I have a new article on Return of Kings, in which I discuss carbohydrates. Namely, whether or not they are as bad for you as some fitness enthusiasts have claimed them to be.

Many fitness enthusiasts, when discussing diet and nutrition, will come to the conclusion that carbs are inherently bad, and should be excised from the diet immediately. Some will even go as far as to accuse the neolithic revolution as the point where human society went irreversibly down hill…

Idiotic leftist anthropology aside, there is some grain of truth to this—certainly, consumption of carbs is rampant in the United States, and to a lesser extent the Western world on the whole. A major factor, if not the deciding factor, that causes this is the intertwining of political lobbying and agricultural business, in which corn production (to name one glaring example) is stimulated via political lobbying and reasons to eat vast quantities of corn syrup are made up after the corn is grown.

But the question remains, are carbos as bad for you as some have claimed?

Carbohydrates—more accurately, their substrate glucose—are, of course, the main energy currency of the human body. Glucose is very quickly converted to adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, and that in turn is used for purposes of cellular energy (to put it VERY simply). In addition to that, carbohydrates are stored as muscular glycogen for  purposes of medium-duration exercise, which is to say the durations of time that a set of an exercise is done.

While glucose can in fact be synthesized from amino acids, and in fact this is the main working arrangement of ketogenic diets, the relatively small amount of carbohydrate content needed, and the quick dietary absorption time compared to proteins, indicates that carbohydrates should be consumed in balance with protein and fat. But then the question remains: what constitutes “balance”, exactly?

You can read the article here.

(If the link doesn’t work when you click it, it is because the article is scheduled for a time later today).