If you’re looking for a list of good carbs and bad carbs, you might need to change your ideas about dieting a little. While certain carbs that are worse for your body than others, there aren’t really good carbs and bad carbs, just good amounts and less healthy amounts.

Counting Carbs
It seems like more and more people are counting carbs, or at least paying more attention to the amount and type of carbs they eat. Popular diets such as the Atkins Diet have convinced people that there are good carbs and bad carbs, and the bad carbs need to be avoided and the good carbs limited.

While it’s a good idea to keep your intake of “bad” carbs in check, many health experts recommend that carbohydrates should make up at least 55 percent of a person’s total caloric intake, while others say that number should be as high as 65 percent.

This is fairly high so you don’t want to discount carbs. At the same time, it’s clear these people aren’t talking about the carbs you’ll find in candy, cookies and other highly processed foods, so that’s where the idea of a list of good carbs and bad carbs comes from.

A List of Good Carbs and Bad Carbs
If you had to make a list of carbs that you should eat more of versus carbs you should avoid, it basically breaks down into simple carbs being “bad” and complex carbs being “good.”

Complex and simple are terms that have to do with how the food is broken down into energy (sugar) in the body. Simple carbs are broken down quickly, giving your blood sugar a spike and sending you running back to the kitchen or snack machine within hours of your last fix.

Complex carbs are the ones that give your body the best fuel. They are usually found in foods high in fiber, which break down more slowly, giving you a more steady blood sugar level through the day and making you feel less hungry and irritable when mid-afternoon rolls around.

It’s a great idea to get more of these carbs into your daily diet.

Here is a list of good carbohydrates :
- Fruit
- Vegetables
- Whole grains and foods made from whole grains, such as bread and cereal
- Beans
- Nuts
- Legumes

Bad carbohydrates are :
- Refined grains like white bread and white rice
- Processed foods such as cake, cookies and chips
- Soft drinks
- Alcohol

Just because these foods have less desirable carbs does not mean you should kick them out of your life forever. A list of good carbs and bad carbs should not be seen as a strict rule. Yes, you should get most of your carbs each day from the “good” list, but you certainly don’t have to cut our alcohol or skip the birthday cake, as long as you don’t make it an every day or every meal thing.

Cutting carbs for Weight Loss
Cutting back on the bad carbs can help you lose weight, as well as give you a feeling of more energy and less irritability. Carbs are the fuel that makes your body run. Putting the right fuel in your engine makes a world of difference.

Because the good carb foods tend to have higher fiber and lower calories than many processed bad carb foods, you’ll find yourself feeling fuller while eating fewer calories though it’s possible you’ll be eating a bigger volume of food.

If you think about the kinds of foods you’re adding and the ones you’re giving up, then this makes sense.

It would take a lot more fruit to equal the same number of calories you’d eat in a candy bar, and you’ll probably feel satisfied after one piece or serving of fruit which is much lower in calories than the candy bar. Even better, you’ll feel satisfied for a long period of time and won’t feel the need for another unhealthy snack later in the day.

Can you go for more than a day without eating sugar in any form? Do you drink soft drinks or milkshakes, eat Danish pastry, fruit yogurt (a 6 oz. cartoon has 7 teaspoons of sugar or honey), donuts, bagels, cakes, cookies, most bran muffins or many other sugary items. Can you go without any other foods that contain words ending in “ose” such as sucrose, fructose, etc., or contain corn syrup, corn sweetener, honey, barley malt, maple syrup, sugar cane solids, or rice syrup? Do you pig out on a carton of ice cream or a bag of cookies? If you find that sugar is part of your diet every day, you may have a problem.

The problem with sugar
The average person eats 153 pounds of sugar a year. That is equivalent to over 1/2 cup of sugar a day. The teenage boy eats twice that much. So you say, “Who cares?” What is wrong with sugar?
There is much scientific evidence written in many medical journals showing that sugar can ruin your health. Do you have any of the following symptoms? Do you fall asleep after meals, have allergies, gas, bloating, extended stomach after meals, joint pains, headaches, chronic fatigue, constipation, diarrhea, over weight, skin problems, high blood pressure or other symptoms? These all can be signs of a sugar problem.

Here’s the problem: The human body was simply not designed to handle refined sugars.Refined sugar is new to the human diet. Metabolizing refined sugar is quite a challenge, but if forced to, the body will struggle to cope with it. This struggle causes serious disturbances, and after time, disease is the guaranteed result.
We have evolved from early man having digestive mechanisms to digest foods. We do not have the digestive mechanisms to digest the glut of sugar that we are eating on a daily basis!

Sugar in your body
Recently, information has emerged as to what happens to the minerals in the body when sugar and other abusive foods are eaten.
Sugar throws body chemistry into biochemical chaos lasting for six to eight hours after consumption. During this period, hormone, fat, carbohydrate, and protein metabolism are greatly disrupted.

After consumption, refined sugar is rapidly absorbed by the body, which dangerously increases the sugar content of the blood. Excess sugar causes production of excess insulin, which signals cells to take up sugar. Cells then absorb sugar, to get it out of the bloodstream. This solves one problem but creates another: Now the body’s cells have too much sugar. To correct this imbalance, cells turn the sugar into saturated fats and cholesterol.

Increased insulin levels not only tell the body to store fat, but they also tell it not to release fat. This makes people get fat and stay fat. It causes fat to be deposited in our cells and organs, resulting in atherosclerosis, fatty liver and kidneys, and obesity.

These fats cause blood cells to become sticky thereby increasing the chances of blood clots, strokes and heart attacks. Sugar increases “bad” LDL cholesterol, decreases “good” HDL cholesterol, and increases triglyceride levels in the blood. If antioxidant vitamins and minerals are deficient, these triglycerides can be oxidized causing serious health problems. In addition, red blood cells are choked by the saturated fats and this reduces their ability to carry oxygen to our tissues.

Hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) is another problem caused by sugar consumption. When insulin is secreted into the blood, it makes blood sugar levels fall rapidly. Insulin levels remain high however, so the body continues to take up sugar beyond the point where it needs to. The result is hypoglycemia. Symptoms include weakness, dizziness, crying spells, insomnia, aggression, and depression.

Sugar in breakfasts or lunches can cause children to do poorly in school. They become hypoglycemic about 60 minutes after eating sugar and this affects brain function. Many teachers claim that their students are “brain dead” after lunch, and this is why.

Sugar-induced hormone imbalances tax and weaken the immune system to the point where it can no longer defend the body. When insulin causes blood sugar to fall excessively low, the adrenal glands secret hormones that pump blood sugar back up. Daily consumption of sugar causes an overworked biochemical balancing act resulting in adrenal exhaustion, which in turn decreases the body’s ability to respond to future stress. Adrenal exhaustion is now a common problem in the chronically ill.

Sugar quadruples adrenaline levels, while increasing both cholesterol and cortisone. Cortisone is known to depress immune function. Studies show that the ability of white cells to destroy harmful bacteria is reduced as sugar consumption rises. This is why children, who eat lots of sugar, are more susceptible to colds, flu, and other infections.

Another point is Fiber Deficiency : Humans were designed to derive energy from complex carbohydrates, which are naturally high in fiber. By contrast, a high sugar diet provides calories without the fiber that is essential to human health. Insufficient fiber causes materials to move too slowly through the digestive tract. This can cause constipation, which is a big problem in our society. It also causes waste to remain too long in the colon where it can serve as food for harmful bacteria, thereby producing gas and toxins, and promoting intestinal inflammation and bloating.

Conclusion
The bottom line is that sugar upsets the body chemistry and suppresses the immune system. Once the immune system becomes suppressed, the door is opened to infectious and degenerative diseases. The stronger the immune system the easier it is for the body to fight infectious and degenerative diseases.
Sugar is implicated in the following diseases and many more: allergies, arthritis, diabetes, hypoglycemia, osteoporosis, gallstones, kidney stones, headaches, yeast infections, and cataracts.

So if you have any of the symptoms or diseases mentioned, remove all forms of sugar from your diet for two weeks, I think that you will be pleasantly surprised. Not only will some of those symptoms disappear but you will be strengthening your immune system, allowing it to do the job it was meant to, defend you against foreign invaders.

Some of the other effects of sugar on the body are:
* Increases overgrowth of candida yeast organism
* Increases chronic fatigue
* Can trigger binge eating in those with bulima
* Increases PMS symptoms
* Increases hyperactivity in about 50% of children
* Increases tooth decay
* Increases anxiety and irritability
* Can increase or intensify symptoms of anxiety and panic in susceptible women
* Can make it difficult to lose weight because of constantly high insulin levels, which causes the body to store excess carbs as fat.

Eating disorders among men are on the rise, with recent NHS findings showing that as many as a quarter of people who suffer from eating disorders are male.
The NHS Information Centre (NHS IC) research – The Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey 2007 – published last month, surveyed 7,461 people in England over 16. It found that an alarming 6.4 per cent of adults had a problem with food, a figure much higher than previously thought.
Females are ten times more likely than males to suffer from anorexia or bulimia, according to the Royal College of Psychiatrists. However, the NHS research suggests that eating disorders are becoming more common in boys and men.
Eating disorders in men can take different forms to those in women, as they “tend to be more focused on body image,” Mary George from eating disorder charity Beat, said. She explained that “visits to the gym become obsessive as does the desire to change body shape – this then becomes accompanied by controlling calorie intake which leads to a full blown eating disorder.”

Common disorders
The most common forms of eating disorder are anorexia nervosa, where individuals starve themselves and excessively exercise to lose weight, and bulimia, in which they binge on food and then purge through vomiting or laxative use. Anorexia accounts for around one in ten cases in adults, according to figures from the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), whereas bulimia accounts for a third of all cases, with other disorders such as compulsive eating making up the rest.
The disorders can range in severity and can be a major cause of serious psychological distress. The physical impact of a disorder such as anorexia can be devastating, resulting in drastic weight loss, low mood, a loss of periods in women, and in more acute cases, heart problems and osteoporosis.
In its eating disorder guidelines, NICE states that some studies have identified eating disorders as having the highest mortality rate of all mental disorders, illustrating the potential severity of these disorders.

A taboo subject
“Many men don’t realise that they have an eating disorder and are reluctant to seek help when they do feel they have a problem,” commented Beat’s Mary George on why eating disorders are usually associated with women.
The silence surrounding male anorexia and bulimia has meant the issue has become something of a taboo subject, but it was cast under the spotlight last year when former deputy prime minister, John Prescott, admitted that he had suffered from bulimia in the past.
Following Mr Prescott’s revelation, Ms George said the charity’s helplines “had ten times the normal number of calls for men who hadn’t realised they had an eating disorder until then.”
The authors of the NHS survey concluded that although research into male eating disorders was expanding, “men with eating disorders are a group that have been neglected in research, policy and clinical practice in this area”.

A complex issue – for both sexes
Problems with food can begin when it is used to cope with those times when someone is bored, anxious, angry, lonely, ashamed or sad, or when it is used as a crutch to help relieve painful situations, says Beat.
The recent tragic death of 18 year-old Alice Rae refocuses from beyond the statistics the very real and human cost of anorexia. Alice died in January of this year; found dead in bed by her mother at the family home in Houghton, Hampshire, after battling with anorexia.
The fashion industry has come under recent scrutiny for its promotion of ’size zero’ models and the message this gives out to young women about body image. But specialists, such as the National Centre for Eating Disorders, suggest reasons why someone should develop an eating disorder are complex, and each case is individual. Factors such as low self-esteem, family relationships, problems with friends, dealing with grief, problems at work or university, or sexual or emotional abuse can all play a part.

Help at hand?
Eating disorders are serious mental health issues and can be very distressing for both those with the disorder and their families, as studies show.
According to a report published by Beat in February 2008 entitled Failing Families?, 79 per cent of families surveyed said that an eating disorder had caused lasting damage to their lives. Relationship breakdown; problems at work caused by the need to take time off to provide care and support; damage to friendships and social life and a negative impact on other children in the family were all listed as factors.
Despite NICE guidance advising that “families and carers should be informed of self help and support groups and offered the opportunity to participate in such groups”, Beat’s survey found that only 12 per cent of families felt they had access to the amount of support they needed and 23 per cent had no support at all.
The NHS survey reinforces this need for improved support and treatment of those with eating disorders, finding that four in five adults (81 per cent) who screened positive for an eating disorder were not receiving any counseling, medication or therapy for a mental or emotional problem.
In response to the NHS report findings, Conservative health spokesperson Anne Milton said: “These figures are shocking. We are failing to get across to young people today the dangers they face when they abuse food. At one end of the scale we have some frightening statistics on obesity and on the other end of the scale we have many people suffering from this tragic illness.”