In our modern nutrition world, sugar and carbs are often the most feared foods. You hear sugar make you fat, cause diabetes, feed cancer cells, wreck your gut, hormones, as well as more tragic tales supposedly related to sugar and carb intake. But I’d argue that sugar and carbohydrates are largely misunderstood.

In this blog, we explore and discuss …

the problems with low carb diets
the differences between optimal carbs and ultra-processed carbs
the benefits of simple sugars
why we don't need to curb our sugar cravings
how to slowly reintroduce carbs if transitioning off a low carb diet
problems with fake sugars and high fructose corn syrup

Mainstream Media Often Makes Us Think Carbs are Bad for Our Health

Mainstream nutrition advice often makes us believe sugars and carbohydrates are unhealthy and low carb diets are the key to achieve optimal hormone health. The press frequently demonizes carbs, stimulating unfounded fear to eat carb-based foods.

The truth is sugar and carbs are largely misunderstood.

Popular nutrition advice often suggest that sugar leads to hormonal imbalances, but what actually leads to hormonal imbalances include ultra-processed foods, living a high-stress lifestyle, consuming vegetable oils, synthetic additives, and fake sugars, as well as poor liver function, or a damaged digestive system.

Balancing your hormones remains much more complicated than just eliminating carbs from your diet. In fact, avoiding quality carbohydrates can often make your hormonal imbalance worse.

The reality is carbohydrates are the body’s main and preferred source of fuel and energy. Without eating carbs, your body has to go through an extremely stressful and wasteful process to create energy from your body stores of protein and fat.

Let’s look at what happens physiologically when you don't eat carbs for a long period of time.

Problems with a Low Carb Diet

When a person goes on a low carb diet or restricts carbs, the body senses it's running out of fuel (glucose).
The lack of available glucose sends a signal to increase stress hormones in order to obtain energy from protein stores, turning them into glucose for energy. This reaction increases stress hormones, adding unnecessary stress to the body.
Initially, this rise of stress hormones feels great because running off cortisol and adrenaline feels exhilarating, which is the main reason people feel great when transitioning to a low carb diet. However, if you continue to avoid carbs for a long period of time, your stress hormones continue to stay high, and your thyroid function starts to decrease. This is one of the most common hormonal imbalances in our modern world. Stress hormones and thyroid hormone are inversely related. As thyroid hormone decreases, various symptoms can start to show up: PMS, painful periods, Polycystic Ovarian Syndrome (PCOS), chronic fatigue, constipation, bloating, hormonal acne, dry skin, hair loss, anxiety, depression, brain fog, insomnia, poor liver function, and/or poor detoxification.

You can learn more about the symptoms related to poor thyroid function in this blog HERE.

Instead of simply avoiding carbs, we need to focus on ingesting the right types of carbs.

Optimal Carbs

When people blame carbs or sugar for their hormonal imbalance symptoms, the culprit is often poor quality food, so let's stop demonizing and fearing carbs. Instead, let’s reevaluate the types of carbs we're eating.

When people blame carbs and sugar for their symptoms, they’re often talking about ultra-processed carbs that include a variety of chemical additives to improve flavor, color, texture, and shelf life. Examples include chips, candy, cookies, cakes, pastries, cereals, sodas, energy drinks, and fast food.

We can all agree these foods are not quality carbohydrates. The food additives used in manufacturing these prepared packaged foods do more harm to our hormones than sugar.

Seed oils, corn syrup, synthetic vitamins, food dyes, pesticides, along with artificial chemical additives and preservatives are the true reason why so many of us struggle when eating these foods, not because of the sugar content.

Instead of eliminating carbs from our diets completely, opt for optimal carbs including:

fruits and fruit juices
root vegetables
squash
dairy
honey
maple syrup
sourdough bread
white rice
even some refined white sugars in moderation

Before we discover the benefits of adding optimal carb sources in your diet, let's first discuss the different types of carbohydrates.

Types of Carbs

All sugars are carbs, but not all carbs are sugars. Simple sugars contain one or two molecules called mono and disaccharides.

Monosaccharides consist of glucose, fructose, and galactose. Fructose is found mostly in fruits. Fructose literally means fruit-sugar. Galactose mainly comes from dairy products.
Disaccharides consist of sucrose, maltose, and lactose. Maple syrup and table sugar primarily consist of sucrose. Maltose is naturally found in peaches, sweet potatoes, and honey. Lactose comes primarily from dairy products.
Polysaccharides are not simple sugars but rather long chains of glucose molecules, found in starches, like bread, white potatoes, and rice or in cellulose mostly found in vegetables.

Distinguishing between sugars and starches is important because even though both can be part of a well-balanced diet, ideally we should be obtaining most of our carbs from simple sugars, not starches, especially while healing from hormonal imbalances.

The Benefits of Simple Sugars

Our body thrives on simple sugars for many reasons.

Simple sugars provide quick, easy-to-digest energy. Foods with simple sugars like fruit and honey are often relatively void of antinutrients, making them easier to digest. These sugars can either be utilized immediately for energy or stored in the liver as glycogen to be used for energy later.

Probably one of the greatest benefits of simple sugar is how it directly lowers the stress response. Have you ever craved sugar while stressed out? Stress increases your needs for energy. As pointed out earlier, when you go a long period of time without eating carbs, stress hormones rise in order to rely on energy from protein stores. One of the simplest ways to lower stress hormones is to simply eat simple sugars.

Simple sugars also improve moods, lower anxiety, and feelings of depression. Our vital organs, especially our brain, can only use glucose for energy. Even though we can make glucose from protein and fat stores, that requires increasing stress hormones which often make us feel irritable and anxious.

Besides table sugar, most foods that contain simple sugars, like fruit, dairy, and root veggies are high in vitamins and minerals, so we should eat them not only for energy but also for their nutritional density.

Our liver loves simple sugars, fructose especially. The liver is an extremely energy dependent organ. The liver requires a lot of glucose energy to perform its 500+ bodily processes. Without enough sugar or glycogen, stored sugar, the liver cannot perform optimally and detoxification become less efficient, especially for women struggling with estrogen dominance. If the liver does not have enough glucose fuel, it must work overtime converting amino acids into glucose, thus cannot efficiently eliminate excess estrogen.

The liver also needs plenty of energy in order to convert thyroid hormone to its active form. Supplying the liver with continuous energy helps to increase the metabolism by improving thyroid function.

Simple sugars also help you fall asleep and stay asleep. You not only need energy when you're awake, but your body still needs fuel when you're sleeping. Since simple sugar helps reduce stress, eating foods that contain sugars before bed help you fall asleep easier and stay asleep. Plus, the liver ramps up its bodily functions at night, so if you don't eat enough sugar throughout the day or before bed, your liver can run out of glycogen at night, increasing stress hormones, and making you wake up.

If you struggle with insulin resistance or PCOS, you might be even more fearful of carbs. In this case, you should instead opt for fructose, sugar found in fruit. Unlike glucose, fructose does not require insulin to enter the cell, so if you're struggling with insulin resistance, fruits should be your optimal source of carbs.

Without a doubt, simple sugars provide your body with many benefits, so should you really be scared of sugar and continuously try to curb your sugar cravings?

Should You Curb Sugar Cravings?

With the assumption sugar is bad, so much popular health advice suggests different ways to curb your sugar cravings or ways to cut out sugar from your life. But your sugar cravings are actually your body’s way of communicating with you. Sugar cravings are common and completely normal. You might crave sugar for many reasons: when you’re stressed, hungry, dehydrated, in your luteal phase, under-eating, don't eat enough protein, craving comfort, low in minerals, or if your blood sugar is low.

Sugar is an essential component to make energy so you can function on a day-to -day basis. You need sugar to breathe, to move, for your liver to detoxify, for your thyroid to function, for your brain to think, for your ovaries to ovulate, as well as regulate all other physiological functions.

Let’s stop fearing sugar and stop viewing sugar cravings as a curse but rather as your body's way of communicating. If you crave sugar instead opt for better sugars: fruit, honey, maple syrup, squash, root veggies, and dairy, not ultra-processed, packaged chips, cookies, cakes, and pastries, filled with an array of chemical additives, preservatives, as well as vegetable and seed oils.

If you're craving sugar you also might actually be craving protein. If you're not eating enough protein throughout the day, it's common for your body to crave sugar. To learn more about the importance of protein for hormone balance, read this blog HERE.

How to Reintroduce Carbs in Your Everyday Diet

Ideally, most women should be consuming 150 grams of carbohydrates or more per day. If you're pregnant, breastfeeding, or strength training, you will likely need even more.

However, if transitioning from a low carb diet, you must give your body time to adjust and regain its natural ability to utilize carbs efficiently again. Here’s my best advice on how to re-incorporate carbs back into your diet.

Go slow! Your body needs time to adjust and adapt to eating more carbs. You will not feel well if you go from eating 50 grams of carbs a day to 200 grams. You will likely struggle with digestive symptoms and fatigue if you introduce carbs too quickly. First, figure out how many grams of carbs you're currently eating per day. Once you have that number, increase your carb intake by 5% to 10% each week until you reach at least 150 grams per day. Continue to reevaluate your progress.
Fruits are another great starting point when increasing your carb intake, since fruits add greater nutritional value, while decreasing the need for insulin, because fructose does not require insulin to enter the cell.
Also, whenever eating carbs, you ideally want to pair them with a protein source. Carbs alone can spike your blood sugar too quickly, but if paired with a protein source your blood sugar will likely stay more stable.
Lastly, if you want to reintroduce starchy carbs, aim to pair them with simple sugars sources, especially fructose, helping glucose to enter your cells better. Some simple examples of this approach include pairing sourdough bread with honey or rice with a small glass of juice.

Why Fake Sugars and High Fructose Corn Syrup are Worse than Real Sugars

Let’s wrap up this blog post by looking at the problems with fake sugars. Most people believe that diet foods or zero sugar foods are healthier simply because they have no calories, but these fake sugars often do more harm than good.

Fake sugars, also known as artificial sweeteners are artificially concocted in a lab and created to make your food or drinks taste sweeter. Saccharine, aspartame, acesulfame, sucralose, xylitol, stevia, erythritol, sorbitol, and mannitol are all examples of fake sugar.

Fake sugars are frequently found in products labeled as diet, zero calorie, or less sugar. To the taste, artificial sweeteners might seem like a great alternative to real kinds of sugar, but consuming these fake sugars over a long period of time often causes more harm.

Here’s what biologically happens when you eat artificial sugars:

When we eat any of these so-called sugars, the body assumes it's ingesting sugar due to its sweet taste.
Because the body believes it's eating sugar, insulin rises to get that sugar into the cell.
However, no actual sugar is available to enter your cells. So, insulin stays high causing blood sugar to drop.
When blood sugar drops, the body naturally increases cortisol and adrenaline to raise the blood sugar back up.
As a result, your stress hormones are high and your energy level is low due to the lack of usable sugar or energy. Let's stop trying to trick our body and instead give it the real carbohydrates it needs.

Long term, this may lead to chronic high stress and poor thyroid function along with gut issues like diarrhea, bloating, flatulence, and bacterial imbalances.

Finally, what about high fructose corn syrup?

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) and white granulated table sugar are two completely different substances. Both cannot be equally blamed for the causes of poor health and hormonal imbalances.

High fructose corn syrup is extracted from GMO corn starch, so it actually acts as a highly concentrated starch in the body, not sugar. Since HFCS acts as a starch, it's slowly absorbed, even more so than starchy foods like potatoes and rice, so more likely to produce a higher insulin response therefore more likely to be stored as fat tissue rather than be used for energy.

With its low cost and sugary taste, HFCS is mostly used in processed packaged manufactured goods, replacing granulated white sugar made from cane or beets. Our decline in overall health and struggles with hormonal imbalances are likely not due to consumption of white sugar but rather consumption of highly processed HFCS.

We agree we should obtain our necessary sugars from natural sources, like fruit, honey, dairy, and root veggies, but we must not blame sugar on declining women’s health. You don’t need to consume white sugar if you don't want to, but no need to fear it either. Overall I recommend reading your food labels and limiting your intake of highly processed fake sugars and high fructose corn syrup whenever possible.

Let’s agree to stop fearing carbs and sugar, since they’re essential to help us thrive and enhance our overall health. Instead let’s focus on quality carbs from fruits, real fruit juices, fruiting veggies, dairy, honey, and maple syrup, and limit highly processed fake sugars and high fructose corn syrup.

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out by commenting below or through my email bella@nourishwithbella.com

Why You Shouldn’t Fear Sugars and Carbs