"Carbohydrates aren’t essential!" a flushed Jordan Peterson insisted recently on low-carb advocate and best-selling author Max Lugavere's podcast, The Genius Life. From Keto to Atkins to carnivore diets, carbohydrates have become a bogeyman of nutrition. It's easy to see why – many of the unhealthiest foods we consume, from refined sugars to processed white bread, are carbs. But this animosity often misses the mark and stems from a misunderstanding of what carbohydrates really are.
We live in an age of nutritional absolutism. First came the “truth” that carbs are evil; now we have the “post-truth”, celebrating them as the secret ingredient to longevity, as seen in a recent Times piece by the author of The Happiest Diet in the World, Giulia Crouch. Crouch touches upon an important point, discussing the prevalence of carbs in the diets of the world’s blue zones: a term coined by author and explorer Dan Buettner to denote regions with an above-average number of centenarians. Then again, blue zones may be a myth, as the recent Ig Nobel prize winner and UCL researcher, Dr Saul Newman, sought to demonstrate. (His research showed that poverty and pressure to commit pension fraud were far more reliable indicators of reaching ages over 100 than anything to do with lifestyle choices.)
