
Some other excerpts from this paper:
Carbohydrate Amount and Quality
Among the most important new insights related to diet and cardiometabolic health is the growing evidence characterizing the importance of carbohydrate quality. Although carbohydrates have traditionally been classified as simple (eg, monosaccharides and disaccharides) versus complex (eg, starch and glycogen), several additional characteristics are relevant in determining cardiometabolic effects. These include dietary fiber content; bran and germ content; food structure (eg, intact, minimally processed, refined, or liquid); and potentially glycemic responses or induction of hepatic de novo lipogenesis following ingestion
Fat Amount and Quality
One of the reasons I recommend you add Super Seed Mix to chips, crackers, and other food is that seeds are much healthier than oil or butter.
For decades we were told to not eat much fat, since they have more calories than protein or carbohydrate. The latest research shows that the type of fat matters more than the proportion of the calories you eat that come from fat, with the big exception of industrially produced trans fat from partially hydrogenated vegetable oils (consumption of such fats should be as close to zero as possible).
The best fat — a healthy fat — are the omega-3 fats (EPA & DHA) found in seafood. Conversely, seafood-derived omega-3 fats hep prevent heart disease. Although you can also get these from plants, it looks like they aren’t as good for you as the omega-3 fats from seafood.
Sodium / Sodium
This is the easiest one to lower: don’t eat out — cook at home using fresh, raw ingredients and add little salt. 75% of what we consume comes from processed foods, and a third of those foods are made with white flour. If you buy whole grain flour or better yet, mill your own flour and bake your own goods, they will not only be healthier, but they taste fantastic and don’t take long to make, the food industry just wants you to think you don’t have the time.
Where the salt is hiding in processed foods:
abbreviations
saturated fatty acid (SFA)
long-chain omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs), which include eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA; 20:5 omega-3) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA; 22:6 omega-3)
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About Alice
I've milled and baked with whole grains for many years, because whole grains are delicious, and white flour is missing the nutrition that protects you from cancer, stroke, heart disease, diabetes and many other diseases. Plus it's a good emergency food.
