Bad News About Processed Carbs: They Make You Hungry

They fill you up, and then they let you down, so far down that in a few hours you crave more. Sounds like crack, but nope, we’re talking about processed carbohydrates, and that opinion comes from researchers at the New Balance Foundation Obesity Prevention Center at Boston Children’s Hospital. As Anahad O’Connor reports in the New York Times, the scientists gave nearly identical milkshakes to a dozen obese people on two occasions separated by several weeks. The sole difference in the shakes was that some were made with high-glycemic corn syrup and some with low-glycemic carbohydrates. As expected, O’Connor tells us, blood sugar levels rose more quickly in response to the high-glycemic milkshake, but what happened in the hours following the shake was more revealing. O’Connor reports that four hours after drinking the high-glycemic shake, blood sugar levels had plummeted into the hypoglycemic range, the subjects reported more hunger, and brain scans showed greater activation in parts of the brain that regulate cravings, reward and addictive behaviors. Christopher Gardner, a nutrition scientist at Stanford University who was not involved in the research, tells the Times that lesson number one from the study is that people should not just be told to eat less, but to “eat less refined carbohydrates and more whole foods.” Read more in the New York Times.