The Starch Solution (2 page)

As you read this book, you will come to understand that the very same solution that helps you also benefits the environment. With just a simple U-turn in your diet to bring it back in line with healthier diets of long ago, you can help heal the world around you as you slim down, improve your health, save money, and change your life.

O
ne of my earliest life lessons was about honesty. As a child, I was a mischief magnet. I didn’t mean to be. I was just a curious kid. When I was 7, the police caught me “breaking and entering” into the vacant house across the street. I thought I was exploring. The following year, I killed my pet hamster—it was an accident. At 9, I set the living room sofa on fire while conducting experiments with my dad’s cigarette lighter and lighter fluid. I was sorry about that. My parents were wise. They knew that punishment ran the risk of turning their well-intentioned little troublemaker into a disaffected, rebellious teen. They reasoned that the more I told them about my antics, the better chance they had of gently guiding my energies toward more productive outlets. So, instead of yelling at me, they showed me that truth was the best way out of trouble. Finding and telling the truth has been my credo ever since.

I am a passionate person, with a larger-than-life, type A personality. I have lived with this high enthusiasm, for better or worse, every single day of my life. I don’t just value truth, I seek it obsessively. At times, people find me brash, undiplomatic, and too direct. I can live with that. Speaking up is the single most effective way I know to awaken people from the falsehoods that are making them sick and teach the truths that can bring them health.

That information is what I seek to share here, in
The Starch Solution.
What you will find on these pages is the truth about food, health,
misinformation campaigns, and our planet. I’m laying it all out so that you may form your own opinions, and live your life fully aware of the impact of what you eat on you, your family, and the world around you. Sharing what I have learned over the last 44 years of studying and practicing medicine is all I can do. The rest is up to you.

My medical education started long before I became a doctor. At age 18, in 1965, I suffered a massive stroke that completely paralyzed my left side for 2 weeks. My recovery was slow and incomplete. Forty-seven years later, though I windsurf every day that I can, I still walk with a limp—a lifelong reminder of the path that led me to illness and then to newfound health.

My parents lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s. During those hard times, my mother’s family survived on beans, corn, cabbage, parsnips, peas, rutabagas, carrots, onions, turnips, potatoes, and bread, which they bought for 5 cents a loaf. A little hamburger once a week was their only meat. My mother’s painful memories caused her to promise herself never to let her children suffer as she had. Her children would enjoy the best foods money could buy. Ironically, her well-intentioned promise ended up causing more harm than good. It turns out the Depression-era diet was the healthier one!

I grew up eating bacon and eggs for breakfast, sandwiches stuffed with meat and slathered with mayonnaise for lunch, and beef, pork, and chicken at the center of the plate every night at dinner. All three meals were washed down with glassfuls of milk. Starches? Those were side dishes at best (and covered with butter). Except in refined breads and cakes, they rarely found their way into our home.

I didn’t realize it then, but the best food money could buy nearly killed me. As far back as I can remember, I suffered daily stomachaches and brutal constipation. I was frequently sick with colds and flu, and when I was 7, out came my tonsils. I was always in last place in gym
class, and my teenage face was oily and pocked with acne. At age 18 it became clear that something was terribly wrong when I suffered a stroke, something that I thought happened only to old people. I had no idea this had any connection to my indulgent diet—nor did the doctors in the hospital suggest anything of the sort—so I kept on eating the very same way. By my early twenties I was 50 pounds overweight.

I don’t blame my mother. She fed us based on the best nutritional advice available at the time. Who knew that much of this advice came from the meat and dairy industries, which exalted protein and calcium as our most essential nutrient needs? Even as concerns began to surface about the adverse effects of animal foods, they were largely dismissed by food industry—funded scientists as unimportant.

I was raised in a lower-middle-class family in the suburbs of Detroit. My parents worshipped medical doctors as if they were exceptional beings possessing godlike qualities. I was just an ordinary person, at best; I never even dreamed of pursuing a career in medicine—at least until my fateful hospitalization for my stroke. My exalted view of doctors shifted radically during my 2 weeks between those hospital walls. I became a medical curiosity, attracting some of the area’s top specialists to look in on me and review my case. As a patient, and a teenager eager to return to school, I asked each doctor who examined me, “What caused my stroke?” “How will you make me better?” “When can I go home?”

The typical response was nonverbal. They shook their heads and walked out of my room. I remember thinking to myself, “Well, I could do that.” When it became clear to me that no doctor could answer even one of my three basic questions, I walked out of the hospital against medical advice. Returning to college at Michigan State University, I felt for the first time a fierce sense of direction and determination. I entered medical school in 1968 and pursued medicine with a great passion.

I also became passionate about a surgical nurse I met during my senior year in medical school as I assisted with a hip replacement.
Mary and I married and escaped to Hawaii, where I took my first year of post—medical school residency training, my internship, at The Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu. Over the next 3 years I worked as a general practitioner at the Hamakua Sugar Company on the Big Island. There, as a general doctor to 5,000 sugar laborers and their families, I delivered babies, signed death certificates, and did everything in between. The nearest specialist was a 42-mile drive away to Hilo. My patients were relying on me to do it all.

When I treated acute problems, like sewing up injuries suffered in the fields, casting broken bones, or dispensing antibiotics for infections, I enjoyed the satisfaction of seeing my patients heal. What frustrated me were the chronic problems. Despite my best efforts, I simply could not help patients suffering from devastating illnesses like obesity, diabetes, heart disease, or arthritis. When a plantation worker came to me with one of these complaints, I would do the only thing I was taught in school: prescribe medications. As they walked out the door, I would invite my patients to return if the pill I gave them didn’t work. They would return. We’d try another pill. I never ran out of pills to try, but eventually the patient would stop coming.

Convinced that my failure resulted from my own shortcomings, after 3 years on the sugar plantation I left the Big Island of Hawaii, returned to Honolulu, and enrolled in the University of Hawaii Medical Residency Program. A little more than 2 years later, I left this intensive training experience still wanting answers to the same questions I entered with. I did learn one valuable lesson: It might not be my fault after all that my patients’ health did not improve. Even some of the world’s top medical scholars got no better results than I did. Like mine, their patients remained riddled with chronic disease; at best, a few of my peers temporarily controlled symptoms.

I graduated, took an exam, and received my board certification in internal medicine. But neither study nor that designation made me a good doctor. For that, I had to think back to my time on the plantation.

People, including doctors, have an expectation that we will get fatter and sicker as we age. Children are the healthiest, their parents less healthy, and the eldest generation suffers from severe and chronic diseases.

What happened with my patients on the sugar plantation challenged that expectation. There, the elderly immigrant generation remained trim, active, and medication free into their nineties. They had no diabetes, no heart disease, no arthritis, and no cancers of the breast, prostate, or colon. Their children were a little heavier and not as healthy. But what really threw me was seeing the youngest generation—the grandchildren of these immigrant families—suffering from the most profound health problems, the same ones I had spent my years learning about during my medical training.

What could be causing this reversal of fortune? I took a careful look at the way these families lived. I considered their lifestyles, the work environment on the plantation in Hawaii, and their behaviors. After considering every aspect of their lives, I noticed an interesting trend. These families had gone from a traditional diet in their countries of origin to fully adopting an American diet. Had they lost the protection from obesity and common chronic diseases afforded by their native foods?

My elderly patients on the plantation had immigrated to Hawaii from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines, where rice and vegetables had been the foundation of their diet. They continued to eat the same way in their new American homes. The second generation, their Hawaiian-born offspring, began to incorporate Western foods into their parents’ traditional diet. The third generation cashed in the life-sustaining starch-based diet of their grandparents for a diet rich in meat, dairy, and processed foods.

I grew up hearing the steadfast agreement among the government and every other source that the healthiest diet was a well-balanced one, taken from the four food groups: meat, dairy, grains, and fruits and
vegetables. Yet on the plantation I watched elders thriving late into their senior years sustained by grains and produce—just two of the four food groups—while each successive generation got sicker and sicker as they increased their reliance on the other two groups—meat and dairy.

Over and over again, I saw this shift in diet over two, three, and four generations, and its reflection in my patients’ declining health. Finally, something shifted in me as I awakened from the false promises of my medical education. My patients brought me the insight I had been searching for since age 18, when I was hit by that awful stroke and could not get answers to the most basic questions about what might have caused it and what those doctors planned to do to improve my health going forward.

My medical training had taught me nothing about the impact of food on health. Nutrition was almost never mentioned in medical school, my textbooks, or during my internship or residency. There were very few questions about it on my board exam. Yet it was this one simple insight that now allows me to take patients off ineffective pills, protect them from risky surgeries, and offer them a simple, effective pathway to health and longevity and permanent loss of excess body weight.

Wondering whether this trend might apply beyond this small population in Hawaii, I began looking into traditional diets around the world. What I learned on the plantation was confirmed, over and over again. Diet was, indeed, the missing ingredient—and the most fundamental one—in human health.

The full potential of practicing dietary medicine became apparent only after I did additional research into what was known about the effects of diet on health. Sifting through stacks of scientific journals in the Hawaii Medical Library at The Queen’s Medical Center, I learned I wasn’t the first physician or scientist to come upon this discovery of a
starch-based diet’s potential for healing. Others before me had found that potatoes, corn, and whole grains led to robust health, while meat and dairy led to persistent, life-threatening diseases.

I also learned through those medical journals that people already sickened by disease could reverse the processes and recover, simply by no longer eating the foods that made them sick and instead supporting their natural healing processes with a starch-based diet. There wasn’t just one lonely article saying so; study after study described weight loss, as well as the relief of chest pain, headaches, and arthritis, owing to a change in what people ate. Kidney disease, heart failure, type 2 diabetes, intestinal distress, asthma, obesity, and other troubles were also reversed by healthy eating. Volumes of research in these journal pages written over the previous 50 years showed me how my patients, with their chronic, seemingly intractable conditions, could be cured with one simple solution: a diet based on starch supplemented by vegetables and fruits. No pills or surgery needed.

I could hardly wait to share the discovery that what I had observed on the plantation—a simple change in diet to improve health and relieve much suffering—was already scientifically documented. I was certain my revolutionary breakthrough would be widely welcomed, that some fluke had prevented others from seeing this truth and shouting it out to a world of people eager to heal themselves from pain and suffering.