Thats my excuse. I don’t write daily because I get busy. I am not that busy, though, really. Truth be told I feel like anything I write these days will be watery versions of things that I have already written. But today…

Now though, I have learned a new thing. While I still hold that all processed foods are unhealthy, despite the label claims, I have discovered that all carbs are not unhealthy. There is one in the bunch that is almost always bad for you, but the rest are neutral.

If you eat any food in it’s own skin it will not be harmful. Eat all the grapes you want, when grapes are ripe on the vine, and you will put on pounds in the autumn, right before you lose all the weight you gained because food is so hard to come by. That is nature’s plan for you. The fruit is on the vine right before the pickings get slim. You and your tribe may have to migrate south to find survival sustenance. Even if you get fat on the fruit of the vine you will not stay that way through the winter.

Modern man has a different problem…the fruit is always on the vine. The only saving grace to eating fruit for twelve months out of the year…if you eat the whole fruit then you will be eating the skin. Fruit skin contains fiber, and it contains two kinds of fiber. One kind is water-soluble. The other kind does not dissolve in water. If you eat whole foods you will get both kinds of fiber. If you take the fruit and run it through a juicer or smooth it out in a Vitamix then you are only really getting the soluble fiber–you have decimated the insoluble. The value of insoluble fiber to you is that once in your intestine it coats the walls, and acts like a strainer, this strainer catches the soluble fiber as though it were a hair net, which becomes a gelatinous barrier to the starches and sugars in your food. They must penetrate this layer in order to get out of your intestine. It increases the amount of time that the sugars and starches are in your intestine, where some of them will be consumed by your germs living in your gut. The fibers themselves are being slowly consumed, too. The net effect is that you do not get a rush of glucose and fructose arriving in your liver at the same time. The rate that they arrive is called the ‘flux’. A low flux of sugars arriving can be properly metabolized by your liver. A high flux will overload it, and then your body must release insulin, cortisol, and other enzymes to keep your blood sugars in the safe zone. This acts to shunt a great deal of the energy you eat as carbs to triglycerides and then to fat storage. If you eat whole foods, if you break them up with your teeth instead of a machine, then instead you feed your microbes, your liver can handle the stress and you stay thinner and healthier.

Anything that keeps down the rate of flux of sugars into your system is of benefit to you. If you eat bread, crackers, pasta, then there is nothing that can help. This starch is the solid form of glucose. It will immediately penetrate your intestine and go into your system. Glucose can be utilized by the muscles and organs directly, though. The liver gets its share, but it doesn’t cause the liver to overload like glucose’s evil twin, fructose. Fructose is half of table sugar and if a food tastes sweet, it contains fructose. Fructose cannot be used by any organ or muscle, it must be dealt with by the liver. The difference between eating a cracker and eating a cookie is the fructose. The cookie is doubly fattening because not only does fructose require being turned into fatty acids, it also acts to suppress the satiety signal and causes you to feel hunger very quickly. We all know this to be true without the benefit of science. The science helps, though. The science says that we should not be eating fructose at every meal, it is added to just about all processed foods currently.

Now I must repeat myself. Your best, quickest route to eating healthy is to stop eating processed foods. Quit drinking processed drinks, including fruit juices. Start eating singe ingredient foods, any one of them, including any real fruit, is better than the very healthiest processed foods that exist.