Simple carbohydrates are, once again, guilty of approaching obesity

The nutritional recommendations are not something immovable and should remain the same from the beginning of time to the end of days: like all the sciences that surround us, nutrition evolves and thanks to the advances of science and the new studies that are they are doing and they are appearing published in scientific journals we can see how those nutritional recommendations also change.

Do you remember when, until relatively recently, almost exclusively fat was blamed for the obesity epidemic that the world suffers today? We had burn the myth of “if you eat fat, you store fat” in our heads. And yet, nowadays we know that this does not work like that . In fact, thanks to the latest studies, such as this one published in the journal Clinical Chemistry this same month of January , we know that simple carbohydrates or fast absorption are much more related to weight gain than they are fats.

This study ( Genetic Evidence That Carbohydrate-Stimulated Insulin Secretion Leads to Obesity ) provides genetic evidence that this type of carbohydrates, among which we can find artificially added sugars or refined cereals, stimulate our body to produce a greater amount of insulin and this predisposes us for weight gain.

The conclusions that have come with the study are two, very interesting:

• The diets with a high glycemic load (care that is not the same as the glycemic index of foods: we explain here the difference between the two ) create an obesogenic environment in our body that predisposes us to weight gain and obesity. As we said, these are the diets in which simple carbohydrates are protagonists: refined grains, sugars, added sugars, etc.
• There is a correlation between the greater segregation of insulin due to the intake of simple carbohydrates and the body mass index.
• It also appears among the conclusions that diets low in simple carbohydrates are much more effective for weight loss than low-fat diets (the latter associated, in fact, with an increased risk of overweight ).

What would reinforce this study is the one known as the “carbohydrate-insulin model” , which relates the resistance or lack of sensitivity to insulin as the cause of overweight or obesity.