when we talk about carbohydrates in the diet we're usually talking about foods that are rich in either starch so starchy foods and another phrase for that is complex carbohydrate I'll just write complex carbs for short and these also have another name and that name is polysaccharide and the name comes from the fact that starchy foods are made up of many sugars so poly and saccharide poly meaning many and saccharide is another chemical name for sugars and those sugars are linked together by chemical bonds now the other kinds of food that come to mind when we're
talking about dietary carbohydrates are simple carbs or simple sugars and the simplest simple sugars are single unit sugars called glucose you might have heard of this one fructose I'm sure you've heard of this one and you probably know that this is the kind of sugar that is found in fruits and also galactose so these three are called monosaccharides mono meaning one and saccharide meaning sugar so these are single sugars now when glucose and fructose are combined or linked together they form another kind of sugar that I'm sure you've heard of called sucrose and that is
reg table sugar so interestingly table sugar has gotten kind of a bad wrap in recent years it's even been called a toxin in our diets by many scientists and the truth is that the way in which we consume sugar much much too much of it in many cases it does make this kind of sugar into a toxin but you might be surprised to hear that most of the excess sugar in the average Western diet is from processed food so things like sugary cereals or sodas and these often have huge amounts of sugar added to increase
their palatability to increase their taste or to increase the shelf life of packaged foods but actually if we use sugar in moderation if we don't drink the big 2 L soda every day and we use small amounts table sugar it's probably okay for individuals who are healthy individuals who have no medical conditions it's probably okay to have a small amount of sugar in our diets moderation is the key okay back to our discussion of simple sugars the other two unit sugar that you may have heard of is called lactose and it's a combination of glucose
and galactose it's the sugar found in milk and some people have a hard time digesting it what happens then is that the lactose passes through the part of the gut where it's supposed to be absorbed and that part is called the small intestine and it gets digested in the large intestine I'll just write initials here for these parts of the gut but it goes into the large intestine where it gets digested by gas producing bacteria in the large intestine instead and that's why people with lactose int an can feel sometimes bloated and uncomfortable if they
drink regular milk that's quite high in lactose okay so these two sucrose and lactose are examples of disaccharides or two unit sugars now both of these types of carbohydrates give us energy they give us four calories and I'm writing calorie with a Capital C because that's actually a kilo calorie but anyway these guys give us energy now there's another type of carbohydrate also a type of complex carbohydrate that gives us no energy because our bodies can't break it down but it's important and it's called dietary fiber there are two kinds of dietary fiber there's soluble
fiber and insoluble fiber soluble fiber you might have guessed it from the name it dissolves in water um it's believed to support the health of the intestinal walls or the walls of the gut and there's also evidence that it might help regulate cholesterol levels also a good thing for many of us insoluble fiber doesn't dissolve in water but instead it absorbs water kind of like a sponge and because it absorbs water it acts as a stool softener it prevents us from getting constipated and it also speeds up the passage of food through the intestinal tract
or or through our digestive system by the way fiber is also a polysaccharide but our bodies can't break these bonds so it doesn't give us any energy now both types of fiber are found in fruits and veggies when we choose things like brown rice over white rice or when we choose whole grain bread over white bread we're basically making a choice that increases the amount of fiber that's connected to our starchy carbohydrates and this is better for our health and will also prevent us from getting hungry again too quickly so it's a good thing to
do
