THE FOOD · INVESTIGATION
Carbs:
when did you
become the
enemy?
Somewhere along the way, carbs stopped being food.
They became a decision you have to defend.
Bread got a reputation. So did pasta, rice, potatoes and pretty much anything that used to just be called "lunch."
Somewhere in the last couple of decades, an entire category of food — one that has fed most of humanity for most of human history — got rebranded as the reason we're not losing weight, not feeling great, and not as healthy as we could be.
Cut the carbs. Go keto. Carb cycle. Carb-load, but only on the days you've earned it.
And somewhere underneath all of that noise, I had a much more basic question.
actually?
Not the villain version. Not the "clean eating" version. The actual molecule, doing its actual job.
Because before I decide whether to fear something, I'd like to understand what it does.
What even is
a carbohydrate?
A carbohydrate is a molecule built out of sugar units.
Sometimes it's a single sugar unit. Sometimes it's two linked together. And sometimes it's thousands of them, chained into long, complicated structures.
Along with fat and protein, carbohydrates are one of the three macronutrients — the nutrients your body needs in relatively large amounts, mainly as a source of energy.
Roughly speaking, carbohydrates provide about 4 kcal per gram, similar to protein and less than half of what fat provides.
one thing.
It's a category. And like the vitamin family, it's a category with some very different characters inside it.
Sugar in an apple, starch in a potato, and the fibre in a bowl of lentils are all, technically, carbohydrates.
They behave completely differently once they're in your body.
So let's actually separate them.
THE THREE FAMILIES
Sugars. Starches.
Fibre.
Sugars
The simplest carbohydrates — single units or pairs of units. Found naturally in fruit and milk, and added to food as sucrose, glucose or syrups.
Starches
Long chains of glucose units. Found in grains, potatoes, legumes and other plant staples. Your digestive system breaks them down into glucose, just more slowly than sugar.
Fibre
Also long chains of sugar units — but ones your digestive enzymes largely can't break apart. Most of it passes through undigested, and that's exactly the point.
Sugars, starches and fibre are all carbohydrates. But calling all of them by one name — "carbs" — is a bit like calling apples, bricks and clouds all "objects."
Technically true. Not remotely useful.
What about
the glycemic index?
At some point I ran into the glycemic index — a ranking of how quickly a food raises blood glucose compared to a reference food.
It sounded like exactly the tool I was looking for. A number that would finally sort carbs into "good" and "bad" for me.
deliver on that.
When researchers behind the 2023 Nordic Nutrition Recommendations reviewed the evidence, they found there wasn't enough consistent evidence linking the glycemic index or glycemic load of a diet to health outcomes to justify turning it into an official recommendation.
That doesn't mean the concept is meaningless. Different foods really do raise blood glucose at different speeds, and that can matter in specific contexts, including for people managing diabetes.
But as a simple label for sorting all carbohydrate foods into "healthy" and "unhealthy," it's trying to do more work than the evidence currently supports.
So the glycemic index isn't nothing. It's just not the whole story either.
THE OFFICIAL RANGE
So how much
carbohydrate do
we actually need?
According to the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2023, diets in which carbohydrates make up roughly 45–60% of total energy intake — fibre included — tend to be associated with lower all-cause mortality, particularly when the carbohydrates come from higher-quality sources.
of total energy, as carbohydrate
A range, not a target you have to hit exactly.That's a wide range. Wide enough that most reasonably varied diets — including plenty of diets people would never think to call "low-carb" or "high-carb" — fall somewhere inside it.
The same recommendations are far more specific about one part of the carbohydrate family: added and free sugars. Those should stay below 10% of total energy, and preferably lower.
The World Health Organization goes a step further, recommending free sugars — sugars added to food or found naturally in honey, syrups and fruit juice — stay under 10% of total energy, with an additional benefit from getting below 5%, or roughly 25 grams a day.
So the useful question probably isn't:
"Should I be eating fewer carbohydrates?"It's:
"Where are most of my carbohydrates actually coming from?"FIBRE
The carb nobody's afraid of.
Fibre is the one member of the carbohydrate family that almost never gets accused of anything.
Which is a little ironic, because most of us aren't getting enough of it.
Fibre covers a whole group of compounds — cellulose, hemicellulose, pectins, beta-glucans, resistant starch, and more — that resist digestion in the small intestine. Some of it gets fermented by bacteria further down in the gut. Some of it just adds bulk and moves on through.
Higher fibre intake has consistently been associated with lower all-cause mortality and a lower risk of coronary heart disease, colorectal cancer, stroke and type 2 diabetes. It also appears to support satiety — part of why fibre-rich meals tend to be more filling.
Actual intake tends to land well below that — closer to 16–26 grams a day for women and 18–26 grams for men in the populations that have been studied.
Whole grain cereals, whole fruit, berries, vegetables, legumes and nuts are the main sources. Refining a grain — turning whole wheat into white flour, for instance — strips out much of the fibre along with it.
Some Nordic guidance goes as far as putting a number on whole grains specifically: around 90 grams a day for adults.
If there's one carbohydrate number actually worth paying attention to, fibre is probably it.
SUGAR
Not all sugar is the same sugar.
"Sugar" gets used as one word for several different situations, and that's part of why it's so confusing.
There's the sugar naturally present in a piece of fruit, packaged together with fibre, water and micronutrients.
There's the sugar naturally present in milk.
And there's added or "free" sugar — sugar and syrups added to food during cooking or manufacturing, plus the sugars in honey and fruit juice — which arrives with little else attached to it.
The evidence on added and free sugars is fairly consistent: higher intakes are linked to a greater risk of chronic metabolic diseases such as obesity and unfavourable blood-fat profiles, and to dental caries. That's the specific target behind the WHO and Nordic recommendations to keep added sugar low.
That evidence is about added and free sugars specifically — not about an apple, and not about a glass of milk.
STARCH
Whole grain vs. refined grain.
Starch is where bread, rice, pasta, potatoes and most grains live — and where "carb quality" probably matters the most.
A whole grain still has its bran and germ attached, which brings fibre, B vitamins, minerals and other plant compounds along with the starch.
A refined grain has had that outer layer removed. What's left is mostly starch — the same basic building block, with much of the surrounding structure stripped away.
This is part of why nutrition guidance rarely says "eat less starch" and instead tends to say something closer to: choose whole grains more often than refined ones.
It's not that refined grains are forbidden. It's that whole grains tend to bring more with them, for a similar number of calories.
THE QUESTION I ACTUALLY CAME FOR
Okay, but should
I go low-carb?
We've established that carbohydrates aren't one thing, that fibre is quietly the good guy, and that the strongest evidence points at added sugar, not carbs in general.
Which brings us to the question that probably brought most people here in the first place.
But the evidence
is more nuanced.
The pitch for low-carb eating usually goes something like this:
It's a tidy story. Actual trials paint a messier picture.
A 2014 systematic review comparing low-carbohydrate diets to balanced, equal-calorie diets found similar weight loss between the two approaches, with no additional protective effect on cardiovascular disease risk from going low-carb.
Other reviews comparing low-carbohydrate diets directly against low-fat diets have found a modest short-to-medium-term weight-loss advantage for lower-carb approaches — often around one to one-and-a-half kilograms over six to twelve months — along with improvements in HDL ("good") cholesterol and triglycerides.
The same body of evidence also tends to show an increase in LDL ("bad") cholesterol on lower-carb, higher-fat diets, depending heavily on what kind of fat replaces the carbs.
A modest weight-loss edge in the short term. Mixed effects on blood fats depending on food choices. And very little evidence of a dramatic, unique metabolic advantage once calories are matched.
In other words: when total calories are similar, the carbohydrate-to-fat ratio of a diet doesn't appear to be a magic lever. What tends to matter more is what specifically replaces what — swapping refined starch and added sugar for vegetables and healthy fats looks very different, physiologically, from swapping it for more refined starch and saturated fat.
So when does
eating fewer carbs
actually make sense?
None of this means carbohydrate intake never matters for anyone. It means the answer depends on the person asking.
Managing type 2 diabetes or insulin resistance
Certain rare metabolic conditions
Personal preference and appetite regulation
Athletic goals with specific fuelling needs
Working with a clinician on a particular health outcome
For someone managing blood glucose, the type and timing of carbohydrate intake can genuinely be worth careful attention — which is exactly why that kind of change is usually made with a clinician, not a headline.
The less useful question is:
"Are carbs bad?"The more useful one is:
"What am I eating, and does it serve me well most of the time?"That's a question food labels can't answer for you.
SO, WHAT DID I ACTUALLY LEARN?
Probably not what
the headlines promised.
I went looking for a clean verdict on carbohydrates. Good or bad. In or out.
What I found instead was a category with three very different members, one number (added sugar) that deserves real attention, one number (fibre) most of us are quietly falling short on, and a lot of trial evidence that refuses to hand low-carb eating a clear metabolic crown.
Favour whole grains, fruit, vegetables and legumes over refined starch.
Keep added and free sugar low — that's where the clearest evidence actually points.
Don't treat carbohydrate percentage as the single dial that controls your health.
Not because carbs are innocent and above criticism. Some carbohydrate sources are genuinely worth eating less of. But that source is usually added sugar and heavily refined starch — not bread, rice, oats, fruit or potatoes as a category.
Not a macro to fear.
Not a free pass either.
Just a food group with better and worse members, like every other food group.
AND MAYBE THAT'S THE PART I WAS LOOKING FOR
Understanding gives us
better questions to ask.
I don't think the lesson of carbohydrates is that we should count grams more precisely.
I think it's that the category itself was never the problem — the sources inside it were doing all the actual work.
"Should I be eating fewer carbs?"
becomes"Is most of my carbohydrate coming from whole foods or from added sugar?"
"Am I getting enough fibre?"
"Does this way of eating actually work for my life?"
And if the answer to those is basically yes?
go back to being lunch.
Because nutrition is supposed to exist within our lives.
Not become another thing we have to constantly get right.
I went into this half-expecting to come out with a reason to fear my next bowl of pasta.
Instead, I came out thinking I probably need to worry about carbohydrates a little less — and read the label for added sugar a little more.
Don't outsource that job to a macro ratio.
READ THE EVIDENCE
Sources
- Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2023. Nordic Council of Ministers — Carbohydrate and Dietary fibre chapters.
- Sonestedt, E., & Øverby, N. C. (2023). Carbohydrates – a scoping review for Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2023. Food & Nutrition Research, 67.
- Carlsen, H., & Pajari, A.-M. (2023). Dietary fiber – a scoping review for Nordic Nutrition Recommendations 2023. Food & Nutrition Research, 67.
- World Health Organization (2015). Guideline: Sugars intake for adults and children.
- Naudé, C. E., Schoonees, A., Senekal, M., Young, T., Garner, P., & Volmink, J. (2014). Low carbohydrate versus isoenergetic balanced diets for reducing weight and cardiovascular risk: a systematic review and meta-analysis. PLoS ONE, 9(7).
- Mansoor, N., et al. (2020). The Effect of Low-Fat and Low-Carbohydrate Diets on Weight Loss and Lipid Levels: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Nutrients, 12(12).