Carbohydrates are the single most important food you can eat.

That statement probably goes against everything you've ever heard, so let me explain.

If you don't believe me, take this little test. Think of a carb!

If you're like most Americans, bread, pasta, soft drinks, French fries, sugar, and similar foods probably flew into your mind. Yes, these foods are carbs -- highly processed and refined ones.

And if these are the kinds of carbs you consume on a regular basis, let me warn you, (unless you regularly run marathons), you're most likely either overweight or heading down the road to weight gain.

You may like them, you may consider them "comfort foods," you may think that they couldn't be so bad since they are so predominant in our current diet. But the biological bottom line is that human beings have not evolved to metabolize these types of carbohydrates.

They slow down your metabolism and contribute to every one of the major diseases associated with aging including diabetes, heart disease, dementia and cancer.

In most, cases they are also "empty" calorie foods-the worst possible combination -- high caloric foods, low in nutrients. They deprive you of vital nutrients as well as burden your body with the task of digesting food molecules that aren't giving you anything you need.

Eating them (especially in excess) is a prescription for weight gain. But they're not the end of the carb story. If you're like most people, you may not realize that the wide world of carbs is actually much, much bigger than this limited crowd of processed carbs.

In contrast, natural carbohydrates, which come to your table just like Mother Nature made them, contain many essential nutrients and specialized chemicals that turn up your metabolism via newly discovered plant chemicals call phytonutrients.

So you have a choice: use phytonutrients to spark your metabolism into action, or drown your metabolism with indigestible nutrient-poor carbs.

Our genetic nutritional template goes back 20,000 years. Our ancestors foraged for wild food, like wild berries, grasses, roots, and mushrooms to find life-giving phytonutrients that all humans are designed by nature to eat.

On a recent vacation I found myself in a sea of phytonutrients in the wild islands of Southeast Alaska. I was foraging along with the grizzly bears for bog cranberries, blueberries, nagoonberries, raspberries, and strawberries. These scrumptious berries, bursting with phytonutrients, were smaller, richer in color and taste, (and lower in sugar) than their domestic berry cousins.

Here's a tip: The greater variety and the deeper the color of plant foods you eat, the higher their concentration of phytonutrients. The key is to learn which phytonutrient-dense foods can prevent disease and promote weight loss.

Want phytonutrient power?

Here 's a small sample of the many superfoods that contain these powerful phytonutrients: isoflavones in soy foods, lignans in flax seeds, catechins in green tea, polyphenols in cocoa (yes, chocolate!), glucosinolates in broccoli, carnosol in rosemary, and resveratrol in red wine.