Do white foods make you fat and lethargic?
A lot of diet gurus would have you think so: Eliminate the white foods and watch the pounds melt away. White flour, sugar, salt, milk, white rice and potatoes are all on the avoid list.
The Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet and the Zone are all based roughly on this premise. And every one of those foods are forbidden under the so-called Paleolithic Diet, the premise being that grains like wheat are such a recent addition to the human diet that we are not physiologically equipped to consume them. Pancakes and pasta simply were not on the menu for cavemen.
White foods are also commonly found — along with white-ish foods like corn and soy — in almost all modern convenience foods, what I like to call square foods. Square foods are just about anything in a package with more than one ingredient. Apples have one ingredient; cookies from a box are made mainly with those dreaded white foods.
So, are white foods addictive? Or simply cheap and tasty? Do they make you fat? Or did you do that yourself?
When I put the question to UBC nutritionist Judy McLean she laughed. Simply put, too many calories make you fat. If white foods made people fat, virtually everyone in south and East Asia would be obese. Rice makes up 80 per cent of a person’s total calories in some countries.
So why is this myth so persistent? Simply put, carb reduced diets work and they usually work fast because they quickly drop your caloric intake by eliminating your body’s main fuel source and they promote immediate water loss. But water or not, when the pounds drop away quickly people get excited.
The extra protein and fat in these diets also help keep you feeling full, but you can get that same feeling of satiety with a high-fibre, low-calorie diet without the potential health risks of extreme low-carb diets. According to the Mayo Clinic a diet high in meats and fats can increase your risk of cancer, heart disease and kidney problems.
And a joint McGill/University of Alberta study found that low-carb systems can greatly increase your blood cholesterol and warned that such diets may not be safe for people with type 2 diabetes. Despite their popularity, these diets are radical. Talk to your doctor before you consider trying one.