Most replayed moment: Carbs: the good, the bad, and the misunderstood | Tim Spector

Hello, and welcome to Zoe recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health. Today, we're talking about carbohydrates, Pasta, potatoes, fruit, and beans. Carbs crop up everywhere. However, few topics in nutrition causes much confusion. Are they essential fuel or the enemy of weight loss? Should we cut them down or just choose our carbs more carefully? I'm joined by professor Tim Spector to help untangle the truth and answer your biggest carbohydrate questions. Stick around to find out if freezing your bread makes it healthier. So what is a carb and what is it that can make it unhealthy? Well, a carb is a macronutrient. So in in the sort of the old school world that we used to know, everything was divided into these three groups of proteins, fats, and carbs. And most of the things we eat are mixtures of those rather than one thing. You don't actually eat a carb, you eat a plant. And that plant will have different amounts of proteins, fats, and carbs in it. And within the carbs, it's gonna have different types of carbs in it. And some of the foods we eat, which you say, Oh, that's a carby food, like say bread, is also gonna have some protein in it and a little bit of fat in it. So we tend to massively oversimplify, but that's what we've done in the past, mainly through ignorance. And the food companies have liked it that way because it's made it very easy to sell products to us. Now, I think we need to break down carbs into what they are, which they are essentially sugars that are either very simple, sort of moderately simple, and really complex and and long and hard to break down. So the the simple sugars like sucrose, you know, your table sugar, is a very simple carbohydrate. It's a very simple sugar. It means it only has a few bonds easily broken down and used by your body as energy. Then you've got the starches, which are slightly more complex storage forms of sugar, which are joined together by bonds, which can be broken down by other enzymes in your body. And every plant has these starches and we're designed to do them. So they break it down into simple sugars, which are then released. It just takes a little bit longer. And then you've got the really complicated long sugars all joined together with lots of tight bonds that are called fibers. And these are sometimes really impossible to break down in the body and only by the gut microbes sometimes rather than ourselves, and they pass through the body. So you've got this complexity all the way from simple to very long and complex with very different effects on the body. So most people think of carbs as only the sort of sugary end ones. They forget that a lot of …