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Editor's note: As the wellness war wages on, fit-fluencers still have their sights set on taking out the carbohydrate. But carbs alone won't cause inflammation, lead to diabetes, or even affect your weight. In fact, the right kind of carbohydrates might just be the superfood your diet is missing.

WHEN MEN COME to Katherine Metzelaar for help, they seem to have one thing on their mind.


Metzelaar is a Seattle-based dietitian specializing in nutritional therapy. With patient eyes and a warm, easy smile, she’s the kind of expert who helps her clients untangle their attitudes and beliefs about food. In her nine years of clinical practice, she says that 100 percent of her male clients have shared one fear: carbohydrates. “Guilt is a very common emotion associated with eating carbohydrates,” Metzelaar says. “And then if you restrict those foods, you’re going to feel out of control.”

Fear—of carbs.

Except that when you look back at the millennia-spanning history of carbohydrates, their stigma makes total sense. More than fat, more than artificial ingredients, more than GMOs—carbs have long been a scapegoat for ancient philosophers, class warriors, and creators of money-raking fad diets alike. Carbs will shorten your life, as the drumbeat goes. Carbs are blood-sugar-spiking empty calories. Carbs will make you fat, sick, and unhappy.

Over the past few decades, however, scientists have built a more evolved view of carbohydrates. This class of nutrients has been unfairly blamed for obesity, diabetes, and other health terrors. New research is showing that carbs are a driver for a long, healthy, and active life. And as it turns out, avoiding carbs can be bad for you, too. A few recent studies have linked low-carb/high-fat diets with an increased risk of cardiovascular events and shortened life spans in men.


But still: the collective and ongoing freak-out about carbs. So if you’re confused, skeptical, and/or fearful about carbs, Metzelaar gets that. As she tells her clients, your anxiety toward carbohydrates likely goes way back.

So let’s go way, way back.

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THE DAWN OF THE CARBS
UNLESS YOU'VE BEEN living under a mastodon for the past 2.5 million years, you’ve likely heard of the Paleo diet. The modern protein-centric, starch-averse diet instructs its followers to avoid grains, legumes, added sugars, and carb-dense vegetables such as corn, jicama, peas, and white potatoes. Our fitter, stronger, healthier ancestors didn’t eat these foods during the Paleolithic period, proponents of the diet argue, so neither should you.

But the diet isn’t based in prehistoric fact. A groundbreaking 2021 study in the journal PNAS found that our Paleolithic ancestors—and their close Neanderthal cousins—ate so many starchy foods. Their glucose-rich diet of grasses, tubers, and cooked barley fueled their brains’ rapid expansion. And mounting archaeological evidence shows that calorically dense starchy foods were foundational to almost every culture, ever. Yes, carb-loading helped you evolve into the man you are today.


But there are early instances of carbohydrate avoidance, too. Ancient texts detail a practice known as “bigu,” which directed Chinese Taoist priests to abstain from grain, in what was arguably history’s first low-carb diet. The goal wasn’t weight loss but ascension to immortality. (Didn’t work.)

Halfway across the world, in another century, a different foundational carbohydrate faced condemnation. The potato, an easily cultivated tuber from the Americas, was panned as “tasteless and starchy” by the influential 18th-century French philosopher Denis Diderot. To twist the paring knife deeper, he described the potato as a “reasonably healthy food for men who want nothing but sustenance.”