Edit: the hypothetical diet wouldn’t be pure skittles, it’s just replacing rice/pasta/bread/etc. with skittles and still getting the proper protein and fiber
Edit: the hypothetical diet wouldn’t be pure skittles, it’s just replacing rice/pasta/bread/etc. with skittles and still getting the proper protein and fiber
Kind of yes, kind of no.
Short term there is not a huge difference between getting sugar from complex carbs or simple carbs and most vitamins and micro nutrients will be OK with a few weeks of worse absorption and slowly lowering levels.
Medium term this would be bad, but so is the standard western diet. Carbs are not a great source for energy for a number of reasons but one of the key ones can be seen with vitamin C. Why do we not have functional pathways for making vitamin C? Our closest relatives do, the other great apes, and almost all other mammals do too. In fact as far as I am aware one of the only other mammals missing the ability to make vitamin C is the guinea pig which is especially ironic considering it was the aminal selected to understand scurvy, an extreme form of vitamin C deficiency.
We don’t need anywhere near the same level of vitamin C if we are not eating sugars, complex or simple. Eating a very very low carb diet, deep into the ketogenic end, reduces the need for vitamin C. Taking someone who has symptoms of scurvy and switching them to a carnivore diet seems to reverse the symptoms fairly promptly and plenty of people eat just meat for decades at a time without developing scurvy, so it seems safe enough.
So if you look at a diet made of highly processed high carb foods like the current standard American diet you would see a measurable but not extreme change in the short to medium term, but in the medium to long term it would get worse. If you compare to a more reasonable diet which doesn’t have huge amounts of processed foods or carbs in it then it would be a bigger difference.