A carb (gasp!)

“Thai people don’t eat a lot of noodles.”

During my food tours of Chiang Mai and Bangkok, I heard this over and over again. The Pad Thai dish that is so popular in the states and “representative” of Thai culture, isn’t a dish commonly eaten by Thai people. Wild.

Instead, I was told that Thai people eat rice at every meal. A rice shortage and a smart pivot from the Thai government to increase tourism in the 1930’s is what led to the creation of Pad Thai, but I can’t talk any more about that before I get hungry.

Thai people eat rice at almost every meal.

Rice.

A carb (gasp!).

And yet, only 12.1% of Thai people are considered obese compared to 41.6% of Americans. They’re eating carbs at every meal. Carbohydrates. The foods that virtually all diets tell us to avoid to “quickly lose 30lbs.”

A few more data points before we go into analysis:

The only vegetables I ate on my trip was stir fry cabbage, carrots, and snap peas, however, fruit is very common (and so fresh!). I also ate much more pork than what is considered “healthy” in the United States. Lastly, as of 2020, only 0.5% of Thai people held a gym membership compared to 21.2% of Americans.

Lots of carbohydrates. Few vegetables. High fat protein sources. Virtually no gym memberships.

Lower obesity rates.

The math ain’t mathing.

Delicious Thai Adventures

Carbohydrates are an essential macronutrient. If you want to be exhausted constantly, have terrible and ineffective workouts, and never eat pasta again, go right ahead. It’s essential to remember that carbohydrates themselves aren’t going to magically make you gain weight. The insidious nature of this macronutrient (and the probable cause of your weight gain) lies in how much we eat.

Many of the carbohydrates we eat are highly processed. Think white bread, pasta, sugary snacks, chips—these foods have been designed in a lab to be delicious, calorically dense, and highly addictive. Generally, the more processing a food has gone through to be shelf stable or taste better, the worse that food is for us. Most of the carbohydrates that Americans eat are highly processed carbs. Tough.

For so many of the foods that Americans eat, the problem is not in the food itself. We can eat a piece of white bread or have a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup and still be considered healthy. The problem is in the dosage. The problem is in how many servings of these foods we eat at one meal, and the frequency in which we eat them.

Carbohydrates are good for us. However, Americans have a very hard time setting ourselves up for success with the types of carbohydrates that are in our standard diet. Taking a note out of our Thai friends’ book—one of the keys to success in a balanced diet is eating less highly processed foods, and more nutrient dense foods that don’t promote overeating.

My hypothesis is that the reason Thai people can eat rice at every meal while maintaining low rates of obesity is because rice (and many of the other foods in the standard Thai diet) is minimally processed and not overly palatable.

Said another way, rice is boring. And the likelihood of someone overeating rice—a food they eat at every meal, every day—is pretty low.

“Wow, the rice is so good today, let me get a second portion.”

I think not.

“There is a type of magic in simple foods that aren’t scientifically modified to be hyper-palatable and encourage over-eating.”

I can’t overstate how important this is. It’s great that you like to cook and try new recipes. However, there is a type of magic in simple foods that aren’t scientifically modified to be hyper-palatable and encourage over-eating.

Rice, beans, oatmeal, quinoa—a huge reason these carbs are considered “healthy” is because they just aren’t that delicious! They provide an essential macronutrient to give us energy, but we’re not tempted to eat three servings because they taste so good.

These complex carbohydrates also keep you full for longer—curtailing your cravings for tastier and more calorically dense foods. It sounds counterintuitive, but by eating a standard serving of minimally processed, dare I say bland carbohydrates, we can naturally curb our caloric intake by being less tempted to eat huge servings of highly processed foods.

There are a million factors that go into a country’s obesity levels. With the demonization of carbohydrates in America’s increasingly obese society, it felt important to draw some comparisons to the eating habits of a culture with much lower rates of people being overweight.

Thai eating is by no means perfect, but it’s essential to remember that carbohydrates aren’t inherently unhealthy. The dosage, frequency, palatability, and caloric density of those carbohydrates will determine your health outcomes. Choosing complex, blander carbs might be the best strategy to reach your immediate and long-term health goals.

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For reference:

Dosage: how much of that food are you eating

Frequency: how often are you eating that food

Palatability: how tasty is the food

Caloric Density: how many calories are in the food