enough complex carbohydrates

Getting enough complex carbohydrates is imperative. Carbohydrates are burned as energy so protein won’t have to be. Carbohydrates give up their energy and spare your hard earned muscle from waste like a soldier who gives his life for his country. Complex carbs are only “complex” molecules of simple carbs. In other words you can think of a sugar as a monosaccharide (“mono” –one sugar) or a disaccharide (“di” –two sugars). Glucose and fructose are two examples of monosaccharides. Sucrose, table sugar, is a disaccharide composed of one molecule of glucose and one molecule of fructose. If you chemically bonded two glucose (monsaccharide) molecules you would have a disaccharide, maltose, used to flavor malt liquor. A “complex” molecule is a polysaccharide (“poly” –many sugars). There may be anywhere from three to one hundred thousand sucrose sugars bonded together (sucrose-sucrosesucrose…). An example of a polysaccharide in animals is glycogen (for food storage). Plants use two forms of polysaccharides starch (for food storage) and cellulose (structural material). It’s interesting to note that cellulose is so complicated that animals cannot digest it. Not even a termite can digest cellulose. The only creatures on this earth that can digest cellulose are the bacteria in the intestines of animals that eat it. This is actually how fiber benefits us. We cannot digest fiber, its too complicated of a carbohydrate, but in an effort to break it down, our intestines are flooded with water. This keeps the digestive tract hydrated with a lubracative material called chime and helps to keep the system clean and regulated. Complex carbs are just many simple sugars bonded together. Your body has a hard time separating the complex carbs into simple sugars. It takes a while to break down a complex carbohydrate molecule. By the time the body can break down, say, ten grams of carbs, 2 grams have already been passed through the intestines and are no longer available for absorption. Breaking down carbohydrates into simple sugars requires energy. A portion of complex carbohydrates may require 50 calories to break down, but after the process of digestion, the body only reaps 25 calories in return. This form of dieting (eating huge amounts of foods every two hours) could actually help you to loose weight (fat) twice as fast as starvation alone. Many calories such as those composed in complex carbohydrates pass out of the system before they can be broken down into their usable forms and are; therefore, unabsorbed and unused. Simple sugars on the other hand, should be avoided (except after workouts). They are easily absorbed, because they are “simple,” and must be either immediately used as energy or stored, and they require no energy for their break down like complex carbohydrates do. Sugars can be stored as fat but not the same way fat is. It takes fatty acids to make bodyfat. The fats that you consume can provide the fatty acids as a waste product after the fat is burned as energy. Simple sugars help to compose glycerol which combines with three fatty acids to form an energy dense molecule of bodyfat.