Home > Topic > carbohydrate
1 " Thanks to this availability of suitable wild mammals and plants, early peoples of the Fertile Crescent could quickly assemble a potent and balanced biological package for intensive food production. That package comprised three cereals, as the main carbohydrate sources; four pulses, with 20—25 percent protein, and four domestic animals, as the main protein sources, supplemented by the generous protein content of wheat; and flax as a source of fiber and oil (termed linseed oil: flax seeds are about 40 percent oil). Eventually, thousands of years after the beginnings of animal domestication and food production, the animals also began to be used for milk, wool, plowing, and transport. Thus, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent's first farmers came to meet humanity's basic economic needs: carbohydrate, protein, fat, clothing, traction, and transport. "
― Jared Diamond , Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
2 " Instead of going out on Saturday night as planned, I decided to stay in with a few of my closest friends from the complex carbohydrate family. Well actually, like most of my friends, they're not that complex. "
3 " Populations eating a remarkably wide range of traditional diets generally don't suffer from these chronic diseases. These diets run the gamut from ones very high in fat (the Inuit in Greenland subsist largely on seal blubber) to ones high in carbohydrate (Central American Indians subsist largely on maize and beans) to ones very high in protein (Masai tribesmen in Africa subsist chiefly on cattle blood, meat and milk), to cite three rather extreme examples. But much the same holds true for more mixed traditional diets. What this suggests is that there is no single ideal human diet but that the human omnivore is exquisitely adapted to a wide range of different foods and a variety of different diets. Except, that is, for one: the relatively new (in evolutionary terms) Western diet that that most of us now are eating. What an extraordinary achievement for a civilization: to have developed the one diet that reliably makes its people sick! "
― Michael Pollan , Food Rules: An Eater's Manual
4 " Carbohydrate density is simple to calculate -- just divide the quantity of carbohydrate in food by the weight of the food. The more carbs packed into a given gram of food, the higher its carbohydrate density. "
― Andrew Weil
5 " Kennedy's issue didn't seem to be that she had been in jail, but that she had put on weight in jail. The food had been crappy, she'd told me, and it has been high on the carbohydrate count. " But I'm an emotional eater," she'd said, as if that were a terrible thing. " And I was real emotional in jail. "
6 " Shoot for a total of no more than 80 grams of carbs in your daily diet. This means favoring vegetables that grow above ground like kale, broccoli, spinach, and cauliflower as opposed to those that store carbohydrate in the form of starch like potatoes and beets. "
7 " I have a carbohydrate and protein-rich diet. For breakfast, I typically have two slices of bread with butter or jam, four to five eggs - boiled or fried - a few bananas and a glass of milk. "