We’ve Been Wrong About Carbs

I kind of feel like we've been lied to. We've been lied to about carbs as a fuel source when the data is becoming stronger and stronger, that we don't need carbohydrates for fuel. And here we've been told that it's carbs and calories that fuel us. But what if the biggest thing that we actually got wrong about carbs had nothing to do with calories or it being a fuel, has nothing to do with glycemic index, but it has everything to do with what carbs tell your body to do. I'm not even here to demonize carbs. I like strategically using them as a signal, but I definitely don't rely on them as fuel. And I do think that we've been inadvertently a little bit misled. We've been so focused on carbs as an energy source that we completely miss the fact that they function more as a signal. And this is going to change how you look at carbohydrates forever. I promise you, they are a safety signal. They are a signal that tells your system whether it's time to break down or to rebuild, whether you are safe or not safe. And once that is understood, the way that you think about when, why, and how you eat carbs changes entirely for the better. And it's going to help you with fat loss. It's going to help you with insulin resistance. It's going to help you with your sleep. It's going to help you in every way imaginable.

So, here's how we'll break it down. First, I'm going to show you how carbs talk to your stress hormones and why cutting them can keep cortisol elevated unless you know how to time things and manage things. Because I've done low carb for well over 10 years, and my cortisol is a check. Then we'll get into the nervous system piece because carbs are actually sending signals to your nervous system in ways that most people have zero idea about. And then after that, we'll cover why carbs are the key recovery signal after exercise. You're not refueling. You don't need these ridiculous amounts. It's a signal. And also how protein and fat play their own signaling roles alongside them. And then lastly, I'll tie it all together with this micronutrient piece because none of these signals work properly if the co-actors aren't there. So, we'll talk about what you need specifically for carbs to work in your body, but I want to start out with corsol because this part catches people off guard quite a bit.

Now, I also put a link down below for Thrive Market. Thrive Market's an online grocery store. And the reason that I mentioned them is because a that link down below is for 30% off your entire grocery order. So, that's pretty darn cool. But also, they have cleaner carbohydrate sources. So, let's say for example, you wanted like some beetroot powder or something like that. a good concentrated amount of a cleaner carb source. You can sort by diet type, you can sort by type of food, and they vet every single product that comes on their shelves. So, it's like if you went to a supplement store and you're like, "Oh, I want to get some carbohydrate powder." That could send you down a rabbit hole of getting all kinds of different stuff. Okay? So, if you're trying to look for things that you feel good about keeping in your pantry or your fridge, then you want to check out Thrive Market. So, again, it's Thrive Market. That link is in the top line of the description underneath this video.

So, let's look at some research first. There was a study in nutrients and it took overweight and obese people and it put them through an eight-week dietary intervention and it measured their salivary cortisol 14 different times across the day. So they the same time they did this they ran a social stress test to see how the body responded to like little bouts of psychological stress throughout the day sort of. So what they found is that people that consumed higher amounts of carbohydrates had a dampened cortisol response. Now before you think that I'm losing my mind and I'm saying you should just eat carbs all the time, this has a strategic purpose. Okay, we're not talking about them just having lower baseline cortisol. They had a reduced cortisol spike when the stress hit. So, the carbs were literally buffering the stress response. The mechanism actually makes a lot of sense because when carb availability is low, the body has to manufacture its own glucose through gluconioenesis and it actually uses cortisol to do that. Now, it can be a highly fat burning system when that happens, but overall it can wreak a lot of havoc on your body. But a lot of people will take that and they'll say, "I need to eat a high carb diet." No. Again, I strongly feel we have been misled on that. A small amount of carbs, even such a small amount that won't kick you out of ketosis in many times, could actually signal to your body that you don't need to have this high cortisol. You see, cortisol is mobilizing the glycogen. It's breaking down tissue. It's keeping your blood sugar from crashing. So, it's doing its job. And if you're chronically low on carbs, a lot of times you are asking cortisol to pick up the slack constantly. When you bring carbs back in, that pressure valve sort of releases. But again, it's just about the signal, not about the quantity. The body reads it as a signal that energy is available, the environment is safe, and there's no need to stay in a stress driven state. This is not a subtle shift either, because the study showed that dampened cortisol changes over the full 8 weeks. And there's a measurable reduced cortisol spike during these acute stressors. That's your body literally recalibrating its stress thermostat based on what you're eating. When the system senses scarcity, cortisol turns it up. When carbs come in, it tells the system to dial it back down. So, if you're someone who trains hard or you're just like having a stressful life and you keep carbs chronically low. This is especially worth paying attention to because you may be sustaining this elevated cortisol that's impairing your recovery and it's hurting your adaptation over time.

But it gets more interesting because it's not just cortisol. Carbs are actually sending a signal directly into your autonomic nervous system. This system controls our whole fight orflight versus rest and digest thing. And once again, don't misconstrue this as you need to eat a high carb diet. I'm not contradicting. I'm not going back. I'm actually standing more firm in what I believe, which is that we have been misled about carbs being fuel. They're simply a signal in my opinion. So, there was a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition and it looked at muscle sympathetic nerve activity, but also looked at whole body norepinephrine spillover and what is called cardiac barrerow reflex sensitivity. And it looked at this in insulin sensitive and insulin resistant overweight and obese subjects after having carbs. So it was looking at the overall stress response. In the insulin sensitive group, glucose intake triggered a clear measurable increase in sympathetic nervous system activity. Okay? So your body recognized the glucose and responded with an appropriate neural signal. But in the insulin resistant group, that response was blunted and delayed. their baseline sympathetic activity was already elevated and they couldn't mount like a proper response to the glucose signal. That's what tells us that carbs are functioning as a neuroindocrine signal. The glucose comes in, the insulin potentially rises and the brain adjusts this autonomic output accordingly. But if insulin resistance has set in, that communication just breaks down entirely. The signal gets garbled and this ends up being a big problem because it means the person that's eating the carbs isn't getting the downstream benefits of that signal. the autonomic adjustment doesn't happen the way that it should. So the parasympathetic shift that should follow a meal gets muted. And this is why restoring insulin sensitivity through the obvious things through step count, through uh movement, through isometrics, through sleep, through diet. It's not just about blood sugar management. It's about rewiring the circuit so that your body actually interprets the nutrient signals the way that it's supposed to. So when I say train your body to utilize carbs, it's not that I want you to use carbs as fuel. It's that I want you to properly receive the signal from carbs the way that nature intended us to be able to.

Now, we're going to come back to all this, but I want to get into a recovery piece for a second because the signaling concept really hits home when it comes to recovery. After exercise, you are in this catabolic state. Your glycogen's depleted, uh, your stress hormones are elevated, your cellular energy sensors have shifted, and you've kind of started to tilt more towards fuel mobilization versus tissue repair. Okay? Okay. And if we look at a study in nutrients, this looked at how carb intake following exercise influences glycogen restoration, but also your ability to recover. Okay? They found that carb intake rates of about 1.2 g per kilogram of body mass per hour. Maximize glycogen reynthesis. I'm not saying that you need to do this. I'm saying this is what the data show. It's saying that essentially the carbohydrate intake post-workout is what is going to restore glycogen the most. We have since seen that protein intake after a workout doesn't matter nearly as much, but if you're trying to restore glycogen, then carb intake does. But what matters more than just like refilling your carb tank, because I don't expect everyone to eat that amount of carbs, is that restoring glycogen was directly associated with improved performance in subsequent exercise sessions. So, it wasn't that carbs were just replenishing fuel. It was more so that they switched the body from breakdown mode into rebuild mode. When the insulin goes up, glycogen synthes activates and the entire metabolic environment shifts from catabolic to anabolic. So, it's not about how do we restore our glycogen even though we know that is true as well. It's more about the signal that allows the recovery. Okay? Exercise is the yang, carbs are the yin. Exercise activates the stress pathways and breaks things down. Carbs coming in afterwards activates a signal which tells the body the stress event is over. The energy is available again and it's time to shift resources towards repair. And this is where most people again they make the mistake of thinking it's just about carbs or just about calories or this simple like black and white fuel system. This is all about signaling. The body is smart. The body is intelligent. We can give it signals and inputs and it will figure out what to do. We are not the only ones that are in control of how our body is running on certain fuels. And it's foolish to think that we are. I give my body carbs, it's going to use carbs. Doesn't work like that.

In fact, protein plays its own signaling role in this. Okay. If we look at the journal nutrition study showed that leucine which is very important amino acid for muscle growth. This activates mTor signaling after exercise which triggers the very first step in building new muscle. Right? Carbs alone can't do that. But leucine plus carbs together have the strongest effect as a signal because they're sending complimentary signals. We know that protein is a signal. We know if you watch this channel that leucine is a signal. So to say that a little bit of carbohydrates isn't a signal would be simply wrong. Right? Carbs tell the body the environment is safe and that it's okay to start recovery. Leucine says building materials are here. Go ahead and start rebuilding. Interestingly, the research is also showing that when carb intake is not there or when there's not a signal now and then, protein helps compensate for glycogen re synthesis, which means that you can get away with a lot less carbohydrates than you think, which again further confirms why I feel like we're being lied to. We're not being told the full story. because I don't know if there's an agenda or what, but it seems like we are really pushing lots of carbs when in reality you don't need to have that a little signal protein makes up the rest. They're backing each other up.

Now, if we look at fats, it rounds out this whole picture, okay? Cuz I don't recommend having fats around your workout generally. If we look at a review in biomolelecules, it shows that different types of fat alter communication between the gut and the brain. For example, diets that were high in saturated fat actually trigger different effects in the gut to certain degrees. dispiosis, intestinal permeability, and even more inflammatory pathways. But this is not in people that are doing like low carb, keto or carnivore. This is in people that are having high saturated fat along with carbohydrates in their diet. That endotoxic exposure is essentially a stress signal pulling resources away from repair. But then when you look at like for example omega-3s on the other hand, this supported anti-inflammatory pathways and better gut barrier integrity. So while carbs signal safety and leucine signals growth, fat determines whether the background environment is inflammatory or protective to the background environment, like what's going on in the rest of the world.

So if we put it all together before we put it into practical sense, carbs are not calories. I guess technically they have calories, but they're a metabolic signal that tells your body whether it's safe to stop mobilizing stress hormones and it's time to start recovering. They talk to the nervous system. They switch off cortisol driven fuel production. may flip the switch from breakdown to rebuild. Protein, mainly leucine, sends a parallel growth signal through mTor. And fat quality determines whether the immune environment supports or undermines that.

So, how do you use this? First, if you're in a high stress period, you maybe it's heavy training, maybe it's poor sleep, maybe it's life stress, relationship stuff. Strategically including carbs from whole food sources, right? So, maybe some root vegetables, some fruit. This can dampen the cortisol response, but you're not eating them for energy. You're eating them to send a signal that the threat has passed. I will even use honey in this case. I don't need much. Okay. After hard training sessions, a small amount of carbs, it doesn't have to be even the amount that will kick you out of a ketogenic state, 10, 15 g if you wanted to. It's a signal. Okay, that combination along with protein post-workout, sends the strongest recovery signal. Different rules if you're fasting, different rules if like major fat loss is your goal. Okay, context is everything. But again, think whole foods here. And then our fat quality. If the goal is to keep the signaling environment anti-inflammatory, the addition of omega-3 sources are going to be the best choice, right? And you can add those in however you want, right?

But none of this works without important co-actors. That is one of the most important things to know. The B vitamins that we get from our food drive every single stage of cellular energy production, whether it's glycolysis all the way through like ATP production. Magnesium is required for ATP to even function because ATP is biologically active primarily in this magnesium bound form. So without magnesium you can't produce the ATP that you need. Then we have iron, right? This is delivering oxygen to muscles. Okay, so we need this also to the brain. We have zinc which is running almost all the enzymes involved in our metabolism. It's involved in DNA synthesis. It's involved in immune function. These are what allow the signals to actually reach their targets. So it is so important that you're getting this from whole foods that you get these things or even take a multivitamin or a beef liver capsule or something that's going to get you these, right? It's what makes the signaling system operational. So when you think about it less as filling the tank and more as providing your body with a series of signals and sending messages to different parts of your body, a you can probably get by with a lot less food than you think, a lot less carbs than you think. Sometimes a lot more food than you think because it's not simply fuel. Carbs from whole foods with micronutrients here and there, small amounts or if you eat large amounts, that's fine. Just get it from whole foods. Lucine rich protein, anti-inflammatory fats, that is the signal.

Now, if you want to see the exact carbs that I've been reaching for lately, like these are ones that I maybe wouldn't have even touched 10 years ago, I did put together a full list in this video right here. So, I recommend you check that one out. It's 11 carbs I've started eating that I never would have eaten a decade ago. So, check that video out and I'll see.