Carbohydrate Intake and the Daily Value

[FUZO]

TweetCarbohydrate Intake and the Daily Value

The daily value for any given nutrient is one of many dietary guidelines put into place by the FDA to encourage healthy eating patterns for the general population. As defined by the FDA itself, the Daily Values are “not recommended intakes. They’re really just reference points to help people get some kind of perspective on what their overall dietary needs would be.” In other words, it is not intended to keep your personal nutrient intake above or below a certain level but rather to provide an example of a healthy diet so that comparisons can be made and significant issues in diet can be diagnosed. But in the case of carbohydrate, just how healthy is the Daily Value? As more and more evidence is revealing, carbohydrate’s Daily Value of 300 grams is certainly more than generous, if not glaringly exorbitant.
A convincing argument against this value is our ancestry. Consider a caveman in his life-long struggle of finding and securing food as a hunter-gatherer. Such an individual would have access to only the nutrients and resources in his immediate vicinity, and given the stark absence of refined carbohydrate in the Paleolithic period, these nutrients would have come in the forms of meats, seeds, fruits, and vegetables (Grains and legumes were not consumed in the Paleolithic period simply on account of their toxicity. Only when humans began to cook most of their food did they overcome the toxins present in raw grains and legumes). Out of these nutrients, fruits and vegetables are the only providers of carbohydrate, barring the negligible amount found in seeds. Knowing that, it would be safe to say that the average caveman?s intake of carbohydrate was minimal due to the scarcity of its presence in his everyday life. Even if they were so fortunate as to come across a carbohydrate dense food such as fruit and gorged, they would still come nowhere near the 300 grams that is suggested by the Daily Value. However, if a caveman miraculously obtained access to a naturally occurring Safeway-like variety of fruits and vegetables, this is what their diet might have looked like if it met the Daily Value for carbohydrate:
1 apple = 19 g
4 cups carrots = 24 g
2 cups grapes = 32 g
4 cups raspberries = 60 g
2 bananas = 70 g
15 cups asparagus = 45 g
10 cups broccoli = 50 g
Total (g) Carbohydrate = 300
That is an undeniable ass-ton of produce, far too much for an individual to comfortably consume in a day. Moreover, the likelihood of a caveman finding even one of the more carbohydrate dense items listed was fairly low. Finding all of them and in such lavish amounts would have been next to impossible. On this premise, any caveman who required around 300 grams of carbohydrate a day would have had a severe and lethal disadvantage to both his fellow humans as well as other species. Any genes that coded for such great need would have been quickly eradicated via natural selection.
This brings us to our current situation. These days, we actually have access to the previously listed volume and variety of fruits and vegetables. On top of that, we have countless other forms of dense carbohydrate that were unavailable to our ancestors. This makes carbohydrate’s Daily Value of 300 grams seem feasible, on the account of the ease with which it can now be met. But has our genetic makeup really changed all that much? The answer is no; our genes have more or less remained the same since some of our early ancestors, and thus our carbohydrate need has remained equally identical. Our bodies are not programmed to be able take in a surfeit of carbohydrate, and the excess that accumulates is stored invariably as fat. Long term over consumption of carbohydrate thus leads to obesity, and has also been linked to a host of other chronic diseases such as heart disease, diabetes, and cancers.
Just because we can consume vast amounts of carbohydrates doesn’t mean we should. It is time to reconsider the Daily Value for carbohydrates, just as it is time to reconsider the way our nation as a whole eats. Our health and our carbohydrate intake are inextricably linked, and each individual should know what that means to him or her. What’s your daily carbohydrate intake? How do you feel/perform when you vary this intake?

[BABY1]

TweetGood info!