You didn't grow up on a farm, did you? I did, and I assure you that the average farmer's diet was high calorie and a high percentage of those calories came from some form of starch or sugar.
They certainly didn’t eat the refined sugar and corn syrup that we do.
How does one obtain sucrose without refining it? Corn syrup is mostly glucose. What does that fact have to do with anything?
My grandparents’ generation ate substantially more fats than we do in the form of real butter and animal fats.
I don't know that this statement is true, but since a gram of fat offers more than twice the amount of calories as a gram of carbohydrate, I'd say that our sedentary lifestyle has a lot more to do with the increase in obesity than anything else.
wheat and corn flour wasn’t refined even close to the point it is today, leaving a lot more fiber and making sugar carbs much less accessible.
Sugar carbs? The whole processed vs, less processed is a red herring. The issue is calories consumed vs. calories burned. Put a lab rat on a treadmill for 10 hours a day and you can feed it nothing but "refined sugar" and it won't get fat.
I’m talking about reversing a disease process that’s already been started, not staying healthy if you’re fine.
Removing carbohydrates from your diet isn't healthy. Eating a balanced diet is healthy.
Had we been eating the amounts of calories, carbs, fats and protein that our grandparents did, we’d be a much healthier society as a whole.
Yet we're live longer and healthier lives than our grandparents did. Farm families consumed massive amount of calories and obesity was rare. That's because they burned those calories off. Today we consume an energy dense diet and lead a sedentary lifestyle. That's the difference.
Like I said before, blaming one macronutrient or another is how diet fads are created and how books are sold, but it has little to do with the truth. Some people think they can repeal the first law of thermodynamics. They can't, but that doesn't stop them from trying.....and selling books and obtaining government grants in the process.
Actually, I grew up with my grandparents on a farm.
There were fats aplenty. There was toast. Things like cake, candy, pies and ice cream were very rare treats. My grandfather was a bee-keeper and we did have honey. (I was given raw comb as a treat.) Our primary starches were bread and potatoes. (Bread for breakfast and potatoes for ‘dinner’ and ‘supper’) We never ate cold cereal.
Meat and carbs (usually potatoes) were eaten in equal portions - bite for bite. We’d have a small amount of cooked veggies on the side. (For breakfast we’d eat toast with eggs and, if we were lucky, some carefully rationed sausage or bacon.)
Men at much more than the women. They were larger and more physically active and it was expected. But the ratio of meat to carbs was the same. 1:1
Weirdly, I don’t remember eating a single salad (I’m not counting potato salad - that was a common theme with lunch), although we did munch on raw carrots straight out of the ground and I loved eating sugar peas right off the vine. Heck, grandma carried a salt-shaker in her basket when we’d work on the harvest just so we could snack as we worked. (I got smacked a lot for eating when I was supposed to be peeling... I hated peeling.)
Other than that, our veggies were eaten cooked and we ate much less than the amounts recommended today. (Usually it was only about two, half-cup servings a day.) Fruits and berries were eaten in season or in the form of preserves spread on our breakfast toast. My grandfather drank a tall glass of fresh goat’s milk every morning and this was also forced upon us kids. None of the grown women drank straight milk unless they were pregnant, but they did eat cheese.
We ate three meals a day, although the kids did graze outside all afternoon on whatever we could find on the farm.
As for the whole, ‘needing to eat carbs for energy thing’ that I hear so much about - our guys would head out to do chores in the morning with nothing more than a cup of coffee. (The cows and goats won’t wait to be milked while grandma makes breakfast.) They’d come in two hours later to wash up and break their fast.
We still have the farm in the family. Most of my relatives are farmers.
Yes, the farm life-style is much more physical than modern living. Yes, exercise is important. But we didn’t eat a ton of refined carbs on the farm. Sweet should be a *treat*, not a regular way of eating.