Chapter 1: You Can Benefit from the Good Carbohydrate Plan You can benefit from the Good Carbohydrate Plan because everyone -- including those on high protein diets -- eats carbohydrates. If you answer yes to any of the following questions, the Good Carbohydrate Plan will be of enormous benefit to you.
- Are you confused about carbohydrate, protein, and fat?
- Have you tried dieting and gained and lost weight over and over again?
- Do you have a lot of weight to lose, perhaps 20 to 50 pounds or more, and you are concerned that these pounds may contribute to health problems?
- Are you trying to lose those last, stubborn 5 to 20 pounds and can't seem to get them off?
- Have you been told that you have or are at risk for high blood sugar and you want to get it under control before it gets out of hand?
- Have you discovered that you have high cholesterol and you are concerned about heart disease risk, but you don't want to take medication to control it? Or, are you already on medication for cholesterol and want to get rid of the need for medication?
- Do you feel tired and just not up to par all the time and you want to get your energy back?
My patients have followed the principles of the Good Carbohydrate Plan and have successfully met these health challenges -- some of them in as little as three weeks. What's more, when they continue to follow the principles, they experience the results for a lifetime.
WHAT IS THE GOOD CARBOHYDRATE PLAN?
The Good Carbohydrate Plan is a high carbohydrate eating plan that helps you control your weight, your blood sugar, and your cholesterol permanently by changing the sources of carbohydrates in your diet. I have used this plan for nearly fifteen years to help my patients lose weight naturally and control their blood sugar without calorie counting. It is centered on good carbohydrates -- those that provoke the smallest rise in blood sugar and insulin -- and can be tailored to your individual needs.
The Good Carbohydrate Plan translates the latest scientific research about carbohydrates and other nutrients into a set of principles called The Five C's for finding good carbohydrates and a table I call the Carbohydrate Quotient to help you with your food choices. I've also included in this book recipes and tips on how you can make the most of good carbohydrates.
Let me emphasize that the Good Carbohydrate Plan is a flexible plan. It is not a one-diet-fits-all or an all-or-nothing plan. With the Good Carbohydrate Plan, you can tune up whatever diet you are on by replacing bad carbohydrates with good ones. Every good carbohydrate you add to your diet to replace a bad carbohydrate will be of benefit to you. Or you can try a complete version of the Good Carbohydrate Plan and obtain the maximum result of controlling blood sugar and cholesterol without medication. You'll begin with good carbohydrates as the core of the diet and add optional foods to create healthy diets such as vegetarian, Mediterranean, or Asian.
And here's the best part. The Good Carbohydrate Plan does not restrict the amount of food that you eat. It allows you to eat more carbohydrates while you control blood sugar, and helps bring your cholesterol levels to a safe range, i.e., below 170 mg/dl. You'll be able to eat whenever you feel hungry, and enjoy delicious, healthy foods for the rest of your life.
WHY A BOOK ABOUT CARBOHYDRATES?
I'm writing this book because there has been a lot of misinformation and confusion about carbohydrates over the last few years. Most of the popular literature on dieting these days touts the benefits of protein while bashing carbohydrates. They say that carbohydrates cause everything from obesity, diabetes, heart disease, to high blood pressure. Meanwhile, I have been reversing these same conditions with a high carbohydrate diet for over a decade using large amounts of the very foods that some have said would cause these diseases. Something is terribly wrong! The public is getting the wrong message.
Because of all the misinformation, many Americans are steering clear of exactly the foods they need to be healthy, trim, and fit. One popular protein diet book on its back cover indicates that carrots may be a food to avoid. Carrots unhealthy for you? No way! I want to set the record straight. Carbohydrates have been the cornerstone of health for the human race for thousands of years. Carbohydrates are also the center of the plan that I have been using for nearly fifteen years to get people to control their blood sugar, cholesterol, and weight, and regain their health as a result.
WHY THE GOOD CARBOHYDRATE PLAN?
I was born, raised, and still live in Hawaii where we have the advantage of being at the crossroads between East and West. Here, I am able to see firsthand the differences between a variety of diets and the health of the people on these diets. When I was studying medicine, I began to notice that the ancestors of the people who live in Hawaii -- the people from Asia, Polynesia, Hawaii, the Mediterranean -- all seemed to have quite good health. When their descendants moved to Hawaii, they began eating a Modern American Diet (MAD) and started to have high rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease, and diabetes like the majority of the United States population.
Modern people who base their diets on traditional eating patterns experience a fraction of the heart disease, obesity, diabetes, and other chronic diseases that have reached epidemic proportions in the United States. China and Japan are two obvious examples of cultures that eat very high carbohydrate diets and have populations with low rates of obesity, heart disease, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and diabetes.
Considering the grim statistics -- nearly one-third of all Americans die of heart disease, nearly one quarter of all Americans die of cancer, 7 percent die of stroke, and diabetes has increased 33 percent in the last ten years -- I thought this sharp contrast of the low rates of diseases in other countries compared to the United States was so important that I looked at this relationship more carefully. I began to realize that the populations with low rates of chronic diseases ate large amounts of what I call good carbohydrates. In fact, in ancient times over 80 percent of calories came from good carbohydrate foods. By sharp contrast, in modern times with our fast food, high fat, high animal product, high sugar diet, less than 15 percent of the American diet comes from good carbohydrates (see diagram, page 27). This is one of the fundamental reasons why our MAD diet is causing obesity and so many ill health effects.
To prevent and reverse some of the obesity and chronic diseases that plague so many of us, I developed the principles of the Good Carbohydrate Plan while studying nutrition at Harvard University. I launched my practice and a number of nutrition programs in Hawaii fourteen years ago based on the principles of the Good Carbohydrate Plan. Since then, I have been blessed to see thousands of people benefit from these principles, including, for many, life-changing improvements in their weight and health. I am writing this book to show you how you too can enjoy better health and natural weight control on the Good Carbohydrate Plan.
Getting to the Real Problem
The reason the Good Carbohydrate Plan works so well is that it gets to the real problem. The problem is not that we are eating too many carbohydrates. The problem is that we are eating too many bad carbohydrates along with too much fat and animal products. Americans are eating more refined carbohydrates than ever. We now eat a record high of 33 teaspoons of sugar per person per day. We also consume an average of 149.7 pounds of flour products per person per year, with less than 2 percent of it coming from whole grain. The American diet is loaded with refined white flour and white sugar -- bad carbohydrates -- the very opposite of what we need for optimum health.
The American diet is also far too high in fat, cholesterol and animal products. Contrary to what some popular diet proponents have suggested, dietary fat intake continues to increase in this country. Objective data from the USDA for the years 19701999 shows that while sugar intake has increased dramatically, fat intake has gradually increased to record high levels, and we are eating more animal products than ever.
As you will see in the research I describe in Chapter 3, the solution to the American diet problem isn't replacing bad carbohydrates with protein and fat. The solution is in replacing bad carbohydrates with health-promoting good carbohydrates.
CARBOHYDRATES ARE NOT THE CULPRIT
In the age of so-called protein diets, carbohydrates have been labeled the guilty culprit. As a result, many Americans are afraid to chomp down on a nice crunchy carrot, eat a bowl of brown rice, or bite into a delicious slice of whole grain bread! Let's look at some of the reasons why all carbohydrates have been wrongly lumped together as bad.
Much of the recent evidence against carbohydrates is based on the actions of the hormone, insulin. Insulin is an important hormone in your body that is secreted into your bloodstream to process carbohydrates. While everyone needs the insulin their body makes, according to some recent research I describe in Chapter 3 on the relationship between insulin levels and health, having too much insulin circulating in your blood can be related to heart disease, obesity, and other health problems. There is also some evidence that in some people, high insulin levels may cause a cluster of health problems called Syndrome X, or Metabolic Syndrome. This syndrome includes high blood sugar, high blood pressure, and abnormal cholesterol levels.
Since carbohydrates have the potential for raising insulin levels, this has led some high-protein-diet proponents to proclaim that all carbohydrates are bad. However, what these diets and almost all other diets have ignored is that not all carbohydrates are the same. The ...
