Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about carbs, both intact and stripped. What are stripped carbs? Carbs that were once intact (like wheat, rice, and corn), but which have had their fiber matrix stripped out through a variety of manufacturing processes. This means sugar, white (wheat) flour, white rice, and corn starch and syrup.

i recently completed a comparison of a dozen or so popular diets and, in the process, i learned two very interesting things. The first was that, no matter what the diet, each  requires you to cut stripped carbs from your diet, either completely or nearly so. That is the basis of any attempt to improve the nutritional quality of your meals, the key to weight loss. Some don’t come right out and say it, but the net effect is still the same. The second was that the Paleo and Mediterranean diets are almost the same. More on that at the bottom of this essay.

Weight Watchers, for example, charges you points for eating stripped carb, but places no limits on fruits and vegetables.

Just for grins, I also looked at the cabbage diet, which I do not advocate, except for on the day after Thanksgiving. There are no stripped carbs in the cabbage diet, a needlessly restrictive and ultimately unsustainable way to eat. Although you will surely lose weight on it, it does not teach you how to eat healthfully, and that’s why when you go off it you usually crash hard.

There are no stripped carbs in the Paleo diet, none in Atkins, Mediterranean, Zone, Protein Power, Curves, plant-based diet, and so on. If you want to eat more nutritious food, and perhaps lose inches in the process, especially around your waistline, then you have to stop eating stripped carbs. Or cut down, or save them for special occasions like birthdays, or Sundays, or Friday nights, or whatever you decide for yourself is a special occasion.

When you eat a bowl of cereal for breakfast (not shredded wheat or Uncle Sam’s, but most everything else in the supermarket aisle), a sandwich for lunch with chips, “cheeze” crackers from the vending machine at 3:30 pm, and pasta for dinner, stripped carb is about all you ate all day. We are drowning in stripped carbs, and they have little or no nutritional value.

For a great many Americans, the solution to obesity and diabetes is not to cut down on the amount of food we eat, but to cut down on the amount of stripped carb we eat.

What makes Paleo and Mediterranean similar?  They both encourage large amounts of fresh fruits and vegetables, nutritious oils, high-quality protein. If you’re eating Paleo, that’s it. If you’re eating Mediterranean, you also enjoy legumes and whole grains (in small amounts) without any problem.

Let’s stop filling our grocery carts with stripped carbs.