Myth: To Lose Weight, You Must Avoid Carbs

Bread, pasta, beans, and other high-carbohydrate foods are lower in calories than fatty foods, like cheese or French fries. That's one reason why people whose eat carbohydrate-based diets - people living in rural Asia and vegetarians, for example - tend to be thinner than people whose diets are based on fatty foods.

Here are the numbers: one gram of carbohydrate (that is, starch) has four calories, while a gram of chicken fat, olive oil, or fryer grease - any kind of fat - has nine.