‘Fats are evil!’
‘Carbs cause diabetes!’
WELL, WHAT SHOULD YOU EAT?!
The diet industry is full of BS about carbs, fats, and their dangers. What you need is a no-nonsense guide to fitting them into your diet.
That’s what we’re here for today: this article is going to break down what you’re dealing with and how to structure your diet. If you’re wondering whether to use carbs vs fats for energy and a healthy balanced diet — keep reading!
What’s Up with Fats and Carbs?
These two macronutrients are key to your diet – you can’t live on just protein. Despite this, they’ve both been called unhealthy and there are diets that totally eliminate one or the other.
In this long-running combat between fat-phobes and carb-phobes – who’s right?
How do fats and carbs work and what should you build your diet around?
These are the questions that have pushed us to write this article and they’re the main ones we’re going to answer. This article will provide clarity to the “debate”.
Learn more about great natural fats
Outrageous Claims: Diets and Die-Hards
When you look at the landscape of diet and fitness information, you see people shouting “keto!” or “Carbs!” at each other. People can suck at finding mid-ground.
Die-hard fans of both types of diet – high carb and low-carb – are all over. This combat between these two ideologies is awful for you and your body: neither of these diets is a good idea in the long run for the average person.
The best diet is the one that works for you, your goals and your needs. Keto and the opposite (LoCLoE – Lots of Carbs, Lots of Exercise) aren’t built for your needs and any diet that pushes you to very-low in either carbs or fats is a junk idea!
This is what happens when lazy people, or those looking to solve the whole problem with one variable, push low-quality content on unexpecting, honest people.
What We Know About Fats
Fats are a key part of your diet – they keep your hormones healthy and allow you to effectively absorb crucial vitamins like vitamin D.
Fats are what hormones are made out of and they provide your body with the raw materials for a number of key processes. There are two key types of fats:
- Saturated fats (the kind often found in animal foods and, usually, solid at room temperature)
- Unsaturated fats (the kind you’ll find in many plant foods and oils, as they’re liquids at room temperature)
Saturated fats are demonized often, but they’re not always bad for you and they’re often necessary for the best hormonal health and some can help burn bodyfat!
Fats are more calorie-dense than carbs, with more than twice as many calories per gram (9 vs 4). However, healthy fats can improve your heart health or, in some cases, aid your weight loss.
Fats and the Drawback & Benefits of Keto Diets
Keto enthusiasts like fats because, after an extended period of nothing but fats (and protein), your body learns to use them in place of carbohydrates. The problem is that just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!
Keto has very few benefits for healthy people and some big trade-offs:
- It boosts your endurance at 50-70% of maximum force output (good for things like cycling and endurance running)
- But it reduces your ability to perform maximal force exercise (like heavy resistance training or sprints)
- Keto-adaptation can improve your chances of staying healthy and combating the risk of neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer’s.
- But, Keto can reduce your metabolic efficiency, increase your risk of heart disease, and reduce muscle growth/performance.
Fats are Important for a Healthy Body
There are clear trade-offs when it comes to dealing with dietary fats, but they are necessary. Ignoring the benefits of fats might make it easy to discredit a keto or paleo diet, but they’re key reasons these diets are so popular to begin with.
What we Know About Carbs
Carbs are the main source of fuel for everything from your brain to your muscles – this makes them a pretty important part of your diet. So why do high-fat, low-carb diets blame carbs for all the ills of the world?
Pros and Cons of Carbs
Cutting carbs out of a diet has become popular in the last 20 years and low-carb or no-carb diets have become more popular. This is because people love a simple explanation to a difficult problem and carbs do have some big problems if they’re not structured properly.
There are three types of carbs and they all have their own benefits/drawbacks/uses:
- Sugars: they have a bad reputation, but they’re key for making sure you’re healthy and perform at your best. Too much sugar is an easy way to get diabetes and ruin your metabolism/health/life, though, so be careful but don’t cut out sugars or carbs entirely – they’re essential for optimum function.
- Starches: most of your carbs will/should be in this section – they’re more slowly digested than sugars and can be used as a great staple in your diet when understood and balanced.
- Fiber: you can’t absorb it, but it still counts. Fiber is great for metabolic and digestive health – it slows down the absorption of other compounds, has probiotic effects to keep your gut healthy [learn more], and even improves your heart/blood health.
Carbs are great for filling your diet, providing you with the energy for maximum performance in exercise, and there are some amazing carb sources that provide a variety of vitamins/minerals. Carbs can contribute to diabetes, but only when consumed in huge quantities while over-eating or under-exercising.
High-quality vs Low-quality Carbs
Most peoples’ diet is high in carbohydrates, but specifically in refined, white, low-quality carbohydrates (like white bread). Those low-quality carbs lack many of the nutrients, fiber and satiety that make carbohydrates a great choice. Aim to improve your carb quality (more whole-foods and plant products) and there won’t be any real problems.
Carbs have their own trade-offs and the most important approach is to balance your intake with the amount of physical activity in your life and, for most people, have them fill the space that protein and healthy fats don’t fill.
Do We Need the Fat/Carb Combat?
This is the real question here. “Is there any need to have these two key macronutrients competing with one another to be “the one” in your diet?”
There’s no reason that carbs should replace fats or vice versa – you can easily just split the difference between the two without any serious negative effects while gaining the benefits of both!
Moderation is the Key
Another important question: “What’s bad about doubling-down on a single macronutrient because it has some benefits?”
The answer: because it’s too much of a good thing! Each macronutrients provides a multitude of benefits to the body, until they’re taken out of moderation.
You should have fats in your diet because of all the perks mentioned above, but they shouldn’t make up all of your diet because then you’ll miss the much needed positive properties of proteins and carbohydrates!
The truth is that both keto and high-carb, low-fat diets have some positive aspects.
If you cut out all carbs, for example, you’re going to notice that your diabetes symptoms get better because you’re not eating any sugar. But that’s like cutting out water because too much water causes mineral wash-out: a zero-carb diet is an awful idea.
Carbs are necessary for using fat and keeping your body energized.
Related: Best energizing morning teas.
Zero-carb diets may increase the kidney stone risk and risk the health of the nervous system by depriving it of its obligatory fuel source.
A combination of carbs and fats is superior on all of these points!
The problem is that both extremes are better when they push you towards a better calorie balance, higher quality food choices and reduced processed foods, you’re going to see benefits. This is why bad diets get popular: they work better than no diet, create a calorie deficit and reduce the junk in your diet.
Food Crossover
This is something we don’t see discussed often: carbs and fats work together in the body and cutting one out is going to reduce the effectiveness of the other. Cutting out fats is going to ruin your body’s ability to use fats properly.
This is why we call it keto-adaptation, not keto-efficiency, for example.
You need carbs to provide the oxaloacetic acid for the absorption and metabolism of fats in the body, meaning that some carbs will be necessary for maximum fat benefits.
Equally, triglycerides from fat are going to be necessary to convert carbs into energy properly – something that will show up immediately if you’re in endurance sports.
Putting the two together is key to the metabolism of both fats and carbs – you can adapt (read: survive) without one or the other, but you’re going to be sub-optimal compared to a scientific diet that includes both carbs and fats at the right quality/ratio.
The Answer: Fats vs Carbs for Energy and Wellness
So now the only question is: How do you make the most of the fats and carbs in your diet and which is better? We’re going to answer with 3 simple principles you need to live by:
1st Principle: Fix your Fat and Carb Quality
This is a super simple principle of dieting that gets overlooked too often. There are better and worse carbs and fats, so aim for the best in both! Improving your dietary quality is as simple as more healthy fats and carbs.
For carbs, this means more high-quality unrefined plant sources: beans, pulses, wholegrains and a rainbow of veggies. Fats should be mainly unsaturated and especially Omega-3 fats – this means more olive oils, fatty fish, nuts and seeds. Your saturated fats should come from coconut oil and lean red meats.
These simple changes are enough to put you ahead of the curve and improve your health and wellbeing.
2nd Principle: Balance individual nutrients properly
This is the most important part of fats and carbs: the ratio of constituent parts determines how much performance benefit you’ll make.
For carbohydrates, this means focusing on complex starches outside of training and getting plenty of fiber but eating sugars during exercise. Starches should be around 80-90% of your carb intake, with 10-20% of sugars being used as immediate fuel for exercise/post-exercise recovery.
Balancing the benefits of saturated and unsaturated fats is simple: eat twice as much unsaturated fat as saturated! As long as your saturated fats are generally-healthy (less hot dogs and bacon, more coconut oil and venison) and you’re getting enough Omega-3 fats, you’ll do just fine.
3rd Principle: Eat carbs and fats depending on your goals
If you’re looking to boost your performance in endurance exercise, then you should be eating accordingly. Some evidence suggests that keto is a great way of doing this, but equal weight goes to the fact that you can improve workout performance by consuming carbs during exercise.
Thus, you should probably avoid carbs outside of training when you’re aiming for maximum endurance but allow yourself a small amount of fast-absorbing carbohydrates during exercise. This won’t necessarily ruin your keto-adaptation as they are exogenous glucose sources (your body doesn’t make them – it just uses them).
Alternatively, if you’re training for strength or muscle size, you need to balance your carb and fat intake to ensure that you’re covering all your bases. A super-easy way to do this is to eat as many carbs as protein (by gram) and half as much fat (by gram). It’s a great place to start, especially if you’ve fixed your fat and carb quality.
What Next? The Take-Home
The only diet you need is a better one: it doesn’t need to be a fad.
Restrictive diets are the enemy: they push you to drop out beneficial, healthy parts of your diet without replacing them effectively. There’s a limit to the benefits of a high-fat diet, and similar benefits to high-carb diets – pushing either too far will only damage your health, performance and wellbeing.
These diets put too much focus on things that don’t matter and demonize totally-healthy compounds without any good, scientific reason.
What you should do is follow the simple 3 principles we set out above. Look at your own needs and put those first – the rest is just balancing the type and quantity of both carbs and fats!
Credits
Cashew fruit – Costa Rica, San José by Evert Jan
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Thank you for pointing out the facts! Really hate it when people always take fat out of their diet and don’t do their own research. A perfect balance is great and that’s nice of you to emphasize. A lot of people I know would hunger themselves to get a flat stomach but that’s really not necessary. Great writing!
Thanks for the comment! Good fats found in foods are important of any healthy diet. And eating food with fat doesn’t necessarily equal more fat in the body.