With the growing popularity of using low carb diets to combat disease, lose weight, or just maintain a healthier lifestyle in general, the question arises of whether or not carbohydrate dense foods are bad for our health. Although I do believe that there are some great benefits that can accompany a low carb diet, I certainly don’t believe that all carbs are bad or that they should be avoided entirely.

So, are carbohydrates bad for psoriasis, eczema, and dermatitis? The answer to this question depends on 1. Whether you eating healthy carbs or refined carbs 2. How these carbs fit in with the rest of your diet and 3. Food combining (what foods you are mixing with your carbs). If you are eating healthy whole food sources of carbohydrates, eating the right amount according to your personal diet approach, and only mixing you high carb foods with foods that digest well in conjunction with carbs, then no, carbs are certainly not bad and should not trigger your skin disease. 

What purpose do carbs serve?

First of all, lets consider the fact that carbohydrates are an important macronutrient and are and excellent source of many different vitamins and minerals if you’re eating the right kind of carbs. The way you handle your carbohydrate intake is crucial to the mechanism of your diet and making the right choices concerning carb intake is an irreplaceable virtue. These foods are used to manufacture glucose which is the bodies main energy source (unless you are in ketosis).   

While carbs are the bodies primary energy source, you can also switch over into ketosis which means that your body with then begins to use fat as its main source of fuel. So if you are following a high fat/low carb diet then your need for carbohydrates is less than someone who is following a diet that runs on carbs. I will touch on this more on the difference between the two diets and how you should go about incorporating carbs into both of them in later sections. 

Healthy carbohydrate foods

In recent years, I’ve observed that societal diet trends have increasingly demonized carbohydrate intake in the sense that many people see avoiding carbs at all costs as being synonymous with eating a “healthy diet”. While I do believe that restricting your carbohydrate intake can have some positive benefits as I mentioned, I don’t believe that eliminating all carbs is necessarily what people should be doing. 

Rather than looking at all carbs as bad, I think it is very important to understand the difference between good carbs and bad carbs and realize that there is a huge difference between eating a sweet potato or fruit and eating a bun made with white flour. Below I have listed some great nutrient dense carbohydrate foods that can certainly be included in a healthy diet. 

• Sweet potatoes
• Fruit
• Oats
• Quinoa
• Sprouted whole grain bread
• Buckwheat
• Beans

Unhealthy carbohydrate foods

Overconsumption of refined carbohydrates is probably the biggest problem with the standard American diet. These are the type of carbs that you really need to stay away from as they are digested as sugar and cause major insulin spikes and digestive issues. You can make major improvements to your health in a relatively short period of time just by simple cutting these foods out of your diet. 

This may be a tough one to kick for some people. These foods are rather addictive and cutting them out after years of eating them can cause some serious cravings in the first few months or so. As time goes on your body adapts and the cravings fade. If you want to clear your skin and improve your health drastically, stay away from these foods that I’ve listed below and really anything that isn’t a whole food. 

• White bread
• Pastries
• most breakfast cereals
• Soda pop
• White pasta
• Fruit juices

What does the rest of your diet look like?

During the process of natural healing, it is extremely important that you develop a basic understanding of micro and macronutrients and what these nutrients are contributing to your health. Micronutrients are what I look at as the real healing nutrients that are going to help you detoxify and build a strong foundation that is needed in order for your health to flourish. Macronutrients on the other hand are the building blocks that your body uses to build and energize itself. 

The 3 macronutrients to consider here are protein, fat, and carbohydrates. Each of these nutrients serve their own purpose and all can be included as a part of a healthy long term diet. With that said, your macronutrient ratios are something that you really should take a deeper look at if you want to heal your skin disease and optimize your overall health. Your macro ratio will ultimately be a deciding factor in how much carbs you should be including in your diet. 

A macronutrient ratio is determined by what percentage of your total calories are coming from each macronutrient. A simple way to figure this out is to type your daily food intake into a free nutrition app such as FatSecret. Apps such as this one will take your food entries and calculate your macronutrient totals and ratios amongst other things. 

There is no real answer for what is the best macro ratio. Everyone is different and to think that there is one single ratio that will work best for everyone is foolish. With that said, there is one principle that seems to pertain to everyone (especially those trying to improve gut health and heal from disease). This principle is that you should not be eating a diet that is high in both fats and carbs. 

You don’t necessarily have to jump to one extreme or the other (high fat/low carb keto or high carb/low fat plant based) but you do think that you need to at least follow some moderate variation of one or the other and make sure that your diet does not contain a lot of fats and a lot of carbs at the same time. 

Therefor, if you opt for a high carb/low fat approach your body will be able to handle a larger amount of carbs than someone who is following a high fat/low carb approach. Now, this does not mean that carbs are bad for you if you are eating high fat. It just means that you need to be aware of how many carbs you’re consuming. If you’re following a high fat/ low carb plan, I would suggest that you keep your daily carb intake to under 25%. If you’re following a high carb/low fat plan, I would suggest that you keep your daily fat intake under 25%.

How to optimize your carbohydrate digestion 

The best way to ensure that the carbs that you are consuming are being digested properly and efficiently is to gain an understanding of and implement the principles of proper food combining. In short, proper food combining is the practice of only mixing foods together that interact well with each other. 

Different foods require different digestive enzymes and processes and vary in terms of how much time they take to fully digest. In this section I am going to focus on the food combining principles as they pertain to carb dense foods such as starches and fruits. If you want to read a more in-depth outline of the principles of food combining click here.  

Let’s start with fruit. Fruit is a unique food group in that it digests very quickly a9s quick as 30 minutes). For this reason, fruit is best eaten alone. If you eat fruit with a big meal that is going to take a few hours to digest, then that fruit is then forced to stay in your gut for longer than it is intended to. 

This can lead to improper digestion as the fruit can begin to ferment and putrify in your gut. I personally mix my fruit with oats or I might toss some nuts or seeds into my smoothies. This isn’t exactly proper food combining but I feel that these combinations are safe for me. You can experiment with this for yourself, just be sure to keep your fruits as far away from your big meals as you can. For instance, don’t go eat a steak dinner or a bunch of potatoes and then consume fruit shortly afterwords.  These combinations of fruits with oats or nuts and seeds just make sense to me and my gut seems to agree. 

The other big food combining rule that includes carbohydrates is not to mix your starches with your proteins. In today’s society, it’s hard to find a popular meal choice that doesn’t combine these two food groups. A burger and a bun, pizza, steak and potatoes, etc… Just know that they are both digested more efficiently when consumed separately and independent of the other. So I wouldn’t say that either proteins or carbs are “bad” for healing skin disease. But I would just suggest that you consume them as seperate meals if you want to have success in healing your gut. 

Conclusion

My take here is that healthy carbohydrate dense whole foods are a beautiful thing and I don’t believe that you need to avoid carbs to heal your skin. With that said, you really do need to determine what kind of diet approach you want to follow and understand how you should go about incorporating carbs into your regimen. Although the subjects of digestive health and natural healing are rather complex, the key to long term success is to keep it simple.