High Quality Carbohydrates are Linked to Healthy Aging, Longevity in Women (12:38)
Higher Intakes of Complex Carbohydrates and Dietary Fiber Lead to a 37% greater chance of living longer, healthier lives
Broadcast Retirement Network’s Jeffrey Snyder discusses nutrition and diet for better health, aging and longevity for women with Entirely Nourished’s Michelle Routhenstein, M.S., R.D.N., C.D.E, C.D.N.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
This morning on BRN, high quality carbohydrates are linked to healthy aging and longevity in women. Joining me now to discuss this and a lot more is Michelle Rothenstein. She is the founder and owner of Entirely Nourished.
Michelle, great to see you. Thanks for joining us on the program.
Michelle Routhenstein, MS, RD, CDCES, CDN, Entirely Nourished
Thank you for having me.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
It’s always great. And we’re talking about one of my favorite topics, which is carbohydrates. And I was kind of joking with you before in the virtual grain room, carbs sometimes get a bad rap, but good carbs can actually be good for aging.
Michelle Routhenstein, MS, RD, CDCES, CDN, Entirely Nourished
Yeah, yeah. It’s so true. And I think especially now there’s a lot of buzzwords around insulin resistance and people saying, well, cut out all the carbs.
That’s what’s causing the issue. But it’s not. It’s not understanding how biologically it works and realizing that there are a lot of different types of carbs and understanding what are ones that are going to protect our health, our longevity, and which ones may lower that risk, lower that benefit.
And so I want to mention how high quality carbs are what we want to increase versus reducing those low quality carbs.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So to that end, when you talk about, when I think of carbs, I think of things like pasta, bread, rice, those are things that would be favorite. But how do you define a, how does someone of your expertise define a good carb or a quality carb?
Michelle Routhenstein, MS, RD, CDCES, CDN, Entirely Nourished
So when we look at carbohydrates, the best way to kind of simplify it is there’s complex carbs and there’s refined carbs. So refined carbs are taking a carbohydrate, a food that has some glucose, some energy, which is the primary fuel for our brain to work and strips it of those nutrients and exposes more sugar, right? So think candy, think white pasta, white rice.
Those don’t have fiber and they don’t have the nutrients that are in the whole foods. They’re stripped away. So those can spike your blood sugar.
They can increase insulin resistance. They can also increase risk of atrial fibrillation and cardiovascular disease and issues. Whereas the complex carbs are the ones that are not stripped away of their benefits.
So they have the fiber, they have the phytonutrients, the antioxidants that help to reduce inflammation. They help to give us, they’re also paired in mineral format of magnesium and potassium that actually helps with our heartbeat regularity. It also helps with our vascular space, our blood pressure and helps us age better.
I mean, there was a recent study in JAMA that showed women who had higher intakes of quality carbohydrates had a 37% greater chance of living longer, healthier lives. And this really points to the fact that we need carbs. We just need to be eating carbs in the right pairings, the right kinds of carbs to actually get the benefits from the nutrients that are found in that macronutrient category.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
So let’s, Michelle, let’s talk about accessibility. Many Americans go shopping in a food mart or a food market, supermarket, whatever you want, bodega, if you live in the New York area, which I did. Where do you find, where can you find the good carbs that we’re talking about, the high quality carbs in those locales and are they accessible to everybody?
Michelle Routhenstein, MS, RD, CDCES, CDN, Entirely Nourished
Yeah. So sometimes you have to be a little bit creative depending where you are, but we’re looking at, especially also in New York City, there are farmer markets. There are a lot of places that have fresh produce, but even if there’s no fresh produce, there is a lot of frozen produce that actually have and retain more of the nutrients because they’re picked at ripeness.
They’re actually flash frozen and they retain more of those nutrients. So fresh is great. Also frozen is great.
Sometimes if we have to go through canned, those are options as well, but still can give us the nutrients. And this is our vegetables, it’s our fruits, it’s our whole grains, it’s our beans, it’s our legumes, it’s our dairy. There are so many different types of healthy carbohydrates that we should be including in our diet alongside the other important macronutrients.
Protein has that big highlight, but I’ve seen people go in extremes and we have to realize that macronutrients are, all of them are needed. They’re called macronutrients because we need them in good quantities in our body for them to thrive. And within those macronutrients, we have micronutrients that are helping with the biological pathways needed for optimal heart health, for optimal brain health, kidney health, liver health, really for longevity.
And so when you remove a whole macronutrient, you become nutrient deficient, which is one of the really root causes of all chronic disease.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
And so you talked about accessibility. Let’s talk about preparation. Many of people watching this, listening to us, they may have jobs, they may have children, they may have whole families, whatever, their time is very busy.
Does it take a lot? The benefit of going to stop at a fast food restaurant is it’s fast, it’s efficient in some ways, not efficient in other ways. But are we talking about a lot of prep time to buy the food and then prep it so that the family can eat it?
So we don’t want to have kids pounding on the table saying, mommy, daddy, where’s dinner?
Michelle Routhenstein, MS, RD, CDCES, CDN, Entirely Nourished
Right. So, I mean, I think there’s this misconception that when we think about meal prep or cooking, that it’s going to take four or five, six hours, and no one has that time. I work full time in a busy private practice.
I have four children and I make a home cooked meal in 15 to 20 minutes every single night. Does it take a little effort? Does it take a little bit of preparation?
Yes. But anything that’s worth it is going to take that time. And there’s a saying, you know, without your health, you have nothing.
But also, if you don’t put the time in your health, that time will be taken away from you elsewhere. So I think there’s this idea of I need something quick. And, you know, I mean, you work with that.
I’m not saying you can’t eat at a restaurant. You can’t eat at fast food. You have to pick those choices wisely.
But there is some level of needing to cook a little bit at home, but they don’t need to be extravagant meals. They can be done in 10 to 15 minutes. You can order an Instacart or food delivery if that helps with your ability to get it into your home.
But anything that you put that you need to put a little initial effort and then it becomes your routine and then that works with you. But I mean, I worked in New York City before COVID and everyone put their shoes in the oven, meaning like no one cooked anything. They didn’t have a pot or pan.
They didn’t have anything because it was just too small. The apartments don’t allow for that. And so a lot of people would just eat out every single meal.
And we made it work. But there is a level of challenge. You don’t know exactly how it’s being prepared.
You don’t know what they’re putting in, what oils, what sugars, what salts they’re putting in there. And their job is to make you come back. So they add in a level of hyper-palatability that makes you want to crave and come back to it.
And if it’s not properly balanced or chosen, it can spike your blood pressure. It can increase cholesterol. It can increase blood sugar.
So it can work if you’re someone who travels, eats out a lot. We have to adjust things to make it happen. But there’s also a level of saying, well, what’s one meal I can make at home?
Maybe there’s one day you can have a meal at home and start there. But I do think that when we’re really trying to optimize our heart health, there needs to be some level of what can I do that’s fresh, that’s something I can make really quick at home. But it doesn’t need to be time consuming.
It can be 10 to 15 minutes. It can be assembling something in your kitchen. We start with where you are.
And I think that’s important to recognize. But I would say if we’re going to only eat fast food, it’s really hard to meet our nutrition goals that way.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah. I mean, taste is important, but also, as you said, I mean, you want to reduce inflammation. You want to reduce chronic disease.
If someone is suffering from some of these diseases we were talking about, high blood pressure, diabetes, or at least pre-diabetes, if eating kind of a higher quality carb as part of a balanced diet, getting all the natural nutrients, can you actually reverse the inflammation? Can you actually reverse some of these chronic diseases that we’re seeing in a lot of Americans?
Michelle Routhenstein, MS, RD, CDCES, CDN, Entirely Nourished
Yes, you can. And you can even do it when it’s already in progress of higher states. And I’ll give you examples.
As a cardiovascular dietitian, I see people who have a high calcium score. They have a lot of plaque in their arteries. And I’ve seen it in my own practice, but I’ve also seen it in research where when you pair this macronutrient, nutrient balanced diet alongside a registered dietitian, we reverse the plaque progression.
We reduce it substantially. That’s one. We’ve seen heart failure, ejection fractions go from 15.
I’ve seen it go up to 60%. We’ve seen aphid go into remission with diet, reduction of inflammation. We have so much power to improve vascular health and heart health through choosing what we’re eating.
And we really need to hone into that a little bit more. But on that comment of we want food to taste good, I’m in full agreement. I won’t eat things if they don’t taste good.
But I think a lot of times people don’t know what that means or how to do it because it’s not something that they’re taught, right? So your doctor may have said, hey, reduce sodium. But now you don’t have a substitute for how are you building flavor in that food.
And there’s a lot of easy tricks, whether it’s from citrus, whether it’s from some spice element, other spices and combination of spices to make it palatable and flavorful. If food tastes bland and boring, you’re not going to do it long-term. And in order to reduce the risk of chronic disease and its complications, we need to be looking at long-term strategies.
So we have to know your lifestyle. We have to know how to build in the nutrition nuances so that you’re nutrient sufficient. I also want to just make one more point about carbs because I know that’s our topic.
So there was a recent study that these individuals who took a group of people who had, they were called lean body mass absorbers. So they had no insulin resistance, no metabolic syndrome. They had no other issues except for they had high LDL and ApoB cholesterol.
So this high amount of atherogenic cholesterol. And then they put them on a ketogenic diet, no carbs, no carbs whatsoever. And they track them for a year.
And guess what happened? We’ve never seen this before. They had the most plaque progression we’ve ever seen.
So in one year, they had 50% more plaque in their arteries and soft, vulnerable plaque that increases the risk of heart attacks and strokes because they got rid of those carbs. So that really emphasizes the importance of this because we’ve never even seen this in studies that we see people who have metabolic syndrome, have diabetes, have high cholesterol, and they’re on the standard American diet. We don’t see that fast of a progression of plaque.
And we see it in individuals who’ve cut out the carbs. So I really hope that stresses, we need carbs in our diet.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
Yeah. Stay away from the fancy diets that are the popular diets, go to a more balanced diet. All this talk, Michelle, made me hungry, but I really appreciate you coming on the program.
And look, we look forward to having you back on the program again very soon.
Michelle Routhenstein, MS, RD, CDCES, CDN, Entirely Nourished
Thank you so much. Pleasure to be here.
Jeffrey Snyder, Broadcast Retirement Network
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Until then, I’m Jeff Snyder. Stay safe, keep on saving, and don’t forget, roll with the changes.