Functions of Carbohydrates

Carbohydrates are foods that store energy and they come in a variety of forms from cake to bread to sweets to pasta. Many of us have grown to think of carbs a ‘bad’ thing, and as being responsible for a large amount of weight gain. To this end there are even whole diets based around limiting or even entirely eradicating carbs such as the Atkins diet and this leads many people to forget the importance of carbs.

The Importance of Carbs

However diets like the Atkins diet are actually very bad for us and ill advised at best. The reason for this is simple – we need carbohydrates and without them we suffer many negative consequences.

Apart from anything else, when we completely eliminate carbs from the body, our body goes into a ‘fasting mode’ in which the mitochondria produced more ATP from less glucose and this then allows us to store more of what we eat as fat for reserves. In other words, you use the Atkins diet and your body will begin fighting you and trying to store fat. The reason for this is simple – we need carbohydrates and they do a lot of important things for our body.

Energy

Carbohydrates are the number one source of available energy for our body and we use them in order to extract glucose which can be further converted into ‘ATP’ – or Adenosine Triphosphate which is commonly described as the ‘universal energy currency’ of life.

There are two kinds of carbohydrates. These are ‘simple carbs’ which are sweet things like sugar, and ‘complex carbs’ which are things like bread and potatoes. Sources of complex carbs take much longer for our bodies to break down and release energy more gradually. This is better for us as it is less likely to be converted to fat, and as it is less likely to result in a ‘spike’ of energy followed by a lull.

At the same time the amount of sugars in a carbohydrate can also help to divide them further into categories. For instance 3-9 sugars combined form ‘oligosaccharides’, whereas 10+ make ‘polysaccharides’ and these can stack up to several thousand sugar units. Both are considered ‘complex carbs’ while ‘monosaccharides’ are those with 1-3 sugars (generally just the one).

So carbohydrates are crucial if we want to feel energetic and alert, and diets like the Atkins diet would make exercising very difficult as we would have no energy available. More importantly though, we also have to look at the ‘basal metabolic rate’ of the body. In other words, our body doesn’t just need energy when we are explicitly running around – it needs it simply in order to allow us to function as human beings: everything from our breathing to our blinking to our thinking requires energy. Without it our central nervous system would suffer, our immune system, our digestion and more. On top of all this carbohydrates also play other important roles in our organs and the processes of our body.

What Happens Without Carbohydrates?

Without carbohydrates then we would have very little energy available to our body and this would result in it having to find energy elsewhere. This would cause it to turn to the small amount of sugar found in proteins, which are better used for building muscle and other tissue. One of the roles of carbohydrate in a sense then is to allow us to use other nutrients as they are intended.

If we were to continue to starve ourselves of carbs our body would then start looking elsewhere for energy. At first this would mean burning off our fat stores, but shortly after it would mean burning off muscle and generally ‘cannibalizing’ our own body for energy causing us to waste away. We would become highly lethargic and eventually serious damage would be caused.

Of course too many carbohydrates are not good either – if you eat too many calories then these will be stored as fat, and too much glucose in the body can ultimately lead to problems like diabetes. However at the same time nor should you ever remove any food group from your diet – carbohydrates included.

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