With all the conflicting advice as to what you should or should not be eating in order to stay healthy, it would be nice if there was some guiding principle we could use to help us through the maze. One idea which we think is valid and very useful is the concept of "Natural Eating". Natural Eating is all about asking the question "What are humans naturally adapted to eat?" And since changes to our physiology only occur on evolutionary timescales of millions of years, we need to think back to human diet before the invention even of agriculture.
Anthropologists can tell us quite a lot about what our ancestors ate. Our closest relative, the chimpanzee is largely vegetarian, but not at all averse to taking the occasional termite or tree squirrel. Most anthropologists now agree that the development of hunting and fishing played a major part in human evolution. So a natural diet would be rich in meat, fish, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, seeds, and, for sweetness, fruit and honey. The striking thing about these natural foods, to which our bodies are adapted, is that the all have a zero or relatively low glycemic load.
High glycemic foods seem to be a modern invention. Bread has only been around for a few thousand years and sucrose (table sugar) for only a few hundred! It is interesting that fructose, which is the primary sugar of honey and many fruits has a very low glycemic effect. We at the GoodCarb Food Company use fructose (sparingly) as our sweetener of choice. Unlike other carbohydrates, fructose does not breakdown to glucose in the body but behaves more like a fat, going straight to lipids. This fact, together with the increasing use of high fructose corn syrup (HFCS) in the USA , has led to a number of writings, some scientific, some sensational, suggesting that the obesity epidemic in the USA has been caused by fructose. It may well be that the American addiction to sugary drinks has a major role to play in the obesity crisis but it also may well be that it isn't the fructose in HFCS that's the villain. You see, HFCS isn't particularly high in fructose, it amounts to only 55%. The remaining 45% is glucose and other highly glycemic saccharides . Maybe it's the 45% that isn't fructose that leads to obesity?
We try to stay well away from such modern inventions at The GoodCarb Food Company! In particular, we won't use any non natural ingredients such as artificial sweeteners in our products. We follow the Natural Eating principle.