Are carbohydrates the dieter's worst enemy? This is the current hot and controversial topic in the field of weight loss. On the one hand, most mainstream academic and government diet "experts" maintain that the path to slimness is lined with low fat/high complex carbohydrate foods. On the other hand, many recent best selling books contend that the standard nutritionist's prescription for good health in reality is a recipe for obesity, heart disease and diabetes.

These authors may have a point. Over the last two decades, carbohydrates have come to account for an ever-greater proportion of all calories in the industrial world's diet. According to the high-carbohydrate wisdom, we should all be getting thinner, right?

Yet for more than one out of every three of us -- totaling 60 or 70 million adults in America alone -- putting on weight as we age is the rule, not the exception. What is worse, the proportion of us who are 20% or more above our ideal weight has gone up by more than 30% over the last 10 years. No wonder so many people have been giving up on getting healthy.

To many of us it seems that the war against fat already has been lost. Is there a ray of hope for dieters who are more interested in results than in theories?

The answer is yes.

A number of products have come onto the market, which can help to control the downside of high carbohydrate diets. One of the most interesting is the 'new and improved' starch blocker. Starch blockers first appeared in the early 1980's, but at that time the technology was not adequate to produce a properly concentrated and purified product. This has now changed. It is now possible to purchase a consistently effective starch blocker, which lives up to the original billing.

As dieters who have tried the various low-carbohydrate diets can attest, this opens up a world of possibilities. Low-carbohydrate diets almost always are boring, outrageously restrictive in terms of food choices, hard to manage and just plain difficult to adhere to. Does anyone really want to count protein, fat and carbohydrate grams for life or never be able to share a meal with friends and co-workers? Of course not!

The new starch blocker eliminates the usual downside of low-carbohydrate diets because it is designed to change how the body absorbs carbohydrate calories even though the dieter is eating normally.

Knowing the Enemy – Insulin
Changing carbohydrate absorption is important to the dieter. Although our genes may largely determine who among us can become overweight, it is really our exercise and eating habits, which determine who actually does become overweight. Moreover, it is seldom true that merely overeating is responsible for excess weight. When we look closely, we usually find that those who have gained weight are not guilty of eating more calories, but of burning fewer. The culprit is often a reduced resting metabolism, which causes the weight gainer to put on fat even while eating the same, or fewer calories than lean individuals consume.

The resting metabolism (also called the resting metabolic rate or RMR) is the rate at which the body burns calories when we are not exercising. The resting metabolism accounts for about 70% of all the calories which we burn each day. Increased exercise can help to speed up the resting metabolism for a period of time, so moderate exercise for 20 to 30 minutes once or twice per day can help to burn calories. But the lack of exercise alone is usually not the cause of a sluggish RMR. Some people can greatly increase their daily quota of exercise and still not lose weight. This means that there must be at least one other source of the reduced metabolism experienced by most individuals who have weight problems, and that source is the diet.

The diet consists of both macro-nutrients and micro-nutrients. The first includes proteins, carbohydrates and fats. The second includes vitamins and minerals. Both components of the diet influence weight gain, primarily because both can influence the body's ability to use the hormone insulin. It is the body's secretion of and reaction to insulin which largely controls how much fat we store and how much fat we bum. Diets and nutrients which reduce the amount of insulin required by the body reduce excess weight.

One solution to weight gain, then, is to stop eating those foods which cause insulin to be a problem. Refined carbohydrates in all forms, including both sugars and highly processed foods, upset the body's ability to handle insulin. The scientific name for this is insulin resistance.

Insulin resistance causes the body to make more fats itself, to readily store any fats which are eaten, and to turn off the ability to burn fat for fuel. When you consider the fact that most of the carbohydrates found in the modern industrial world's diet are simple, refined, overcooked and/or over-processed, it is easy to guess one of the primary sources of weight problems in modern nations.