Have you ever thought about the fact that white flour, potato starch, confectioner’s sugar, and corn starch look remarkably similar, essentially identical? They have all been converted to a pile of white powder. What these examples have in common is that they have been ultraprocessed in such a way as to change their unique individual identities until all that remains, in each case, is a pile of stripped carbohydrate. 

You cannot see corn kernels in corn starch because there are none. There are no grains in white flour. No bran, no husk, no germ. There are no potatoes in potato starch, and there is no fibrous cane in confectioner’s sugar.

You could say that the essential “wheat-ness” of the product has been removed, that the “corn-ness” is no longer in evidence, that the “potato-ness” is gone. Stripped carbs no longer bear any resemblance to their original state. Their identities have been obscured by the industrial process through which they passed on their way to being converted into (white) powder.

I am not a Luddite. I am the first to admit that many traditional kinds of food processing allow foodstuffs to retain their nutritional value, or even generate new benefits. Think about fermenting milk into yogurt, turning peanuts into peanut butter and grapes into wine, freezing broccoli or edamame, pressing olives into olive oil. 

I have met people who will not use olive oil in their cooking, but are happy to munch on an fiber-rich olive or two from time to time. I am not one of them. Maintaining good health means avoiding items and patterns that make you sick. What if your entire society is designed to make it significantly more difficult to do that? That certainly makes it much more challenging, especially because humans are social animals and we benefit from joining one another at the table to dine and break bread together. But don’t feel that you must avoid stripped carbs 100 percent of the time. Just don’t eat them as often as the standard American diet would dictate.

Stripped carbs, no matter their origin, spike your blood sugar exactly like if you were to eat an equivalent amount of sugar. Stripping also removes many essential nutrients. In the nineteenth century in southeast Asia, early efforts to strip rice precipitated an epidemic of beri-beri, which is caused by a deficiency of thiamine, also called Vitamin B1. The thiamine was in the husks that had been discarded. In the U.S., the Congress mandated replacement of a host of B vitamins, as well as iron, in processes that they termed “enrichment” and “fortification.” Whole grains do not require enrichment or fortification.

While it’s true that human beings have figured out how to convert white flour into all kinds of interesting food-like products, white flour is not food in the same way as wheat berries, bulgur wheat and whole-grain flour. Corn starch is nothing like popcorn, or kernels of corn pulled directly from the cob into your mouth. 

Just because something tastes good doesn’t mean it nourishes you. It’s certainly okay to eat treats sometimes. Sometimes you feel like eating a product made primarily of white flour or corn starch, or choosing a treat off a dessert menu on a random night for no particular reason, It’s okay to eat treats sometimes. But they do not nourish. They entertain. And it will make a world of difference if you keep that in mind.