Simple Carbohydrates "Simply" Make Pain Worse While Making You Fatter

Simple carbohydrates are the "bad" carbohydrates, or sugars that anyone who has ever dieted has heard about. Simple sugars come in the form of the "white" products like white sugar, white flour and even white potatos.

They are bad because they cause a big dump of sugars into the digestive tract. This stimulates a big jump in insulin. Insulin is the enzyme that uses up sugar in the digestive tract. And the more insulin that a food stimulates, the higher its glycemic index is. So simple carbohydrates tend to be high glycemic foods.

Insulin is bad due to its role in stimulating the pain pathway.

Starchy Simple Carbohydrates

Bread products become simple sugars when the fibrous part of the grain is stripped away during the refining process. The fibrous part contains vitamins and fiber. So for nutritional reasons, food manufacturers "enrich" the flour with added vitamins. You'll frequently see this as the first ingredient on any bread product that is not made from whole grain. "Enriched wheat flour" is usually how it reads. Enriching is a synthetic process, not a valuable part of the product.

So there is an insulin dump after eating refined breads and even potatoes because there are long chains of sugars that are quickly broken apart. By the way, french fries are included here. And French fries also show up in a much worse category--the trans fats.

White flours cause an insulin spike. And if you click here to see the inflammation pathway, you'll see that insulin SPEEDS UP the conversion of Product #2 to Product #3. Insulin is a "catalyst" for this step of the inflammation pathway. It makes the step happen quicker and more easily. Without insulin Product #2 doesn't convert to Product #3. So insulin is a catalyst to pain.

Once you have an abundance of Product #3, called arachidonic acid, you are one step away from making the pain chemical called prostaglandin.

If you see the conditions that are caused by prostaglandin in that drawing, you will find other reasons to lower your intake of simple carbohydrates than just pain. There are well-documented studies showing simple carbohydrates increase your risk of diseases like cancer and heart disease. This is the mechanism that explains it. So reducing your pain now by changing your diet instead of relying on pain relievers will lower your overall risk for disease later.

Sugary Simple Carbohydrates

Just to clarify the sugary simple carbohydrates: some fruits have a higher glycemic index than desirable like bananas. But many fruits have a fibrous component with them and this lowers the glycemic index and insulin dump that you would expect.

With that said, please don't stop eating fruit! If you are trying to lose weight, you need to moderate your fruit intake. But most people probably never gained weight from eating too many strawberries or oranges, you know??

The sugary simple carbohydrates that should concern you are in sweets like cake, desserts, sugary cereals, candy bars, donuts, cookies and ice cream. Need I go on? The favorites!

Sugar is a refined product from sugar beets or sugar cane. As a whole food it wouldn't cause a high glycemic index. But once refined, sugary foods also cause an insulin dump and promote the same step in the inflammation pathway that the starchy simple carbohydrates cause. So sugary foods will cause you to have an abundance of arachidonic acid, which is one step away from the pain chemical, prostaglandin.

High Fructose Corn Syrup
Simple Carbohydrates

High fructose corn syrup (HFCS) causes the same problem that refined sugars cause. However, this step is like sugar on steroids. It causes the same insulin spike that simple sugars cause. However, the chemical structure of HFCS blocks where insulin's receptor site. So now an abundance of insulin is floating around without its normal place to go. So it ends up in the inflammation pathway, but much more of it than with simple sugars. So HFCS causes Product #2 to convert to Product #3 in abundance! Even more arachidonic acid is made when you consume foods made with HFCS than with just sugar.

Most bottled drinks use HFCS: soft drinks and bottled teas for instance. There are some products that have cleverly avoided HFCS, like Izze. It is carbonated water with fruit juice. The fruit juice is a simple carbohydrate and will cause an insulin spike. But not near as bad as HFCS. Even better is just carbonated water, like sparkling water or club soda.

HFCS is prevalent in lots of food at the grocery store, though. I love Rudy's bakery that has bread products available at grocery stores in Denver, CO. Their breads are whole grain, no HFCS, and made with mostly organic ingredients. All of their products have a great flavor, too! But many other breads, including Pepperidge Farms, have HFCS and so do popular brands of yogurt.

Critser, author of the book Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Edition 001). says up to 15 pounds of your fat could be accounted for with high fructose corn syrup! It's an ingredient worth eliminating to a very low amount in your diet. It is a synthetic sugar made out of corn that is cheaper than cane sugar or sugar beets. There are chemical residues from the manufacturing process. And it actually makes you hungrier!

HFCS was my pitfall since Coca Cola is my biggest vice. I cut back from 1-2 cokes a day to @1 coke a week in 2007. Along with eating more vegetables and a lower volume of food at each meal and a daily vitamin and mineral protocol, I was able to lose 20 pounds in about 3 months without any special diet plan.

Junk Food and Pain Relievers

Here is something to think about: I'm not saying quit these foods forever. I'm saying that if you are managing a painful condition that reducing or eliminating these foods will improve the outcome of whatever treatment protocol you are trying. It will reduce your need for pain relievers even if you are NOT on a treatment plan.

Find out how to negate the inflammation caused by simple carbohydrates when you have a lapse in dietary choices with "nature's anti-inflammatory." I can tell you from experience that people who have a Mountain Dew and a tube of donuts for breakfast don't get very good results with chiropractic adjustments. Adjustments stop one aspect of prostaglandin production. But the daily assault from the diet keeps the pain pathway activated! No treatment plan will work under those circumstances.

If your diet is laden with these kinds of food, it will cause you to take more pain relievers than necessary. Then you are putting yourself at immediate risk for a bleeding ulcer, kidney failure or liver failure. Almost half of the cases of acute (sudden) liver failure occur because of very high doses of acetaminophen (the ingredient in tylenol) for very short periods of time. You should NEVER consume more than 4000 mg in a day. And if you consume alcohol, doses lower than 4000 mg can cause acute liver failure.

Apparently dying from liver failure is a pretty grisly death. It might be more comfortable to eliminate your favorite junk foods until you get out of pain. At least cut back on the junk food so you can cut back on the pain relievers.

Explore this link for the vegetable oil link to the inflammation pathway.

Explore this link for the meat link to the inflammation pathway.


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