Don’t hold the aloo — boiled, fried or roasted. And feel free to spoon a little more rice onto your plate. A macronutrient that has, in recent years, been projected as the main accused in the ballooning global lifestyle crisis, it turns out that carbohydrates are not just a necessary part of the human diet. They are also a key part of the story of human evolution. The evidence for this — a spike in the presence of the enzyme amylase — has been in the human body far longer than the agricultural revolution itself, as found by two recent studies, one published in Nature last month and the other in Science last week.
Besides the implications that these findings have for the field of medicine (such as finding amylase-based treatments for diseases like diabetes), they also give the lie to the myth — widely propagated by the cults of keto, paleo and other extreme diets — that carbs are the ultimate enemy. They bring back to centrestage the wisdom of balance, including in dietary matters. And then there’s the fact that carbs, as anyone who has ever been on an extreme diet would attest, are a key component of happiness and satiety. What, after all, is chicken curry without rice, or fish without chips?
