Give up carbs — are you out of your mind?
Words fail me! 
Quote:
From The Times
London, UK
7 December, 2017
Give up carbs — are you out of your mind?
From posh carbonara to Christmas sarnies, comfort food is in demand again, says Tony Turnbull. Why did I ever stop eating it, asks Esther Walker
It’s not much of a pun — a letter “e” in the middle would have helped — but when the Eat sandwich chain started emblazoning its packaging with #CarbDiem earlier this year, you just knew that something was in the air. Then last month Instagram lit up with images of Raviolo, the rave new hangout in Manhattan, where the neon pink sign on the wall says it all: “Life is a combination of magic and pasta.” Yes, it’s official: carbohydrate is back on the menu.
Don’t believe me? Sandwich sales at Marks & Spencer are up by 35 per cent on the same period last year. At Bread Ahead, the artisan bread-maker in Borough Market, London, they have gone from giving bread-making classes to 24 people a week to 300 a week, with places booked up to a year in advance.
Meanwhile, from Al Dente Pasta Bar in Norwich to the Pasta Hut in Plymouth, every other new restaurant that has opened over the past month seems to have pasta at its core. At Passo, a new all-day Italian in Old Street in London, you can load up on orecchiette with octopus ragu, and pappardelle with wild boar and port sauce; at Flour & Grape pasta and wine bar in Bermondsey they have eight pasta dishes on the menu and precious little else. And have you seen the queues outside Pastaio, Stevie Parle’s new Italian diner in Soho? People are happy to wait up to three hours — yes, three hours — for a plate of handmade rigatoni in tomato sauce or Genoese-style pesto, which comes with pasta and potatoes.
You can even order your fix of pasta delivered through your letterbox, courtesy of Pasta Evangelists, which, with the backing of Prue Leith and our own Giles Coren, hopes to do for pumpkin ravioli and sage butter what Lovefilm did for video rental. Truly this is the age of the carb.
You can even order your fix of pasta delivered through your letterbox, courtesy of Pasta Evangelists, which, with the backing of Prue Leith and our own Giles Coren, hopes to do for pumpkin ravioli and sage butter what Lovefilm did for video rental. Truly this is the age of the carb.
Except that if they were honest it was never really about health, but about weight loss, and like all restrictive diets (ie every diet that ever existed) it only had a certain shelf life. Sooner or later the willpower cracks and you realise that a bowl of pasta carbonara is delicious and life-affirming in a way that a spiralised butternut squash never can be. So you slip back into your old ways until the next fad comes along.
We never gave up carbs in our house — what kind of middle-class hell would it be without pesto pasta come children’s teatime? — but we have introduced a rule of favouring less processed brown carbs over white so you get the benefit of the wholegrain. Out and about, though, all rules are off. Padella in Borough Market’s fettuccine with smoked eel, cream and lemon, or Pastaio’s bucatini cacio e pepe? You’d be a fool to deny yourself the pleasure of that.
I wish I hadn’t avoided pasta for 15 years
I left university two stone heavier than when I arrived. The link between refined carbohydrates and obesity had not yet been repopularised and I just ate white carbs and drank sugary cocktails and wondered why I was always hungry.
Then along came the Atkins diet. I looked at pictures of Jennifer Aniston — a fan of the diet — with her slim, toned arms and glowing skin, and from then on treated carbs like they were poison. I ran screaming in fright from chips and turned white at the mere mention of pasta. For 15 years I did this.
Don’t get me wrong, cutting out carbohydrate for weight loss works. And it suits anyone without the time or energy to think about “balance” or to prepare for themselves a rainbow plate with a palm-sized portion of this and a fist-sized portion of that.
It’s so binary. Protein: yes. Carbs: no. Stuck at a service station with only sandwiches for a snack? Buy a packet of ham and eat the whole thing. Brazils have the highest fat content of all nuts — eat three and you won’t want to eat again for a week.
Even the cast of The Only Way Is Essex could understand it. Preparing for their annual jaunt to Marbella they worked out in hoodies bearing the legend: “No Carbs Before Marbs.”
The message spread and in 2010, for the first time, sales of white bread — which have historically tracked population growth — fell by 1 per cent, while sales of brown bread increased by 6 per cent and seeded products by 9 per cent.
For years I denied myself anything approaching “comfort food” and never ate the kids’ leftover fries. Very occasionally I would eat a single thin slice of sourdough toast for breakfast. I sometimes missed spaghetti bolognese so much I would eat the sauce with spiralised courgette.
Then one day my husband, Giles, who also rarely eats carbs, came home and said: “There’s this new pasta delivery company, Pasta Evangelists, who want to know if I’m interested in working with them.”
“Pasta delivery?” I shrieked.
“I know!” he said. We fell about laughing for a bit at the idea that anyone would order pasta, but we tried it anyway.
“There’s not very much of it,” I said, peering into my small bowlful of fresh, handmade tagliatelli, dressed with a walnut pesto sauce and scattered with parmesan.
“Well,” Giles said, shrugging, “this is how much pasta an Italian would eat, not a stoned English student with the munchies. This won’t make you fat.”
Then I took the first mouthful of pasta I had eaten since 2005 and looked at my husband and said: “Oh my God. This is delicious.” I ate the whole lot at a nice, relaxed Italian pace. In the old days I would have piled the whole lot on to one forkful.
Once it was finished I felt a bit sad that there was no more, which is often the problem with pasta, but I thought about it and decided that, no, that was probably enough dinner. The next morning I didn’t weigh 400 stone. We had it again the next week, and the next. I did not put on weight.
That will sound absurd to anyone with a normal approach to food, but true carb-phobics will understand. Pasta had become to me the Devil’s doing. I believed that, once eaten, one strand would metabolise directly into neat sugar and turn me into the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man.
Alessandro Savelli, one of the founders of Pasta Evangelists, explains that the Italians who are slim eat carbohydrate — just not very much of it. “Italian women will probably eat pasta every day,” he says, “but in Italy pasta is usually eaten as a primo, it’s only a modest amount. And I would say that in the UK there is usually about 50 per cent too much sauce added. In Italy you would never, ever just have pasta for your dinner.”
Perhaps, I thought, the problem had never been with the carbs. Perhaps it had just been how much of them I had been eating — and with what.
Ayela Spiro, a nutrition science manager at the British Nutrition Foundation, sets me straight on a few things. “Weight gain typically results from eating more calories than your body uses,” she says. “Carbohydrate, like protein, contains around 4kcal per gram compared to fat, which contains 9kcal per gram. Provided starchy foods are not cooked or served with a lot of fat or sugars, and portion sizes are kept moderate, they are relatively low in calories.”
The problems come when you combine too much carbohydrate with fat and protein, she says. This, as we professional dieters will know, is the principle of the Hay diet, where you eat protein or carbohydrate, but never combine the two.
Another key point about carbohydrates is where you get them from. Processed carbohydrate, for example a bowl of Coco Pops, is catastrophic in the way that a handful of wholewheat pasta just isn’t. In his book How to Lose Weight Well, the TV medic Xand van Tulleken points out that some foods are designed to be addictive so that you go on eating beyond the point where you are full. “Studies show that ice cream affects the brain’s reward system in almost the same way as cocaine,” he says. “Most processed foods are almost impossible to stop eating.”
Jo Saunders thinks that making carbohydrate the bad guy is too simplistic. “There are so many other things going on in a diet other than just how much carbohydrate is taken on,” says the Bant-registered nutritionist at cookingthemhealthy.com, which specialises in women’s health.
“There’s what sort you are eating and at what time,” she explains. “I’d always advise ‘clever’ carbohydrate such as parsnip, squash and other root veg, and also to front-load your eating, ie eating a lot early in the day and tailing off towards bedtime.
“For example, if you find at around kids’ teatime you can’t stay off the children’s food, just eat with them and make that your evening meal. That would give you a long fast until breakfast the next day and there are some important biochemical processes that can’t happen unless you’re in a fasting state.
“I also think the whole debate about carbohydrate has moved on and it’s gut bacteria we need to focus on. If you’re just cutting out carbs you will mess around with your gut health and that in turn will upset your digestion and hormones.”
And that in turn, says Georgia Lennard, a naturopathic nutritionist from beyondbalance.co.uk, will have the opposite effect from the one you intended. “A very low-carb diet is do-able for about two to three years, depending on the type of person you are, but it’s not sustainable in terms of losing or maintaining weight. Without some good carbohydrate you won’t digest effectively.” In other words, the eat-all-you-want protein diet will work for so long, then it will start to work against you.
I certainly found that up until about the age of 30 (I am now 37), as long as my diet was high-fat, high-meat and low-sugar I was doing OK. Then, past 35, I realised that I could no longer chow down on endless stews and roasts and bacon and eggs and still be within my ideal weight range.
Age definitely has got a lot to do with it, Saunders says. “For women, as they enter the pre- or peri-menopausal stage of life, their metabolism goes down and thyroid function is affected — a certain level of good carbohydrate is required to make the thyroid hormone.”
Let’s not get carried away: processed food and sugar are still the No 1 enemy. Yes to wholewheat pasta and jacket potatoes; no to an entire pizza.
“Processed sugar sends blood sugar and insulin through the roof,” says Lennard. “It screams to your body to store fat and pushes fat into the cells at a rapid rate. Nobody can get away with it and there is no excuse for eating that stuff.”
But above all else, not getting fat is about not eating too much, whether it is steak and eggs or a huge pile of spaghetti. Once you realise that, you may as well be having a small bowlful of delicious pasta as anything else. And amen to that.
Esther Walker
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/...-mind-qp69sqjh0
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