Step Five: White Foods to Brown Foods

In this step you start adjusting the kinds of carbohydrates you are eating. Carbohydrates include some alcoholic beverages (beer, wine and drinks mixed with fruit juice), sugars such as sucrose (table sugar), fructose (fruit sugar) and lactose (milk sugar) and starches like bread, pasta, cereal, vegetables, beans and grains.

Carbohydrates can be "simple", like beer and wine, and the sugars, or "complex", like the starch found in brown rice or vegetables. Whether a carbohydrate is simple or complex depends on how many molecules it has. While sugars are considered simple carbohydrates, starches are complex carbohydrates because they consist of three or more sugars joined together to make a long chain of molecules. Starches come from grains (wheat, corn, rice, etc.), beans (peas, lentils, chick peas, etc.) and tubers (potatoes, yams, etc.).

In Step 5 of your food plan you will start to shift your carbohydrate intake away from the quickly digested simple carbohydrates to the slower more complex ones. The carbohydrate continuum will show you the relative complexity of different foods.

THE CARBOHYDRATE CONTINUUM
			Alcohol
			Simple Sugar
			White Things
			Brown Things
			Green Things (and red and yellow)

White Things

White things are simple starches. These are the foods that most sugar-sensitive people just love to eat. When we speak of "carbohydrate craving", these foods are the foods we crave. Here is a chart that shows you some white things and the relative impact they have on a sugar-sensitive person.

White Things	Serving	Total Carbs (grams)	Sugar (grams)	Fiber (grams)	Impact
donut, powdered	1	24.0	12	1.0	5.5
raisin bran cereal (Kellogg's)	1 cup	42.9	15	7.0	2.7
bread (soft white)	1 slice	28.6	2.2	1.2	.08
croissant	1	26.1	1.8	1.5	.03
spaghetti (cooked)	2 cups	79.2	3.64	7.56	- .18

Brown Things

As carbohydrates go from white to brown, they become slower because of the fiber. Take a look at these brown things:

Green Things

Green (and yellow and red) things are the slowest of all. These foods are the sugar-sensitive person's best friend. Here is a list of some green things: