Ever wondered why despite of the increasing awareness about health and fitness, with health clubs at every corner of the city, there is increasing plethora of diseases mainly obesity and its implications like diabetes, hypertension, insulin insensitivity etc. The answer might lie in the fact that in-spite of all the awareness, people are still hooked on to processed foods like breads, pasta, ready to eat foods, packaged juices and many more. This is probably because of the lack of time, increasing pressures to meet deadlines etc that people find it convenient to grab ready to eat foods.

A lot of processed foods are termed as White foods. White food refers to the category to foods which are white in color and that have gone through processing and refining, stripping them off their Fiber, and more importantly their Vitamins and minerals bleaching their colors etc. White food can also be termed as “Simple or bad carbs”. All carbs are not devil but processed, manipulated, bleached carbs are – which get turns “White”in color after processing.

Under this category comes the following foods:

Refined Flour (maida),table sugar, white rice, bread, pastas, semolina (sooji), corn starch.

The myth that surrounds a lot of people is that Milk and its products, onions, cauliflower, potatoes, bananas also comes under this category of white foods posing similar health issues as processed foods does. But its important to mention here that natural, unprocessed white foods have their fiber, and other nutrients intact making them “Good Carbs”.

Since White foods (refined foods) are simpler in their structure, the energy stored in them is released very rapidly with the sudden surge of insulin in our body. The high energy released is not utilized by the body leading to its storage primarily as body fat. And eventually increases the craving of more energy dense, carbohydrate rich foods. Contrary to this, unprocessed foods are higher in volume and thus filling which keeps the hunger pangs away for a long duration.

The possible health hazards of consuming White foods are:

• Excess insulin (released after consumption of bad carbs) promotes the storage of fat, leads to rapid weight gain, elevated triglyceride level, and chances of developing insulin insensitivity

• Therefore, always include brown rice, whole grain breads, whole wheat pastas, multigrain and whole grain flour instead of their unhealthy counterparts.