examining the differences between a “healthy” high-starch
diet and a toxic Western diet, we find a few key points to
consider:
Traditional higher-carb diets are still low in sugar.
Traditional diets include far less “acellular”
carbohydrate—sugar and starch that have been
removed from the cells they were contained in. Think
whole fruit vs. fruit juice, or sprouted bread compared
to pulverized and powdered “whole-wheat” bread. In
one recent study mice were fed the exact same
amounts of the exact same food, just powdered vs.
whole. Guess which group of mice gained the most
weight? Powdered. Processing food—carbs, fat,
whatever—makes it instantly more toxic to your
system.It’s difficult to tease out the harmful effect of sugar vs.
sugar and fat combined together in addictive processed
foods. It may be that sugar, consumed in isolation, isn’t
toxic or even prone to overconsumption, but becomes so in
the context of processing. In truth, it is very difficult for
your body to turn small amounts of sugar into fat, but when
carbohydrate is present in your system, every molecule of
fat consumed alongside it is going to be immediately stored
until those carbs are completely used up by your cells. To
make things worse, the giant insulin spike that ensues makes
that fat inaccessible to your body for energy between meals.
This is how hunger snowballs and the loss of metabolic
flexibility begins (more on this in chapter 6).