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Even though experts say we should get 45-65 percent of our calories from carbs, many weight loss plans tell you to “ditch the carbs.” This confusion is because carbs are essentially sugars, so it’s not surprising that people are debating whether they’re good or bad.

But are all carbs really bad? Since carbs are found in almost all plant foods too. The real question is whether drastically eating fewer carbs improves our health.

We will go over the different types of carbs and what they do for our health goals as scientific studies keep showing that having a variety of healthy gut bacteria is super important for overall health, specifically how carbs affect the trillions of helpful bacteria living in our bodies.

Not all carbohydrates are created equal: Complex vs. simple dietary carbohydrates primarily come from the plant foods that we consume, namely fruits, vegetables, legumes, and grains, but carbs can also come from highly refined sources, like soda, candy, cookies, cakes, and white bread.
Carbohydrates are made up of sugar molecules, the body’s preferred fuel source to make cellular energy especially high-output activities that require skeletal muscle contraction, such as our heart and targeted muscle when exercising or working.

Carbohydrates are either simple or complex.
Complex sugar chains are called polysaccharides, including plant cellulose, the roughage in leafy greens, and the starch in bananas, potatoes, and pasta. Simple sugars, like glucose (a monosaccharide that is the primary source of fuel for our bodies) or sucrose (table sugar a disaccharide made up of glucose and fructose), require little effort to break down and therefore deliver instantly accessible sugar into the bloodstream for our bodies to convert into energy. These simple sugars shouldn’t be broadly labeled as bad because we rely on a certain amount for our bodies to function.

However, because consistently flooding our bodies with large amounts of these readily accessible sugars can cause blood sugar spikes and have long-term detrimental effects on our metabolism, we should focus on ingesting complex carbohydrates.

Complex carbohydrates, such as those delivered from whole grains or vegetables, require energy (and digestive enzymes) for our bodies to break down into simpler, more usable forms. Therefore, they release their sugars into the bloodstream slowly and steadily, helping maintain a stable blood sugar level. Starch, which contains hundreds of glucose units strung together, is metabolized more slowly than table sugar, providing a time-released quality, which is particularly valuable for supporting sustained energy during a workout.

What remains of complex carbohydrates after digestion? A significant benefit of complex carbohydrates is provided by what remains intact after digestion. Because our digestive system lacks the enzymes needed to break down the fiber and resistant starch in complex carbohydrates, these compounds pass through the stomach and small intestine, making it to the large intestine intact, where they play an essential role in overall gut health.

The importance of fiber.
Fiber provides the bulk that increases our sense of fullness, as well as the roughage that supports good transit time, healthy elimination, and stool quality. Fiber also binds to toxins and removes waste products from the body. There are many different types of fiber, each with varying characteristics of water solubility, viscosity, and fermentability by gut bacteria.2 Starch vs. resistant starch Starch is found in various fruits, vegetables, grains, and legumes, and it sometimes gets a bad rap due to its high sugar content.

Although digestive enzymes can break down most starch into simple sugars for fuel, some escape digestion and act similarly to dietary fiber in the large intestine. Resistant starch, as the indigestible form is called, is commonly consumed from legumes and whole grains, particularly when cooled after cooking, and it’s also present in unripe bananas.

Prebiotics, probiotics, postbiotics, oh my!
Some fiber and resistant starch have also been found to have distinct prebiotic benefits. They serve as food sources for the beneficial bacteria in our guts. Although we can’t digest some of these long sugar chains, many of the bacterial species in our guts are specialized to do precisely that, and they have adapted specifically for their capacity to digest carbohydrates.

Supplementing with clinically researched probiotic formulations, such as Thorne’s FloraSport 20B, offers a great way to nourish your microbiome by seeding it with live bacterial species. Another avenue to helping our internal ecosystem flourish is to feed our beneficial bacteria prebiotic fibers, which provide the nourishing substrate for them to create new compounds, known as fermentation end products, or postbiotics. These, in turn, yield unique benefits back to us, their host!

The term postbiotic refers to the metabolites created by gut bacteria as a part of the fiber fermentation process and can include heat-killed bacteria (found in fermented food, for example; heat killing does not destroy all the benefits of a probiotic), the vitamins (such as B vitamins and vitamin K), as well as short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs), such as butyrate, propionate, and acetate. The importance of short-chain fatty acids The symbiotic relationship between us and the trillions of beneficial species living within our guts is immensely complex. Still, we are learning that these bacteria support human health by producing Short Chain Fatty Acids (SCFAs). Butyrate, for example, is the preferred energy source for the cells that line the large intestine and exerts an anti-inflammatory effect in the gastrointestinal tract.

Butyrate also promotes the health of the tight junctions in the intestinal tissue, whose integrity is vital to reducing the risk of increased intestinal permeability, also known as leaky gut. Butyrate also increases mucin production by goblet cells, which comprise a protective mucous blanket covering the gastrointestinal tract. It is often the first to interact with invading pathogens to neutralize them.

What happens when the fiber is in short supply? The Adequate Intake (AI) for fiber is 25-38 grams daily, yet the average U.S. adult only consumes 12-18 grams daily. When dietary fiber is limited, the gut bacteria rely on proteins and fats as a food substrate; however, the result is that far fewer short-chain fatty acids are produced. Therefore less gut protection. This indicates that fiber from plant carbohydrates plays an integral role in promoting the growth of beneficial bacterial strains and should be considered a staple part of our dietary habits and supplement regimens.

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