 Drop it. Hey everybody, Dr. O here. Welcome to everyone's favorite topic, carbs, right? We're gonna talk about the carbohydrates, sugars, starches and fibers. We'll talk about the differences and the similarities and we'll talk about carbohydrates and their role in our health. Okay, let's start with our ice breaker. Your brain needs carbohydrates to power its activities. What are your go-to snacks when studying for exams, going to the gym, why are some better for you than others? So let's start with the beginning premise there, the brain needs carbs. So yeah, parts of your brain absolutely rely on glucose, but there are other fuels like the astrocytes in your brain. They actually convert glucose into lactate and then that can be used as a fuel source by other parts of your brain. Your brain can be fueled by ketones, but carbs, glucose is a great fuel source for the brain. But when we talk about needing something right there, or when we talk about glucose being your primary fuel, what I would say is that your brain and your body will preferentially use glucose first and that's because it's so tightly regulated. So right now you have maybe four grams of glucose in your bloodstream unless you're a pre-diabetic or a diabetic, meaning you have less than a teaspoon in your bloodstream. So if you're gonna eat three or 400 grams of carbohydrates today and you only have four grams in your bloodstream at any one time and it's super tightly regulated, then when you consume carbohydrates your body needs to use them, right? So it will preferentially use them before other fuels like fat and other fuel sources. But let's see, your red blood cells absolutely need glucose for fuel. They don't have mitochondria. They can't burn other energy sources. So your red blood cells need them. Your brain parts of your brain do need to rely on glucose but parts can rely on other fuel sources. But this preferential thing, just kind of keep that in mind. Like for example, if you drink alcohol your body will preferentially use alcohol. It will metabolize alcohol to get rid of it. So you could say that alcohol is your primary fuel source in that situation. But it's more that your body is dealing with what it needs to deal with first. So if you have excess glucose in your blood that can be a serious problem. So your body will use it, it'll store it and these types of things. So carbs are a great fuel source. I just kind of wanted to talk about that but isn't that amazing that the RDA for carbohydrates is 130 grams a day. The average American probably eats 300 or more grams of carbs a day. But you only have four grams in your bloodstream in any one moment. And it's super, super tightly regulated. And thankfully there are ways to increase the amount of glucose in your blood too or else every time you exercise you would drop dead. So pretty neat. So your go-to snacks and we'll talk about foods but that's for you to answer I guess. But why are some better for you than others? I mean think about if you have two carbohydrate sources and one has fiber and one doesn't then I would say the one with fiber is generally gonna be better for you. And then just if you're looking, if you're studying or you're working out you want, let's say you're getting ready to work out where you're gonna want carbs that are gonna be digested and absorbed quickly. So they get in the bloodstream for your workout. But if you're trying to sustain energy for long periods of time maybe you want carbohydrates that are a little slow to digest and they don't cause a rapid increase in blood glucose. And then we'll cover in this chapter that what goes up must come down. So whatever causes a rapid increase in blood glucose will lead to an insulin response that causes a more rapid decline as well. So we'll talk about things like the glycemic index there. So just a neat way to think about carbohydrates as we start. All right, so what I know is always that just what I'm doing these. So by the end of this chapter we should be able to identify the so chemically the monosaccharides, the disaccharides and the polysaccharides. So we'll talk about their structures and then also where you find them in food. Summarize carbohydrate digestion and absorption. I promised you we would come back and review digestion of each of the macronutrients on their own and then explain how the body maintains its blood glucose concentrations and what happens when blood glucose rises too high or falls too low. So you're looking at hyperglycemia which would be things like type one and type two diabetes and then hypoglycemia if your blood sugar is too low. Okay, really, really itchy. All right, it's a lot of pollen right now. Describe how added sugars can contribute to health problems. So we'll look at carbohydrates that need to be talked about separately with sugars and added sugars. And there are lots of carbohydrates that offer lots of value but added sugar usually not so much. Identify the health benefits of and recommendations for starches and fibers. So we'll talk about those and then summarize the key scientific evidence behind some of the current controversies surrounding carbs and their calories. So we'll cover all that. All right, the chemists view of carbohydrates. So we're gonna be looking at them from a structural standpoint here. So what is a monosaccharide, a disaccharide or a polysaccharide? So let's start with that. What's saccharide means? It basically means sugar. So a monosaccharide is going to be a single sugar unit. A disaccharide, dye means two, will be a pair of monosaccharides attached to each other and then poly means many. So polysaccharides are gonna be long chains of monosaccharides. Another way to look at this, the monosaccharides and disaccharides are generally classified as what are called simple sugars and the polysaccharides are classified as complex carbohydrates. So you'll see here that these carbohydrates are gonna be made or there's the atoms that make up the foods that we eat are primarily carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen, but you won't see nitrogen here. Nitrogen's only found in the amino group so it's found in amino acids. That's the reason that we have to eat protein, but your carbohydrates and your fats are made of different combinations of carbon, hydrogen and oxygen. I mentioned this in an earlier video, but one of the main reasons that there's nine calories in a gram of fat and only four calories in a gram of carbs is that fat has less oxygen, so you can cram more carbon and hydrogen onto that teaspoon or whatever. Okay, so let's look at monosaccharides, disaccharides, polysaccharides. I just, again, the brain uses glucose as its primary energy source. Again, I would say that it relies on glucose whenever glucose is available to help keep your blood sugar level stable. It's also true that red blood cells do rely on glucose as its only fuel source. Muscles store simple sugars in the form of glycogen, so we'll look at animals like us. We store glucose in the form of glycogen. It can be stored in two places, your muscles and your liver, so we'll come back to that. And then excess sugars are stored as fat. Your body can turn any excess food, any excess calories into fat, whether it's fat, obviously, excess calories from protein, excess carbs, excess alcohol, all these things can be turned into fat. So I like this point here, though, where carbs are sometimes mistakenly thought of as fattening and maybe avoided by dieters. This may be useful if the carbohydrates come from simple sugars like candy and soft drinks, but it's not the case for whole-brain carbohydrates. So let's talk about that, right? Like, so a lot of people really like lower carbohydrate diets, and some people do really well on high-carb diets. That's completely up to you and your genetics and lifestyle. But one of the reasons that I think that people do pretty well on lower-carb diets isn't just because of the carbs, right? If you're, you know, a diet, you can't lose weight unless your diet puts you in a caloric deficit. And a low-carb diet does so by removing foods that have a lot of carbs. But the most fattening foods on the planet are mixtures of carbs and fat. So if someone goes on a low-carb diet and they're avoiding pizza and ice cream and these types of things and cookies, then they will be consuming less carbs and less of those fattening fats, I guess, as well. And that's why it seems to be beneficial. So people don't just eat teaspoons of sugar most of the time. It is a combination of carbs and fat that are fattening because they're so calorically dense. So for me, if I'm designing a diet for someone, once we got their protein needs met and we make sure they're getting all their micronutrients, carbs and fats just kind of fill in the gaps. Like, you wanna make sure you get enough fat because if you get too little fat, you have problems with absorbing fat-sebel vitamins and making hormones, you get enough fat and then carbs and fats really, just how do you wanna fuel your activities? And one of the big questions there would be what kind of activities, right? So if you're, and we'll cover that here in this chapter, but if you're an endurance athlete, your diet might look totally different than a powerlifter, for example. Okay, so the monosaccharides. You see here are the three monosaccharides. We have glucose, fructose, and galactose. So glucose is the same glucose that's in your blood. We call it blood sugar or blood glucose. Glucose is a primary fuel source of the human body and it is a part, like it says there, it's a part of every disaccharide. So we'll come back to those. So glucose is the key. Fructose is actually sweeter than glucose, which is why like table sugar is gonna be sweet and honey and these types of things. And then galactose is generally just found in foods that have lactose, which is called a milk sugar. But the key with both fructose and galactose is your liver has to turn them into glucose to use them for fuel. That's why you see something like Gatorade, where these things got popular. Basically these energy drinks or these sports performance drinks, they're mixtures of glucose and fructose. So when you take these in, the glucose is ready to be absorbed and uses a fuel right now. The fructose is going to need to be converted to glucose by the liver. So it's like you get a whack of energy now and then 20, 30 minutes later, you start to get this second boost of energy from the fructose. So that could be a good or bad thing depending on how you look at it. But that's why these sports performance drinks are gonna have a combination of both of those usually. So those are your three monosaccharides, glucose, fructose, galactose. We very rarely see any of them on their own. So you're, now then this you see that this is just the chemical structure of glucose, which is C6H12O6. And then, but that's just how you, how you would draw its chemical structure there. And now look at these. So you see fructose, glucose, fructose, and galactose, they're quite similar, right? They have the, they all have that same C6H12O6, just different arrangements. But these arrangements do impact their sweetness. So like I mentioned earlier, fructose is sweeter than glucose, even though it's made of the same things. Just like you take the same Lego blocks and you put them in the different formulations and that's your monosaccharides. So glucose is the key energy source. Fructose, you'll see that that's found in fruit sugar. And then galactose, which is found in lactose. All right, let's do this little matching thing here together. So complex carbohydrates are the polysaccharides. I mentioned that earlier. Sucrose is a disaccharide, which we haven't, we haven't gone over the disaccharides yet, but sucrose is a disaccharide. Galactose is a monosaccharide. One of those three, lactose or milk sugar is a disaccharide. Well, let's just, just real good because we're talking about it. Sucrose is going to be a disaccharide, a glucose plus a fructose. Lactose is a disaccharide, a glucose plus a galactose, fructose being our monosaccharide. And then a maltose is a glucose plus another glucose. All right, so I don't know why they put that before they actually showed you the disaccharides. So let's look at them. So we have the monosaccharides or a single sugar unit. Your disaccharides are pairs. So we have maltose, which I just said is a glucose bonded to another glucose. Sucrose or table sugar is a glucose plus a fructose and lactose is a glucose plus a galactose. So you see, glucose is in all three of them and lactose is called milk sugar. The types of reactions. So condensation reactions, you basically remove a water when you link monosaccharides together. So if you're building a monosaccharide, you use condensation reactions. It's called that because you're removing water, just like water condensing. Hydrolysis, you're using water to tear something apart. So a hydrolysis reaction uses water to split these. So if you're digesting sucrose, for example, you're gonna use a hydrolysis reaction to split it into a glucose and a fructose. That glucose already ready to be used as a fuel source, fructose, the liver will have to convert it to glucose before you can use it. All right, so here we see just that's a hydrolysis reaction like I just explained. So I wanna talk a little bit more about the disaccharides. There's not a lot of information here. So where do we see sucrose? Well, sucrose is table sugar, right? Generally it comes from things like sugar beets and sugar cane, these types of things. So the typical table sugar you see on your kitchen counter, that would be sucrose. Now you've probably heard of high fructose corn syrup, very similar, right? Glucose is 50% glucose, 50% fructose. High fructose corn syrup, let's say it's 55% fructose, 45% glucose. It's not, I don't think high fructose corn syrup is inherently any worse for you than sugar. It's just that it's so cheap, right? Because corn is a subsidized crop. You can take this cheap subsidized corn and turn it into sugar. So since it's cheap and it's sweet, it can be used. You know, that's why sugar is in everything, right? It's in your bread, it's all over the place. And part of the reason is because of the cost. So that's a whole separate discussion. All right, so maltose, you're not, malt liquor, malted milk balls. There are a few things that have quite a bit of maltose in them, but you generally don't eat a whole lot of maltose. Maltose is gonna come from your polysaccharides, which we're gonna cover next. These big long chains of carbohydrates, as you break them apart and digest them, at some point they will be digested into these two glucose units of maltose. So usually most the maltose in your body right now is from the breakdown of the polysaccharides like starch and glycogen. So that's maltose, sucrose we call table sugar, and then lactose is milk sugar. It's a glucose and a galactose. The bond holding those two together is harder for your body to break than the other ones. And then also a lot of humans don't have the enzyme lactase as an adult. As a child, we all have the enzyme lactase to break down milk sugar from mother's milk, but then of breast milk. But then as we get older, some of us stop producing the enzyme lactase and we become lactose intolerant. Now that's still for most of human history, that would have been the case all the time. Because for most of human history, humans didn't consume milk after they were weaned from their mother's breast. So there was a mutation that occurred maybe 10,000 years ago in Northern Europe, 7,000 years ago in Africa, in different places these mutations occurred that led to lactase persistence. So some people continued to make the enzyme lactase into adulthood, which meant they could consume dairy products and which obviously would lead to a survival advantage. You have a whole another type of food you can consume. So lactose intolerance would be the rule, not the exception. So most humans, for most of human history, would have been lactose intolerant as adults, but now you're seeing more and more people that can digest lactose as adults. And I would say it varies, right? I do perfectly fine with, we'll talk about lactose intolerance specifically later, but I do perfectly fine with yogurt and cheese and these kind of things, but like a glass of milk just kind of doesn't, I don't feel very good. So I feel like I have a little bit, I have the enzyme lactase, but maybe not as much as some people that enjoy milk and don't have any problems with it. I personally, I've switched to macadamia and milk and I think it works really well for me. All right, so a little bit more about the disaccharides there. So the polysaccharides, these are gonna be long chains of glucose. So every one of these little structures you see on the screen here is a glucose. So there, we have glycogen, we have starch, you see two different kinds of starch, and then we have your undigestible polysaccharides like cellulose, which is fiber. So fiber would also be on this list. So let's start with starch. Starch is how plants store carbohydrates. So plants have glucose, then they store it as starch. You see there are two different types of starch, amylopectin, which is highly branched, as you can see, and amylose, which is not. So quick question, which of these do you think your body could digest and release the glucose from faster? Well, it would actually be the amylopectin just because there are so many different branches that it can pull a glucose off of. That amylose on the right, it can only clip a glucose off the two ends. The amylopectin, you got all these different places where you can grab a glucose. So if you're consuming, that's why all starches are not the same. If you consume a starch that has a lot of amylopectin, it'll probably cause your blood sugar to rise faster than if you consume a lot of starch that has amylose in it. So we'll come back to those. So starch is how plants store carbs, and then they don't store them for us, but we take them, right? And then glycogen is going to be how animals store carbohydrates. So this is how we store glucose. The key here is that there's only two places where glycogen is stored in animals, including humans. That is your muscles and your liver. Key difference though, the glycogen in your muscles is used by the muscles. It can't be given, if you're starving to death and there's glycogen in your muscles, it won't give them up. It won't share it with the rest of your body. So muscle glycogen is just four muscles. That's why if you're an athlete and you're using up a bunch of glycogen by running miles and miles and miles or cycling or something, that's why you replenish your glycogen stores after you worked out because your muscles just used a bunch of their glycogen. Liver glycogen's different. Liver glycogen is where we store excess glucose after we eat, and then between meals, your body will release liver glycogen to keep your blood sugar stable. Remember earlier I said, you've only got about four grams of glucose in your bloodstream, but why don't you die then in the middle of the night? You go to bed, you had supper at six and you don't eat again until six in the morning. That's a 12 hour window where you're not getting any glucose from food and you only have less than a teaspoon of it in your bloodstream, so how do you survive? Well, your body will release glycogen and that's from the liver. So we'll talk about the hormones later, but the hormone glucagon is the one that primarily tells the liver to stop making glycogen and start releasing it. But then your body, this is why carbohydrates are technically not essential and the term essential means that you have to eat them because you can't make them or you can't make enough of them. But your body can make carbohydrates. So in the middle of the night, if you haven't eaten, then glucagon, that same hormone, will tell your liver to, and other parts of your body, to increase gluconeogenesis. So genesis means creation, neo means new, glucose. So gluconeogenesis is how your body turns non-carbohydrates like proteins and like the glycerol backbone of fats into glucose. So your body can actually make it. So that's why you don't, that's why you didn't die last night in your sleep. Okay, so those are the two polysaccharides you see there, but there, we also do have fiber, right? Like cellulose would be an example of a fiber and fibers are also polysaccharides. The difference is they have bonds in them that we don't have the enzymes to digest, which is really a good thing, right? If you had the enzymes to digest fiber, then when you ate fiber, it would turn into pure glucose, right? You'd eat a salad and your blood sugar would go through the roof. So because we can't digest fiber, it passes through us and it's, you know, our roughage and it's good for our gut, but the microbes inside of you can ferment and digest some of that fiber. We'll come back to that. All right, so glycogen and starch are examples of polysaccharides. We've said that glycogen is how animals store glucose, talked about that. Plants store it as starch, talked about that. And then we talked about how amylopectin is a highly branched starch, which can be turned into glucose much more quickly and amylose is unbranched, covered all that. All right, now we have fiber, our last polysaccharide. So whereas starch is how plants store energy, fiber is the structural material of plants. So there are two different types and two main different types and you do need to know them. So we have soluble and insoluble fiber. So what that means is water soluble or not. So let's start with insoluble fiber. This is what I call roughage. This is the stuff that is undigested, really by you and also by your microbes. This is the fiber that just adds bulk to your stool, keeps your stool moving, decreases constipation, cleans out your gut, pulls toxins with it. Lots of health benefits there, but it's not fermented. Soluble fibers are the fermentable fibers and these are the ones that not only do they add bulk to your stool, but since they draw water in, then they soften your stool, kind of like nature stool softener, so also decreasing your risk of constipation. But the other benefit of these soluble fibers is that they are fermented by your gut bacteria. So they improve the health of your gut. They allow these microbes to make fuel for you. They make these short chain fats like butyrate that are used in the colon, so lots and lots of benefits. So both are important. And thankfully, when you eat real whole foods, you get both, but I really do try to make sure that people focus on trying to get at least six grams a day of soluble fiber because there are some added health benefits there, but they both are really important. Let me give you one example of, and we'll get back to this, but one example of why fiber is good for you. Remember from last chapter that your body takes cholesterol and uses it to make bile. So bile is normally squirt into your gut and then reabsorbed. If you eat a high fiber diet, that bile is captured and taken out in your feces, which means that your liver has to then draw on its stores of cholesterol to make new bile. So instead of reusing the same old bile over and over, you're making new bile every day, which means that you're using up cholesterol, which is generally good because most people have, cholesterol not most, but a lot of people have cholesterol that's too high and using up that extra cholesterol will bring it down. So this is one of the reasons that a high fiber diet decreases your risk of cardiovascular disease and it does so by decreasing your cholesterol levels. All right, let's see, resistant starches are really cool. So you think starch and you would think, well, starch isn't fiber, but resistant starches are a special kind of starch where that is resistant to digestion, so it is a type of fiber. Now the trick here is imagine like rice or noodles or things like that. You can increase the resistance starch level in your foods by cooking them and then cooling them. So if you cook a whole bunch of rice on Sunday and then you cool it and then every day you eat some of it, like for meal prepping, you actually, in my opinion, made it healthier because you increase the amount of resistance starch in it by doing so and you can reheat it. You don't have to eat it cold, but it has to be heated and then cooled and during that process it forms these like cross-linkages that become resistant starches. Then when you do, so when you eat leftover carbs, they will have a little more fiber in them. So that's kind of a cool thing, resistant starches. Phytic acid, this one's brought up quite a bit because it's classified as an anti-nutrient. It can bind to some of the minerals and other nutrients that we consume and pull them out of our bodies. Some foods have a lot of phytic acid. There's other ones like oxalates. A good example that would be spinach. Like spinach has boatloads of calcium in it, but you only absorb maybe 5% of it because of things like phytic acid. So fibers can bind good things too. And I would say that's probably your biggest risk of a high fiber diet. If you eat a diet that's too high in fiber, it will impair absorption of minerals because it's gonna trap them the same way that it traps a bile. But I don't think that's, I mean, that's not a big deal because generally as long as long if you're eating a bunch of high fiber foods, you're also getting more and more minerals, more and more nutrients. So I'm not worried about that. The only time I'd really be worried about that is if you eat a really poor diet that's low in minerals and you supplement with fiber or you eat foods that have like a lot of these kind of fake fibers in them that don't come with minerals. All right, digestion and absorption of carbs. So just to review, we'll go through this quickly because we already covered this in detail, but we'll cover starch and then fiber. So in the mouth, you're mechanically breaking down your food by chewing it and lubricating it and all that. But then there is an enzyme called salivary amylase that's in the mouth that does begin the beginning of the digestion of polysaccharides. So if you want a cool example of this, it doesn't work for every student, but it works for a lot. Take something like a saltine cracker and just chew it and chew it and chew it. It might take a minute, a minute and a half. The longer you chew it, as long as you keep it lubricated, it may start to become sweet. So if you sense it tasting a little sweet, that's because these longer polysaccharides are being broken down into smaller shorter carbs in your mouth, so it's kind of cool. So carb digestion does begin in the mouth with that enzyme salivary amylase. In the stomach, nothing happens because the low pH destroys salivary amylase, but then when we get in the gut, in the small intestine, the pancreatic amylases take over. So they take these large carbohydrates and break them down into smaller and smaller chunks. Then you see there right at the end at what's called the brush border, which is the lining of your intestines, the enzymes that finish off digestion take place. So the long, your long starches are turned into little maltoses and then the enzyme maltase will break them down into two glucosees. If you consume table sugar, the enzyme sucrose will break table sugar down into a glucose and a fructose. And if you're consuming milk, for example, the enzyme lactase will break down the lactose into a glucose and a galactose, and then these will be absorbed. And then just remember that the glucose is already is ready to be used. The fructose and galactose have to be converted by the liver. Fiber shouldn't see much of anything happening in the beginning because we are not digestion. They might by definition, they're not adjustable by us, but when you get into the large intestine, you'll see that some bacteria, bacteria are able to ferment some of the fibers. And like I've mentioned a few times, they make short chain fatty acids. I haven't mentioned that they also make gas, right? That's everything about gas. When you fart, not to be crass, but what you are releasing gases that were a byproduct of fermentation that you didn't do, right? The microbes inside of you generated that gas. You are expelling it. So we covered all the health benefits of fiber. I don't need to cover that much anymore, but let me read this point though. Fiber holds onto water, which is what, again, it softens your stool and increases the bulk of your stool so you don't get constipated. Regulates bowel activity, keeping you regular. Bind substances like bile and cholesterol, which we said can be good. And then some minerals, which that can be a bad thing unless you're eating a really healthy diet it won't matter. And then carrying them out of the body with your feces. And those short chain fats like butyrate, they are the fuel source that the colonocytes, the cells of your large intestine use for fuel. They take that fuel and they hold onto other cells better so your gut is less leaky. They make mucus to protect your gut lining from those chains and chains of microbes, all good things. All right, that is an overview of carb digestion. Then absorption, they're just gonna be, the monosaccharides are gonna be carried into the villi of your intestines and right into your bloodstream. So you'll see that glucose and galactose use active transport, which does require some ATP. Fructose uses facilitated diffusion. Not a big deal, but it's true. And then everything has to deliver. The glucose can be used for fuel, stored as glycogen, released to the body to be used for fuel, stored as fat. Fructose and galactose, they need to be converted to glucose in the liver. Now, one thing about that, this is why some foods that have a lot of fructose, they'll be advertised as being good for your blood sugar because if you consume a whole lot of fructose, it's not gonna cause a rapid climb in your blood glucose and that's because it's not going to be, it's not glucose yet. It's gonna, it has to be converted to glucose in the liver and that's gonna take a little bit of time. So you might see some quote unquote health foods that are advertised for their low glycemic index or the fact that they don't cause your blood sugar to spike. It's still all gonna be glucose. It's just gonna be a little bit slowed down. So I wouldn't actually look at that as a health benefit most of the time. Now, which of the following takes place in the large intestine? So we have fiber attracting water. I don't know what the other options were. So yeah, the majority of digestion absorption primarily takes place in the small intestines and then those enzymes, they'll be in the small intestine as well. So the only one of these things happening in large intestine is fiber attracting water. Okay, describe the digestion process for carbs and how it increases one's feeling of fullness and satiety. I mean, we talked about the first part, but how does eating increase feelings of fullness and satiety? Well, generally, protein is gonna be the most satiating food, lead to the most satiety. And then we kinda see carbs and fat are a little bit lower. But fiber is really good. If you want to stay full longer and you want to feel full, then fiber is a great way to stay full. So I would say that if you have a lot of protein in your diet, a lot of fiber in your diet, you're drinking a lot of water, those are like the key things that you can do to feel full. So I would say when it comes to carbs, obviously eating, drinking a soda isn't gonna help you feel full at all because it's gonna be so rapidly digested and absorbed, it's gonna cause your blood glucose to climb pretty quickly, but your body will deal with that pretty quickly and then you'll be ready to eat because there's nothing in your stomach. But a salad is gonna be a totally different thing. So not all carbs are created equal when it comes to fullness and satiety. All right, like it says there, if fiber is present in the stomach, it delays gastric emptying, so we talked about all that. All right, I've already covered this, but lactose intolerance, so for most people at some point in their life are not gonna have enough of the enzyme lactase to properly digest milk sugar. So it's a condition that results from the inability to digest the milk sugar lactose. More humans now can do it than ever, but if you don't, so whenever things pass through you and don't get digested, then they get to your large intestine where there's trillions of bacteria that can break things down. So that's why you'll, if you're seeing intact lactose reach your colon, you're gonna get bloating, gas, abdominal discomfort, and diarrhea. It's gonna pass through you. It differs from a milk allergy. So maybe one in a thousand people have that actual milk protein allergy where if they consume milk, it would be a true allergic reaction. Intolerance is cause gut problems. Allergies cause immune system issues. So I've already mentioned it's a lactose deficiency, so you don't have, what are some options? So if someone came to me and thought they were lactose intolerant, I would ask, first of all, unless you're really lactose intolerant, I would ask, okay, you can't drink milk, but what about cheese, right? So for example, a cheddar cheese that's been aged for a year, year and a half, should have no lactose left in it because the fermenters that turned it into cheese broke it down. Same thing with yogurt. Yogurt that's been truly fermented for 24 hours, which most store yogurts haven't been, yogurt that's been truly fermented for 24 hours shouldn't really have any lactose left in it. So if you can't drink milk, but you can eat yogurt, then you are lactose intolerant because you let the microbes do the digestion for you there. Same thing, maybe if you can't drink regular milk, but you can try like lactate milk or you can try these milks that have the enzyme lactase added to them, that's something to do. What we did, Oliver was lactose intolerant pretty bad when he was younger, but when he consumed raw dairy that hadn't been pasteurized, he was fine. And that's because the pasteurization process destroys the enzyme lactase and that's why it's not in normal milk. But you can just, you can go buy what? Fairlife milk I believe has lactase in it. You can buy a lactate brand milk and you can try those things. So those would be some ways if you can't, but if you can't drink milk or eat yogurt, then maybe you have a really severe lactose intolerance, but maybe you have a milk protein allergy and that needs to be looked into. All right, glucose in the body. So we've digested and absorbed our carbs. Now it's time to transport and utilize them. So glucose plays the central role in carbohydrate metabolism, which is true, right? Because if we store glucose as glycogen, we have to turn it back into glucose to use it as fuel. If we eat fructose or galactose, it has to be turned into glucose to be used for fuel. And then we can, so we can use glucose for energy. Says there, we can make glucose from protein. That's gluconeogenesis and that's true. And then we can also make it from glycerol. So about 6% of the energy stored in your body right now is in the glycerol backbone of fat. So fat is obviously mainly fat energy, but when you digest fat, you use the fatty acid tails, which we'll cover in the next chapter. But we have this glycerol backbone that can be turned into glucose as well. It's called glycerol for a reason. So we can make glucose from protein and from glycerol. So that's called gluconeogenesis. And then you can also turn fat into ketones. So why does your body do that? Why doesn't your body just burn fat for fuel? Well, if you're on a ketogenic diet or you're in a state of ketosis for fasting or whatever reason, the problem is fatty acids can't get to the brain. So your liver makes ketones and then sends them to the brain so the brain can use them as a fuel source. So it's actually a really cool way. I consider ketones the fourth macronutrient. We just don't eat them. You can, you can supplement with them now. But they are a macronutrient. It's just one that your liver makes rather than that you eat. So kind of cool. So we can talk about ketogenic diets and ketosis as we go. Provides an alternative fuel source during starvation. So if you're on a ketogenic diet or a really low calorie diet or exercise can lead to ketone production, fasting, which people do now can lead to ketone production. This next point disturbs the body's normal acid-base balance. That's not completely true. That's the difference between ketosis and ketoacidosis. So if you're on a ketogenic diet, then you're in a state of ketosis. Your pH balance hasn't changed at all. Ketoacidosis can be a life-threatening condition where you're basically looking at 10 times too many ketones in your bloodstream. Almost always it's called diabetic ketoacidosis because it's almost always caused by uncontrolled diabetes. And that causes huge fluid shifts that can lead to dehydration and can cause huge pH problems. So ketosis is a, I mean something that you did when you were a baby, right? Ketosis is a normal part of our metabolism. Ketoacidosis is an extreme example which certainly can be life-threatening. All right, match the ways the body uses glucose for energy. So the reaction for storing glucose is called condensation. We talked about that. When you build glucose units, you remove water. The preferred source for the brain and nerve cells is glucose. Again, we've talked about there are alternative fuel sources that can be used like ketones and lactate, but your brain will use glucose if it's available. And then when we've talked about how your red blood cells absolutely need glucose. The reaction for breaking down glycogen into glucose is hydrolysis. So if you're breaking a carbohydrate apart or a starch or something down, you use hydrolysis reactions. And then the liver stores one third of the glycogen in your body. The muscles store the other two thirds, but like this says here, that glycogen is only gonna be used by that muscle. If there's glycogen in your right bicep, your right bicep gets to use it. If there's glycogen in your liver, it's used to keep your blood sugar level stable between meals. All right, we've hit this pretty good already, but the constancy of blood glucose is so true. It's just amazing to think that you can be on a zero carb diet, or you can eat 400 or 500 grams of carbs a day and your body keeps your blood sugar stable. Only about four grams in your bloods to your right now. It's less than a teaspoon. If you're a pre-diabetic, you have a teaspoon of glucose in your blood right now. If you're a diabetic, you might have one and a quarter teaspoons. So think about that, like three quarters, the difference between three quarters of a teaspoon in your blood of glucose and one and a quarter teaspoons in your blood is the difference between being perfectly healthy and having diabetes. It's amazing how tight your body regulates this. So how does it do so? Let's start with high blood sugar. So if you have high blood glucose, we'll just read this purple section here. That causes the pancreas to release insulin. And insulin, yes, it does lower blood glucose. That's its main job, but it's an anabolic storage hormone. It doesn't just, it isn't just used to lower blood glucose by storing yet. I'll read all the points here and I'll maybe add a few things. So insulin stimulates the uptake of glucose from the blood into your cells. So it basically tells your cells, hey, there's too much glucose. Let's take it into our cells and use it. Stimulates the storage of glycogen in the liver and muscles. So again, same thing. Insulin says, hey, we got all this extra glucose. Let's store it up for later. And then lastly, the conversion of excess glucose into fat for storage. So if your glycogen stores are already full, then your glucose is gonna have to be turned into fat. And that's where, we'll talk about dietary intake later, but I really think that your activity levels should determine how many carbs you eat and I'll explain why. But insulin also is needed. This is a separate discussion, but insulin is, so it does lead to fat storage. It leads to carb storage, fat storage, and also the absorption and utilization of amino acids. So insulin is needed to take up amino acids to build proteins as well. So insulin, very, very important. And that's gonna cause your blood glucose to go down. So how do we raise our blood glucose? There's actually tons of different ways your body can do this, which means from an evolutionary standpoint, having low blood sugar was a more common problem than high blood sugar, because insulin does a pretty good job of lowering your blood glucose, but there are multiple mechanisms to raise your blood glucose up. And that's because in the short term, low blood sugar is more dangerous, right? If my blood sugar falls 50 points right now, I could go into a coma and die. If my blood sugar goes up 50 points, nothing's gonna happen, right? I'll be fine for 10 or 20 years. So it's much more of an emergency when your blood glucose dips too low than when it climbs too high. Not saying you want high blood glucose at all, but that's why your body has several mechanisms to raise your blood glucose levels. So let's start with glucagon though. It's not the only one. So if your blood sugar is going down because you haven't eaten in hours, let's say it's three in the morning and you haven't eaten since six, glucagon is gonna tell your liver to release that glycogen that it stored up earlier to keep your blood sugar stable, and then it's gonna cause blood glucose to be released in your blood. It's also going to increase gluconeogenesis, so you're gonna turn protein and glycerol backbones into glucose, all those things will happen, and your blood sugar is gonna climb. That's why if you think about it, it's pretty amazing that when you wake up in the morning, you haven't eaten in 12 hours, but your blood sugar is higher usually than you went to bed, and that's because of cortisol. So you see here, glucagon and epinephrine, but cortisol, your stress hormone, also raises blood sugar. It does so because if you're in the fight-or-flight response, you're gonna want to mobilize energy so you can fight or you can flee. Epinephrine, that's adrenaline. Adrenaline will also mobilize energy, so you've got all these other systems that will raise your blood sugar up to keep it from getting too low. But the reason your blood sugar is generally higher in the morning than when you went to bed is because we're supposed to wake up, basically full of cortisol and full of these hormones so we can go and hunt and gather and we're supposed to fire out of bed ready to get to work, right? Doesn't always feel that way, but that's why because of cortisol, we see a spike in blood glucose in the morning. All right, so insulin primarily keeps your blood sugar from going too high, glucagon primarily keeps your blood sugar from going too low. And then balancing, if you can't balance these things, so if you're having problems, then diabetes is you see type one and type two diabetes, there's also obviously you can get, you can have temporary diabetes while you're pregnant called gestational diabetes, but if you have hyperglycemia, your blood sugar is too high, then that would usually be type one or type two diabetes. Type one diabetes is an autoimmune condition. It's where the cells of the pancreas that make insulin are destroyed, so you don't have enough insulin. Type two diabetes is insulin resistance. You actually have too much insulin, but it causes your cells to be less sensitive to it. So a type one diabetic needs to inject insulin. A type two diabetic needs to try to find ways to bring your insulin levels down. All right, so that, and then on the opposite side, you have hypoglycemia, so this can be very common too. There's two different types. Basically you can just have hypoglycemia that occurs at any moment, which means you can be perfectly fine and all of a sudden you can notice that your blood sugar is starting to tank, and then there's reactive hypoglycemia, which after a meal, if your blood sugar climbs too high, then it kind of tanks. So there are different types of hypoglycemia, but if you do have problems with hypoglycemia, you generally want to keep some sort of glucose or carbohydrate source, you know, a soda, glucose tablet, something with you so you can bring your blood sugar up quickly if it's dropping. All right, which food will help improve aspects of health because of their low glycemic response? So we haven't talked about really the glycemic index yet, but the glycemic index is every food kind of has a score that says how high it will cause your blood sugar to climb. I don't know how relevant it is. Glycemic load is better because the glycemic load basically takes the glycemic index and then multiplies it by the grams of carbs, right? Because there are some foods that have a high glycemic index, but you don't eat a whole lot of them. And then on the flip side, you see foods that have a lower glycemic index, but still they're gonna cause your blood sugar to go up for a long period of time. So your glycemic response is gonna be how you respond to a food. So I don't even know what the options were here, but yeah, so white rice is like pure starch. It'll cause your blood glucose to go up pretty quickly. Watermelon, it's fruit, it's gonna be a little higher, but not gonna have a ton of carbohydrates in it. But basically, if you're trying to keep your blood sugar from climbing too high after meals, obviously determining how many carbs you should be eating would be a big deal, based on that on physical activity and your own personal health goals. But then on top of that, eating if there's protein and fiber in the meal that will slow digestion, which will decrease the glycemic response. So I really don't care about these individual numbers, like the xemic index numbers. It's more of a meal, right? You wanna put together a meal that doesn't cause a huge spike in blood glucose. Like for example, if you're gonna have a soda, right? A soda on its own in an empty stomach is gonna be absorbed really quickly. If you drank soda while you were having a salad and a meal that has some fat in it and protein in it and these kind of things, the blood sugar response would be blunted. I'm not saying that that makes it that much healthier, but still, that's just an example. All right, the health effects and recommendations and recommendations of sugars. So we know sugar tastes good, right? But it's very easy to consume too much sugar. And then like we see there, energy with few other nutrients. Sugar is an example of an empty calorie. We talked earlier about how nutrient density is really important. How many nutrients you get per calorie. If you're eating just a teaspoon of sugar, you're getting really no nutrients and just a bunch of calories. So there's nothing wrong with sugar. If it fits into your, like it says there, discretionary calories. If it fits into your diet, it's not crowding out healthier foods, then there's nothing wrong with some sugar, right? So, but just depends on the situation, I guess. All right, so one of the downsides with consuming sugar is cavities or dental caries. And that's because when you consume sugar, the sugar fermenting bacteria in your mouth will actually, as they ferment the sugar, they will generate acids and acids are gonna eat holes in your teeth. That's why you see here factors. So bacteria ferment sugars, producing acid, and that's what erodes your enamel, causes cavities. Food factors associated with tooth decay, time of food in the mouth and sticky food. So how long is it in your mouth? Like honestly, if you're gonna have a soda, it's better for you to chug it and then rinse your mouth with water than it is to sip on it for three hours. Because if you're sipping on it, you're constantly keeping that glucose in your mouth. So it's basically how, if you're gonna consume sugar, how quickly can you get it out of your mouth is what it's saying there. How often do you consume sugar? I mean, that's a big deal. Like I've had a lot of problems with cavities and things in my life and I don't eat sugar anymore. And I haven't had a cavities in three years. The longest time in my life that I've ever gone without a cavity, but it's because I don't eat sugar. I mean next to zero. And it's made a huge difference. All right, then there's a lot of things going, you know, genetics certainly play a role. How thick was your enamel to begin with, right? My two, my two step kids, they both probably eat the same amount of carbs, same amount of sugar. One gets cavities, one doesn't. It's not that one is taking better or worse care of their teeth. There is some sort of a genetic component there as well. All right, the dietary guidelines for Americans, which is what they use to create things like the choose my plate and the food pyramid, urge consumers to limit intake of added sugars too. And that would be 10% of your calories a day. So if we're eating 2,000 calories a day, that would be 200 calories. And then of course, there's four calories in a gram. So that would be that a typical person should be eating less than 50 grams of added sugar a day. So make sure you're checking your food labels because the amount of sugar in a food and the amount of added sugar are different things. All right, so it says there are people who successfully reduced their intake of added sugar seem to adapt over time, perceiving sugar more intensely and preferring less sugar in their foods and beverages. I agree with that, right? As I really missed some foods as I stopped eating sugar, but now I don't think it's as big of a deal for sure. All right, alternative sweeteners. We have artificial sweeteners, which are called non-nutrient sweeteners. These are things like Nutrisweet and Splenda sucralose. Overall, like the at the doses that a typical person is gonna consume them, there is no evidence that they cause any adverse problems, but there are studies that show that switching from regular soda to diet soda helps with weight loss and weight maintenance and these types of things. In some studies, getting someone to drink diet soda, I'm not telling you, I'm not advocating this and this is not medical advice, but some studies show that getting people to drink diet sodas helps them more than getting to drink water. So, and I think that's because it helps them deal with their sugar cravings. Like I know if I'm craving something sweet, I have a piece of gum. I have a piece of sugar-free gum which has non-nutrient sweeteners in it. I get some cinnamon, I get some watermelon. I get a little bit of that flavor with five calories. So artificial sweeteners can definitely play a role in helping people keep their caloric intake down. So I see a lot of value there. If you don't need them, I wouldn't consume them, but I don't let Oliver consume them. I just feel like if there are any negative effects, then on younger developing brains, you might see them. So we just kind of have a policy around the house, but I don't have any problem with it. I actually like Mr. Pib Extra Zero is my favorite thing with artificial sweeteners in it. So stevia is an artificial sweetener or alternative sweetener, but it is an herbal product. We've actually grown some. We just throw little leaves of it right in tea. It's pretty cool. You can throw it in your sun tea. So it is grass or generally recognized as safe. Then sugar alcohols, this is a little different story. Sugar alcohols do provide calories. So like erythritol, maltitol, a gram of sugar alcohols might be two or three calories per gram, but they're absorbed differently so they don't cause your blood sugar to climb. That's why like if you're on a low carb diet or a ketogenic diet, people can get away with consuming some of these, but I would say totally depends on the person. Like personally, I can't do, I don't do very well with these. I can have a few grams of them occasionally, but if I try to consume these every day, I get a ton of GI problems. Some people don't. The sugar alcohol, maltitol, which you'll find like in your Atkins bars and Atkins candies and stuff, I can't do that one at all. So if I have, not I want to give you too much information, but I had an Atkins like peanut butter cup thing once years ago and it was really, really hard on me. Or maybe if you go, if you go online, you can look for the reviews people make about those sugar-free gummy bears. They're not lying. For some people, that's exactly what happens. I have a ton of GI problems. If I consume too many of these, some people can consume them without any problems. So I really think it probably depends on you, maybe your microbiome matters. So I would just, if you're consuming sugar alcohols, just kind of test your limits and see what you can tolerate, I guess. So the benefits though, another benefit of sugar alcohols is they're actually biofilm disruptors. So we haven't talked about this in this class. It's more of a microbiology topic, but biofilms are where microbes can hide. So the biofilm in your mouth, you've all heard of plaque, right? Plack is a biofilm formed by the microbes in your mouth so they can hide underneath it. So if you consume sugar-free gum that has sugar alcohol in it, it actually softens the plaque in your teeth. So there are, that's why four out of five dentists or whatever the commercials say, recommend sugar-free gum. But the side effects usually GI and they can be nasty, just being honest. Okay, the health effects and recommended it takes of starch and fibers. Health effects of starch and fibers. So decreasing your risk of heart disease, so a diet that's higher in fiber and diets higher in whole grains are gonna decrease heart disease risk. One of the main reasons is that they capture things like cholesterol. So they help lower your cholesterol. These diets also appear to help lower your blood pressure as well, which is great. So I have a fiber, we talked about that. It softens your stool. The microbes inside of you ferment at lots and lots of benefits. So I think we've talked about this plenty over this lecture, but they do improve heart disease risk factors like cholesterol and blood pressure. And if you want a diet that reduces your heart disease risk, then we'll talk about fast and stuff later, but a diet that has fiber in it is definitely a beneficial one. All right, so why would diabetes be helped by high fiber foods? So high fiber foods are gonna slow the emptying of food from your stomach, which will keep your blood sugar from climbing really high. So that's a good benefit there. For GI health, we've already mentioned this, high fiber foods plus fluid are gonna give you good volume of stool. It's gonna keep you regular. It's gonna keep the health of your intestinal walls intact. So all good things. Weight management. So high fiber foods are filling so they're gonna make you feel full and whole grain, same thing. So hopefully you'll eat less and eat less often, which is the goal if you're trying to lose weight or maintain weight loss. All right, lots of things there. So what could go wrong? Harmful effects of excessive fiber intake. I've mentioned this before. If all you're eating is fiber, then you're not gonna get enough calories and other nutrients that you need, but I've never seen anybody on a 100% fiber diet, but that can happen. Too much fiber can lead to abdominal pain, gas and diarrhea, bloating, those kind of things, can lead to GI obstruction, but I mean, you don't see these things, right? There isn't really a recommended tolerable upper intake level, but some people can get to the point where they're consuming too much fiber. I have mentioned how it decreases nutrient absorption. So a poor diet that's low in minerals but really high in fiber, that could be a problem. But usually if you're eating foods that are high in fiber, you're also eating nutrient dense foods, so it shouldn't be an issue. So just like everything else, fiber intake and moderation. You wanna make sure you're getting enough of it, but not more than you need, not too much of it. And then I like this idea of variety as well. Different types of fiber. They all offer slight benefits. So if you're eating a bunch of different vegetables, they'll all have fiber, but they'll have different variations of fibers in them, for example. Okay, identify ways in which fiber can help with health issues, including diabetes, colon cancer, heart disease, and gut health. And we just mentioned a lot of these things, but we'll go over them again. Heart disease, by lowering blood pressure, reducing inflammation, improving blood lipids, just by making your gut healthier. If your gut is healthier, then it will be less inflamed. And then to me, the number one source of chronic inflammation in the human body is stuff coming in from our gut. So a healthy gut will keep that inflammation at bay, and inflammation is really a key trigger of heart disease. Diabetes, we talked about how it slows absorption of glucose. Gut health, more stool, less constipation, all those things, covered that. Colon cancer, we sort of mentioned, colon cancer by diluting, binding, and removing harmful agents. So we talked about bile, but it also will trap other, you know, your liver is gonna be squirting toxins into your gut, and then fibers gonna grab them and pull them out of your body. And then the production of short chain fatty acids just improve the health of your colon altogether. All right, we've talked about soluble versus insoluble fiber. You can read this list and see where you should be getting them from your diet, but a combination of both is always great. So make sure to read this slide. Our recommended intakes of starches and fibers. We covered this a little bit in an earlier chapter, but the DRI, or the Dietary Reference Intake for Carbs is 45 to 60%. That will be your AMDR, actually, the acceptable macronutrient distribution range of carbs is 45 to 65% of your calories. Different for everybody, right? There are people that are on almost zero carb diets and there are people that eat tons, but I would say, if you're asking me, like, how many carbs should I eat, man? This is, I mean, it's tricky, but, and everyone's different, but I like to let your physical activity levels determine your carbon take, because fat's a phenomenal fuel source at rest. So if you're doing a lot of resting, then you don't need a lot of carbs. If you're really active, you will probably need more carbs. So let's say, let me just give you an example. You're just a typical student and you have a desk job, you're sitting at school all day. So let's say, so you woke up this morning and you had 100 grams of carbohydrates with your breakfast, which is really easy to do. So those 100 grams of carbs your body would have used to replenish your liver glycogen from last night and these types of things, okay? So that was good, good carbs, your body used it. Then you went and set at school all day and now it's time for lunch. You had another 100 grams of carbs with your lunch. Well, you didn't do anything. So your glycogen stores are already full, so your body will use some of that glucose, but it'll have to store the rest as fat. And then you're gonna go home and kind of sit around and watch Netflix and the same thing's gonna happen with supper. So see someone that has a very sedentary life, you don't need a ton of carbohydrates, but if you're an endurance athlete and you're training twice a day, you're gonna need tons of them, right? I know people that eat 500 grams of carbs a day and it might not be enough. So that's why I always say your activity levels and every human's different, but your activity levels should determine your carbon take. So I always like to say this. If you run marathons, you need to eat a lot of carbohydrates. If you eat a lot of carbohydrates, you need to run marathons, right? That's the way that I generally look at it. So I'm not saying that everyone needs to be on a low carb diet. No way am I saying that. I think the average American is eating too many carbs and should go on a lower carb diet, but I'm not saying low carb, right? A low carb diet is technically any diet that recommends less than 150 grams of carbs a day. So the last thing I'm saying is everyone should be on the Atkins diet. But if you're eating 400 grams of carbs a day and you don't do much, maybe 300 or 200 would be smarter for you. These things, you just play with these things and see how they work for you. What is the RDA for carbs? That's 130 grams a day. So that's how many carbs your body needs to basically fuel your brain and your red blood cells. But remember, you don't technically need to eat that many carbs because your body can make them. There are people that eat almost zero carbs. But again, not advocating that, just explaining that. All right, so fiber, how much should we get? So the DRI for fiber is 14 grams per 1,000 calories, which generally they recommend 25 grams of fiber per day for females and 38 grams of fiber per day for males, but it really boils down to how many calories you eat. So 14 grams per 1,000 calories is a good rule of thumb for fiber. All right, we're getting to the end here. From guidelines to groceries, grains. So we talked about earlier, the government recommends that half the grains that you eat are whole grains, right? So how do you know if you're finding whole grain products? A couple of things I look for. Go to the ingredient list. The first word should be whole, not enriched or something else. It should, the first word, because the ingredients are in the order by volume. So if the first ingredient, the first word of the first ingredient is whole, then chances are you're getting a really good whole grain product. And then for every 100 calories, I think you should be getting close to four grams of fiber. So those are kind of general rules I look at. If like, is the food really good? Cause like, yeah, cinnamon toast crunch might have some whole grains in it, but you're not getting that much fiber and the word whole is not the first ingredient. So if you're looking for a food, so like it says here, whole grain products provide about one to two grams or more of fiber per serving. I generally feel better if a serving gives you three or four grams of fiber. So a slice of whole wheat bread, an ounce of ready to eat cereal, like a brand cereal, I like the brand buds, like, you know, all brand, brand buds, all brand high fiber, those are good examples. Half a cup of cooked barley, bulgur, grits and oatmeal, we just had bulgur last week when my wife made tabbouleh, I think it's called. Yeah, so those are some general rules, but look for that word whole and look for a good amount of fiber per serving. Tips to increase fiber intake, like it says there, eat whole grain breads and have at least three grams of fiber per serving. Three grams of fiber per serving, I feel better with four or five. And then eat whole grain cereals that contain at least five grams of fiber per serving. Those are good ideas. All right, vegetables really just eat vegetables, right? Vegetables are, most vegetables are gonna have two to three grams of fiber per serving and it's gonna be a combination of soluble and insoluble. So those are all good. Eat more vegetables, eat raw vegetables, yeah, eat things with the skin, those are all great ideas, you can try those. Fruit, kind of the same thing. Rely on fruit instead of fruit juices. If you want fruit that's really high, I would go berries. Berries are the best way to get fiber from fruit and then not fruit juice, right? Eat fruit, eat fruit with the skin on, avoid fruit juice if you want more fiber. Legumes, which are like peas and beans, many of them have six to eight grams of fiber. You see, some don't have quite as much, like for example, a garbanzo bean, which is also called a chickpea. That's more known for its protein, so it would have less fiber. But even five is great. So you see baked beans, black beans, black-eyed peas, kidney beans, navy beans, and pinto beans have six to eight grams of fiber per serving. Garbanzo beans or, I forgot what they're called, what's the other name, no, chickpeas. Great northern beans, lentils, lima beans, and split peas, they have about five grams per serving. So adding legumes to soups and salads and casseroles is a great way to get more fiber too. Okay, cover a lot of ground. Carbs are obviously very important, right? If you're in a nutrition class, to me, if you can master where to get the good carbs, where to get the good fats, and where to get the good proteins, the rest kind of takes care of itself. Okay, we've done all this, you can read through here, but I think we've done a really good job of all these. Yep, covered that ad nauseam. Okay, I hope that this helps. Like I just mentioned, improving the quality of the carbs you eat, and eating the right amount of carbs based on who you, your genetics, your lifestyle, your activity level, huge determinant in health, especially if you look at the fact that 100 million Americans have diabetes and prediabetes. We are intolerant to the amount of energy that we're consuming, and it's not all carbs. Like I mentioned earlier, foods that have both carbs and fat are the most fattening. But we need to do something, and improving the quality of your carbs, and eating less sugar and more fiber, things like that, great way to get healthier. Okay, I hope that this helps. Have a wonderful day, be blessed.