by Katie Caldesi

Rather than shun the whole food group of carbohydrates we prefer to show you which carbs are likely to be the best for your  body and which carbs should be limited. Afterall vegetables fall under the carb category and we love our veggies.

I think people often think low-carb is missing out an entire food group and therefore bundle it into the fad diet brigade. It our minds it is far from that. Vegetables are largely carbohydrates; I often think I could change the name of our books to “How to eat more vegetables”. As you flick through our three diabetes and weight loss books you can see the pages are full of vegetables. One of our favourite meals is the Beanguine with Pesto and Mozzarella from our recent book. This is a typical Italian pasta sauce but we have used green beans instead of linguine pasta to bring the carb count down.

 

The point of our recipes is to load your plates with green vegetables, salads and cauliflower rather than pasta, rice, beans, grains and potatoes, bread etc which is how the Eatwell plate formed by Public Health England suggests we eat. They advise you to “base your meals on starchy carbs”. That might be ok for some people but if you have a problem tolerating carbs as your glucose levels are high and you put on weight easily, you may need to think again about eating sugar or starchy carbs that turns to yet more glucose in your body.

We are low-carb 90% of the time. We still enjoy a bowl of pasta from time to time at our restaurants and I can’t resist our chef’s homemade focaccia but we always offer low-carb choices for us and those that want them. So we aren’t purists but we have just learnt a different way to eat that keeps us feeling better.

As Giancarlo puts it “the food that I eat feels fulfilling. I am no longer craving for more, more, more food. Low-carb food fills me up and I honestly feel my soul is at peace”.

Low carb describes a diet that restricts both sugars and starchy carbohydrates. Below we have arranged the vegetables from very low-carb on the left through to higher carb on the right.

Generally vegetables that grow below the ground contain more sugar than those that grow above it.

The aim of this website is to set out the case for why low carb is a very helpful food philosophy to follow for good health. However we don’t believe there is a ‘one size fits all’ recommendation to how low you should go. It all depends on your overall state of health and what your goals are; hence we encourage you to experiment with the level that best suits you. See the CarbScale a way of deciding your carb intake.

Below is chart showing how each food affect your blood glucose levels compared to a teaspoon of sugar:-