Embracing Comfort Food: Being a Carbivore with Phoebe Lapine
In Episode 94 of the Kitchen Confidante Podcast, Liren Baker talks with Phoebe Lapine about Carnivore: 130 Healthy Recipes to Stop Fearing Carbs and Embrace the Comfort Foods You Love.
Are you a carb lover? Or a carb fearer? Phoebe Lapine is here to arm us with knowledge to help us navigate the confusing world of carbs and help us enjoy one of the most loved (and misunderstood) foods. Phoebe is the food and health writer, chef, speaker, and voice behind the award-winning blog Feed Me Phoebe. She is the author of four books, including her acclaimed memoir, The Wellness Project, and recently published Carbivore: 130 Healthy Recipes to Stop Fearing Carbs and Embrace the Comfort Foods You Love. Join us as we chat about the biology behind carbs, how we can make carbs work for our bodies, and so much more!
We should do a little carb 101. Maybe you can talk a bit more about carbs and the biology basics.
Yes, let’s get to the basics. I start with that in the book because I think definitions are really important. So carbs are basically a food slang term for carbohydrates, but I believe it refers to starchy ingredients in everyday conversation. So rice, oats, potatoes, noodles, bread, and the various things they produce, pancakes, whatnot. Um, but in reality, the macronutrient carbohydrates are the building block of all life on earth. So , if you were to truly go low carbohydrate, it would certainly not be good for your long-term health.
With carbohydrates, there are a few different subcategories. Sugar is, of course, one of them. And I think that sugar has earned its reputation as the second supervillain of the century. But, all sugar, on a molecular level, is the same once it reaches your gut. So even if it’s maple syrup or honey, ”natural sugars,” I’m sorry to report that once it reaches your small intestine, it becomes glucose, or sugars, and only part of it is metabolized.
Then there are starches, complex chains of glucose. Fiber is also a carbohydrate, which people don’t realize. And fiber is hugely important for our overall health, especially our gut health, and hugely important for managing our glucose metabolism.
How do we find harmony, then, in the food that we eat? How can we make carbs work for our bodies?
I just mentioned how important fiber is for your gut health. So fiber is, essentially, a string of glucose. But the fun thing about it is that it doesn’t get broken down. Once formed, it is solid and passes through your digestive canal until it reaches your large intestines, where it feeds your microbiome, the many beneficial gut critters that run your immune system.
Again, it greatly impacts your blood sugar tolerance, so fiber is very important for overall health. But then, in particular, when we have fiber before our carbs, it forms this fibrous mesh in our intestinal wall.
I like to give people a visual with it. Let’s say you were making raspberry jam. If you were to kind of muddle those raspberries through a fine mesh sieve, which in this analogy, is the fine mesh sieve is your intestinal wall, all of that skin and seeds and whatnot, that kind of fibery sludge is going to completely coat the inside of the mesh sieve. And so when you try to pour something like apple juice or milk or whatever you have, it won’t be just a straight waterfall through that sieve. It’s going to be more of a drip. And that’s kind of the role that fiber plays in our blood sugar metabolism because the key, really, to maintaining good health and not overtaxing our organs and potentially skewing into diabetic territory or whatnot is just making sure that we don’t have too much of a good thing all at once or too much glucose flooding our bloodstream.
Carbivore: 130 Healthy Recipes to Stop Fearing Carbs and Embrace the Comfort Foods You Love, by Phoebe Lapine (Hachette Go, 2024).
Learn more
Listen to the full podcast episode with Phoebe Lapine here, learn more at https://phoebelapine.com, and follow her on Instagram @phoebelapine. You can get her book Carbivore: 130 Healthy Recipes to Stop Fearing Carbs and Embrace the Comfort Foods You Love anywhere books are sold.
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