Weight Down Lifestyle

Learning more about carbohydrates, how to maintain a diet with them There's lots of talk and old and new diets with the focus on lowering or avoiding carbohydrate intake. Like the most recent, "Keto" diet on the heels of the "Paleo" diet.

The overall goal is to increase whole, less-processed nutrient-dense foods and decrease highly processed, refined foods with little nutrition. The message, however, creates confusion around the intake of carbohydrates.

The most recent research is now supporting what dietitians have all along promoted- a moderate intake of carbohydrates. Finding that too high or too low intakes of the nutrient can cause negative health effects and can even shorten a person's lifespan.

Carbohydrate is one of the 3 energy nutrients, nutrients that provide calories. The others: protein and fat.

Carbohydrate is the main source of energy for all processes in the body including muscle, brain function. There is no supplement for carbohydrates, can only be found in foods.

A moderate intake of carbohydrates is defined as 40 to 50% of a person's total intake. Each gram of carbohydrate provides 4 calories. So of a person's total caloric intake, ideally each day, 40 to 50% of those calories would be coming from carbohydrate to be considered moderate.