{"id":499658,"date":"2026-01-07T20:00:10","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T20:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/499658\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T20:00:10","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T20:00:10","slug":"why-im-eating-more-carbs-in-2026","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/499658\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I\u2019m Eating More Carbs in 2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story is part of our \u2018Habits to Embrace\u2014and Ditch\u2014in 2026\u2019 series. Read the whole list here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A warm almond croissant. A giant bowl of mac and cheese. A thick slice of sourdough with a hefty slab of expensive butter. Carbs are undeniably delicious. Yet, for many of us who grew up during the peak of diet culture, they\u2019ve come with some baked-in shame. We\u2019ve been told we need to earn them, or restrict them, or justify them as a guilty pleasure.<\/p>\n

Since the dawn of modern diet culture, we\u2019ve always needed<\/a> villains<\/a>. And carbs have long held the title. Around the 1970s, physicians, like Robert Atkins of the Atkins diet, began describing carbs as so-called empty calories and pushed people toward restrictive, and largely unsustainable, low-carb diets. Throughout the 2000s and 2010s, the keto<\/a> and carnivore crazes surged, convincing endurance athletes and everyday gymgoers alike that fat<\/a>\u2014not carbohydrates\u2014was the superior fuel source. (Science, however, never fully backed that conclusion.<\/a>) Even today, carbs take a back seat as protein dominates our collective consciousness and grocery store shelves. And the rise of continuous glucose monitors<\/a> among people without diabetes has added another layer of carb-anxiety. People see normal post-meal blood sugar fluctuations as unhealthy spikes, reinforcing the false idea that carbs are inherently destabilizing to our bodily systems.<\/p>\n

For anyone who pays attention to the latest in health, this messaging is impossible to avoid. I love carbs and understand their function in the body, yet I still catch myself second-guessing my choices when I eat a lot of them. So as I considered my 2026 health goals, I decided to investigate how I should be thinking about them, once and for all.<\/p>\n

The first person I spoke to was Phil Aubel, a registered dietitian who works in outpatient nutrition and counseling. He had a definitive answer for me: \u201cUnless you have a food allergy, there\u2019s no food I\u2019m going to tell you not to eat,\u201d he says, adding that carbs are part of a balanced diet and an essential macronutrient that supports both daily energy and cognitive function<\/a>. They\u2019re especially important for anyone who exercises regularly, as they\u2019re the body\u2019s main energy source during workouts.<\/p>\n

To understand why exactly they play such an important role in a relatively active person\u2019s diet, you have to understand how carbs work: They break down into glucose, which is the body\u2019s most efficient fuel for exercise. \u201cYour body\u2019s like a sponge and will absorb the carbs, where they’ll be stored in the muscles, ready to go for your next training session,\u201d says Sam Impey, exercise nutrition researcher and chief science officer at Hexis<\/a>, a digital platform that personalizes athlete fueling strategies. During exercise, oxygen is a limiting factor, as you can take in only so much as you\u2019re gasping for breath. \u201cAnd it requires less oxygen to liberate the same amount of ATP [energy] for a gram of carbohydrate as it does for a gram of fat,\u201d he adds.<\/p>\n

In practical terms, that means carbs enhance performance<\/a>, speed up recovery<\/a>, and help athletes avoid \u201cbonking\u201d during activities (a terrible sensation where you get lightheaded and weak from a lack of available glycogen stores). Recent sports nutrition research has shown how important high-carb intake can be for performance in endurance sports, yet a 2025 study<\/a> also shows that most recreational athletes don\u2019t consume enough of them. I myself have seen this play out among my runner friends, who are much likelier to underfuel than overfuel.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"This story is part of our \u2018Habits to Embrace\u2014and Ditch\u2014in 2026\u2019 series. Read the whole list here. A…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":499659,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[1198,990,210,95033,1182,67,132,68,17147],"class_list":{"0":"post-499658","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nutrition","8":"tag-fitness","9":"tag-food","10":"tag-health","11":"tag-life-advice","12":"tag-nutrition","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us","16":"tag-working-out"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115855597458403538","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499658\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499659"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}