Giving Simple Carbohydrates a Complex

Giving Simple Carbohydrates a Complex

Carbohydrates are at the center of debates over food and health around the world. The World Health Organization, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee in the United States, health officials in the European Union, and even some developing countries are struggling to develop scientifically valid advice on the proper place for carbohydrates in a healthy diet. Yet there is much we do not know about carbohydrates. For example, Dr. Christine Lewis from the FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition questioned the reliability and cost-effectiveness of analytic methods used to measure carbohydrates.

That issue and many others were addressed in a Ceres® Roundtable, Giving Simple Carbohydrates a Complex, the proceedings of which are now available. In 2001, the Center for Food and Nutrition Policy held the roundtable that was co-sponsored by the University of Maryland/FDA Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition. The opening panel session featured speakers who addressed the issue from the perspectives of the consumer, scientist, medicine, industry, and government. The objectives of the roundtable were to examine the past and current definitions of simple carbohydrates; to review the methodologies for measuring simple carbohydrates in foods; to understand the role of simple carbohydrates in food production; and to discuss the policy and labeling of sugars on food packages. Discussion topics ranged from multiple ideological perspectives on sugar, to the physiological responses, methodologies to measure carbohydrates in foods to policy and regulatory challenges.

As CFNAP Senior Fellow, Dr. Sanford Miller stated, "We in the nutrition business have a long history of demonizing components of the diet. We identify certain disease states. We make an association between the disease states and the food which people consume, and then we immediately begin to focus on the components of food. I always found that approach really interesting because one of the basic tenets of nutrition is that it is the total diet that is important, not the individual components..."

To view CFNAP's proceedings from the Ceres® Roundtable Giving Simple Carbohydrates a Complex, please click here.

Alan Levy, Ph.D.