Hello and welcome to Zoe Recap, where each week we find the best bits from one of our podcast episodes to help you improve your health.

Today we're talking about carbohydrates.

Pasta, potatoes, fruit and beans. Carbs crop up everywhere.

However, few topics in nutrition causes much confusion.

Are they essential fuel or the enemy of weight loss?

Should we cut them down or just choose our carbs more carefully?

I'm joined by Professor Tim Specter to help untangle the truth and answer your biggest carbohydrate questions. Stick around to find out if

freezing your bread makes it healthier. So what is a carb and what is it that can make it unhealthy?

Well, a carb is a macronutrient. So in the, school world that we used to know, everything was divided into these three groups of proteins, fats and carbs.

And most other things we eat are mixtures of those, rather than one thing.

You don't actually eat a carb.

You eat a plant.

And that plant will have different

amounts of proteins, fats, and carbs in it. And within the carbs, it's going to have different

types of carbs in it. And some of the foods we, which you say, oh, that's a carby food,

like, say, bread, is also going to have some protein in it and a little bit of fat in it.

So we tend to massively oversimplify, but that's what we've done in the past, mainly through

ignorance, and the food companies have liked it that way because it's made it very easy

to sell products to us.

Now, I think we need to break down carbs into what they are, which they are essentially

sugars that are either very simple, sort of moderately simple, and really complex and long

and hard to break down.

...