Carbohydrates or Calories – What Is Behind Weight Gain

Low carbohydrate food is the buzz word today. Everywhere we go we come across advertisements of low carbohydrate food. But is it the carbohydrate that we need to take care of, if we have to lose weight?

We are aware of the facts that natural foods such as wheat, rice, vegetables, fruits and oat are rich in carbohydrate, but that’s just a half truth. Actually these foods are also low in sodium, fat and calories. These ingredients were the main diet for our ancestors, yet they rarely suffered from obesity as currently we are doing.

If carbohydrates makes helps in gaining weight and make us fat, then why didn’t our past relatives suffered from over weight or obesity. They ate ample amount of high carbohydrate foods as these were easily available, easy to store and cheaper to buy. So what made the difference?

Is it carbohydrates aid in weight gain or is it too many calories. Today food manufacturers are producing large array of convenient food from the natural carbohydrate sources. Today we have fast moving lifestyle where we have to be working round the clock and leave very little or no time to decide on what to eat and what to avoid. And this makes us to rely more on quick, convenient foods.

We tend don’t take out time to cook meals from the natural ingredients. The result is these convenient and packaged foods are becoming basic diet for an average American. The major problem of these convenient and packaged foods is it contains high amount of sugar and fat, which load the food with excess calories.

To top it all, many convenience foods are also packed with salt to enhance taste and to preserve food. Salt is made from sodium that causes the body to keep hold of excess water. Many researches have indicated that an average person can retain up to 5 pounds of extra weight to excess sodium intake.

Now a day supermarkets are offering a wide range of tempting and tasty looking processed to choose. Research has indicated that more food choice can lead to increased consumption, which in turn leads to weight gain. With so many people having more processed carbohydrate food it almost impossible to avoid intake of excess calories.

Unfortunately, many people think that the carbohydrate is the main culprit behind the weight gain, but actually it excess calories that make us fat.