If you thought carbohydrates are just bread, bananas and pudding, then you are definitely wrong. Carbohydrates can appear in many forms and in many foods today. You wouldn't imagine that you can even drink them! Let's have a closer look at the wonders of carbohydrates we have today.
The food technology industry has expanded very rapidly in the past 100 years to meet the world's demands and to feed the hungry. Yes, the world needs more and more carbohydrates as the population increases. Without sufficient carbohydrates, we would all be lanky or twiggy. Carbohydrates give us the stuffing material to make us look good and well fed.
There are many types of carbohydrates, from simple monosaccharides (glucose, fructose and galactose) to dissacharides (sucrose, lactose and maltose) to more complex carbohydrates. We will easily get fat if we just stick to the mono- and disaccharides as our main source of carbohydrates, eg canned drinks which are high in glucose and sucrose.
However, we are fortunate today that the food technology industry has come up with varied choices of complex carbohydrates and made them available in our foods, mostly instant foods. Today, we can easily fix a breakfast drink consisting of oligosaccharides. We can also fix a nutritious meal of instant cereals and have a sufficient amount of beta-glucans to absorb cholesterol from our ingested foods. Our menu today is also varied and mixed from many cultures that we can be sure we are getting all the necessary fibres daily. Our correct approach to selecting high-fibre foods and skipping all the attractive tasty fizzy drinks and fatty fast foods will help in bringing us reach a ripe old age of 75 for many Malaysians (90 for many Australians).
Why do the Australians generally live longer than their Asian counterparts? Well, you can study that. They eat a lot of high-fibre foods, fruits and greens. Malaysians on the whole tend to prefer fried and fatty foods and hardly any greens. It is quite difficult to get Malaysians to eat enough vegetables in their daily intake. You must have watched how Popeye fed canned spinach to Olive Oyl? Yes, it's that difficult. Malaysians tend not to like vegetables as the Australians loved their vegetables.
But we have a lot of workaround today that we don't have to worry so much about whether Malaysians eat their vegetables or not, because now we have so many oligos and who knows what may come out on the supermarket shelves next? Today's youngsters can easily fix an oligo drink in minutes and be done for their daily needs of complex carbohydrates. Today's carbohydrate engineering world has delivered what the world needs. However, consumers are not aware that they are doing something good for themselves when they consume such highly engineered foodstuff. Engineered foodstuffs are not all that bad actually. Engineered carbohydrates are good for health and we can depend on them for improving our health status, especially in controlling cholesterol intake, blood cholesterol level and the risk of ischaemic heart disease (IHD). Alternatively, we can also chew prawn shells and swallow that while eating prawns. Prawn shell is chitin, a type of absorbent carbohydrate that will absorb cholesterol from the prawn itself.
As we get older, the more we will depend on engineered carbohydrates for our continued health. With menopause comes pain in the knees and other joints. Complex carbohydrates such as glucosamine (glycosaminoglycans) tablets, creams and injections can help to relief joint pain.
Chemical structure of carbohydrates:
http://www.scientificpsychic.com/fitness/carbohydrates.html
http://www.scientificpsychic.com/fitness/carbohydrates1.html
http://www.scientificpsychic.com/fitness/carbohydrates2.html
0 comments:
Post a Comment