The Bottom Line: Are there good carbs and bad carbs? If there are, should you care? This book tries to answer those questions and, in large part, succeeds.
gamblin_man's Full Review: Johanna Burani - Good Carbs, Bad Carbs: Lose Weigh...
Good Carbs, Bad Carbs: An Indispensable Guide to Eating the Right Carbs for Losing Weight & Optimum Health. This title brings up two questions. Is there a difference in the value or quality of carbohydrates in food? Is knowing this and acting on it in your diet really essential for good health and optimum weight? We will try to tell you if this book makes it case.
Why I got the Book
I have to start by saying I think I have a cat somewhere in my family tree. I am plagued by curiosity, the need to know a lot about anything that captures my interest. My odyssey into the world of carbohydrates didn't start with this book. The trip started in early June with the discovery of "The South Beach Diet" and, through that, the relatively new term Glycemic Index. I learned a lot about carbs and fats through that book and some independent web research. My next stop was "The New Glucose Revolution" where I learned even more about the role of glucose and insulin in our diet. I journeyed through "The Omega Rx Zone" by the author of "The Zone Diet" after my doctor mentioned that the South Beach diet was like the Zone diet.
After all this journeying I was pretty sure I understood a lot about glucose and insulin and fat storage, but I still wasn't clear about how or why all the different carbohydrates mentioned were different and why they had different effects on my blood chemistry and my weight. Good Carbs, Bad Carbs: An Indispensable Guide to Eating the Right Carbs for Losing Weight & Optimum Health came to my rescue. I happened on it in a neighborhood book store and after a quick scan bought it. I am happy I did.
What It Is – and Isn’t
This book is not a diet book in itself, although it can be used to help establish a good diet. It is not a comprehensive text on food and diet. It only lightly mentions fats and proteins, vitamins and minerals. It is not a medical text or even a health guide. What it talks about in its 164 pages comprising ten chapters, an appendix, and some tables, is what sugars (carbohydrates are), where they come from in food, how they get from your mouth to your bloodstream, and what happens to them and you after they get there.
It is written simply in a nice conversational style. There is no preaching or attempt to proselytize. The words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters are written for the average person with enough notes and lift outs to define the more obtuse terms. It covers the subject of where carbohydrates come from, how they get into the system and what happens as a result. This is the book that put all the pieces floating around in my head together for me.
How It Develops the Thesis
The book is broken into parts. The first part is “Carbohydrates: Your Bodies Fuel of Choice” and includes the first four chapters. It begins the tutorial with a chapter, “A Balanced Diet Defined,” telling the reader what a diet is in the minds of nutritionists and what a balanced diet means. It is in this chapter that the importance of carbohydrates begins to surface and where the authors clearly state they are only talking about this one aspect of a balanced diet in this book.
The next chapter is the one that began to put it all together for me. It is titled “How Carbs Work”. It starts with the three most important sugars and defines them and what they do for the body. It moves on to more complex sugars and shows what happens when they are broken down, in the digestive system, into simple sugars. It is here that a simple test with a small piece of white bread makes it seem relevant and truthful.
The terms gushers and tricklers are introduced in the third chapter. This is their introduction to the glycemic index. The glycemic index was developed by doctors and nutritionists in Toronto and Sydney. It defines, in a scientific way, how fast glucose from a food enters your blood stream by actually measuring the rise in blood sugar for a two or three hour period after eating a controlled amount of the carbohydrate.
The fourth chapter finishes this thought by explaining the role of insulin in the use by your muscles of glucose, the sugar that the authors call the gasoline of life. It completes the proof for the authors that there are indeed good carbs and bad carbs.
Part 2 of the book is entitled “Good Carbs: Your Edge Against Disease.” In chapters 5 to 10, the authors develop what happens when you eat following the glycemic index. The first of these chapters talks about weight loss. Chapter six is using food to control blood sugar. Chapter 7 focuses on the value to your heart and circulatory system. Chapter 8 is all about your children and what good carbs can do for them. Chapter 9 addresses how carbs can be used to reach peak athletic performance. The final Chapter, 10, puts it all together, giving good suggestions for how to pick food, prepare meals, pack a lunch, or eat out.
What Else Does the Book Have?
Each chapter is ended with a low GI recipe. I have to admit we haven’t tried any of them, but they look both wholesome and delicious. The appendix includes a list of all the foods that have been tested for their glycemic index. It is alphabetical and simply states that the food is a “gusher” that raises the blood sugar level to a point where extra insulin is needed, a “trickler”, one that enters the blood stream slowly enough that the blood sugar stays low enough not to require a burst of insulin to counteract it, and intermediate , one that does some insulin peaking but not a lot.
Summary
For me, this book was a breath of fresh air. It was honest, well written, and complete in its intended purpose. After only one read, I can quote much of the information in it. I have already bored others with this capability. If you are one of the 75 percent of people who have trouble handling foods that raise your blood sugar, this book can help you understand why, can start you on the road to better health, and is well worth the $9.95 retail price tag. With the deals on Epinions, the value is even better.
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Title: Good Carbs, Bad Carbs: An Indispensable Guide To Eating The Right Carbs For Losing Weight And Optimum Health
Authors: Johanna Burani, M.S, R.D, C.D.E. and Linda Rao, M. Ed.
In this completely revised edition of her bestselling guide, Burani brings readers up-to-date on the most recent research, making it more useful than ...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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