The Starch Solution (22 page)

• Serial angiograms of human heart arteries over a year of study showed that all three types of fat—saturated (animal fat), monounsaturated (olive oil), and polyunsaturated (omega-3 and omega-6 oils)—were associated with significant increases in new atherosclerotic lesions.
  ¹⁴
  Decreasing total fat intake was the only way to stop the lesions from growing.
  
 

• Both omega-3 and omega-6 polyunsaturated oils are found in human atherosclerotic plaques; thus they are involved in damaging the arteries and increasing the progression of atherosclerosis.
  ¹⁵
  
 

• One of the most important predictors of heart attack risk is an elevated level of factor VII, a substance that enables blood clotting. The formation of blood clots inside the arteries causes most heart attacks and strokes. Olive oil increases blood clotting activity by increasing clotting factor VII as much as animal fats do.
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  ,
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• Vegetable oils also impair circulation,
  ^{18
  ,
  19}
  resulting in a 20 percent reduction in blood oxygen.
  ²⁰
  Reduced circulation can lead to angina (chest pain), impaired brain function, high blood pressure, fatigue, and compromised lung function.
  
 

In short, it doesn’t matter what type of fat you eat; saturated animal fat and polyunsaturated vegetable oils all have adverse effects on your heart and health.

Growing up in a lower-income family in the suburbs of Detroit, I had the luxury of eating nuts just once a year. At Christmastime, my father would splurge on a 5-pound bag of mixed nuts still in their shells. Over the next 7 days, breaking through the hard shells with a nutcracker and a steel pick, we six McDougalls would feast on almonds, Brazil nuts, cashews, hazelnuts, pecans, and walnuts.

Nowadays, eating nuts is as easy as unscrewing a lid and pouring out handfuls of shelled, oil-roasted nuts. Eight chews and a swallow later—taking all of about 5 seconds—we’ve gulped down 170 calories of nearly solid fat with every ounce. Three hours later, our body has stored away that fat to help us through the next famine. The famine never arrives, but we keep storing up the fat, quite visibly, just in case. Our bodies were built to store fat to ensure our survival.

Trees produce nuts as a means of storing energy. Seeds, legumes, and grains serve the same botanical function. All of these storage organs can sprout into a seedling, which in turn can grow a new plant. One of the main differences among seeds, legumes, grains, and nuts is the amount of energy they store, either as fat or carbohydrate. Nuts and seeds store energy mostly as fat—approximately 80 percent of their calories are from fat, and 10 percent from carbohydrates. Grains and legumes (beans, peas, and lentils) store their fuel as carbohydrate—only about 5 to 10 percent of their calories come from fat, with carbohydrates supplying about 65 to 80 percent. In both cases, the remaining calories come from protein. Peanuts are the exception among legumes; like tree nuts, they are very high in fat (60 percent of calories), which is why we generally think of them as a nut. Soybeans are also high in fat (40 percent of calories).

All of these edible storage bins are also rich in proteins, vitamins, minerals, and thousands of other nutrients essential for the seedling’s growth. The high nutrient density of these packages—especially their fat—has a major impact on human health. Overindulging in fat-filled nuts and seeds brings about oily skin and excess weight gain, at least. For many people, the resulting complications of obesity are type 2 diabetes and degenerative arthritis of the hips, knees, and ankles.

A casual review of the popular press and some of the scientific literature might convince you that nuts do not, in fact, cause weight gain. But how could eating so many concentrated fat calories be a part of any legitimate weight-loss plan? At 170 calories, a small handful—a single ounce—of nuts every day would add up to approximately 5,000 calories, or more than a pound and a half of body fat, over the course of a month. One trick lies in limiting the nuts you eat to about an ounce a day.
²¹

Many explanations have been put forth for the perplexing phenomenon that an ounce of nuts a day
does
not appear to cause much weight gain.
²¹
One is that nuts are so satisfying they cause people to eat less of other foods; they replace cakes, pies, and other more fattening options. Or is it that their monounsaturated and polyunsaturated fatty acids are more easily burned? Or that they are not well digested, and the excess is eliminated?

Even if an ounce of nuts a day does not cause appreciable weight gain, the evidence shows that upping the quantities to more than an ounce daily, without restricting other sources of calories, will indeed increase your weight.
²¹
So I ask you, faced with a 24-ounce jar of roasted, salted, mixed nuts, how likely are you to stop at one small handful? You think: How could just one more cashew hurt me?

As I was developing my first live-in program at St. Helena Hospital in the mid 1980s, I found myself looking for a good vegetarian meal around dinnertime. This particular corner of Northern California’s wine country happens to be home to a large community of Seventh Day Adventists, known for eschewing tobacco, alcohol, illicit drugs, and often meat as well. I expected they would be a great source of vegetarian dining advice. So when my new friends suggested the
A&W west of town, I headed down for a veggie burger. My first bite told me they’d made a serious mistake. I leaned over the counter, beckoned to the cook, and complained he’d served me a real beef burger. He thanked me for the compliment, beaming with pride that their veggie burger had fooled me with the look, taste, and texture of the real thing. I walked out in disgust, leaving my dinner unfinished, scratching my head at how a burger made from soy could taste just as bad as the beef burgers I long ago left behind. For at least three decades, the sights and smells of the meat aisle at my local supermarket have nauseated me. I have no desire to replace those foods with fake meats made from soy that imitate the same unpleasant effects.

Nutritionists and health experts deliver conflicting news about soy foods. Those who recommend them point to the good health of populations that have included soy in their diets for more than 5,000 years, the Chinese and Japanese chief among them. Based on this observation alone, scientific research over the past three decades has tried to prove that soybeans can help reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease, lower blood pressure and cholesterol, relieve hot flashes, and build stronger bones.

But not all soy foods are the same. Populations following any traditional Asian diet are likely to include soy in the form of fresh soybeans boiled in their pods (edamame), soy milk, soybean sprouts, soy sauce, soy flour, tempeh, tofu; tofu by-products yuba and okara; and fermented soy pastes natto and miso. These foods are eaten fresh or are made using simple processes, like cooking, sprouting, grinding, and fermenting. A traditional family in Japan or China gets fewer than 5 percent of their daily calories from soy. That comes to about 2 ounces of soy foods daily, providing 7 to 8 grams of soy protein.

This small amount of soy food has little health impact, good or bad. The main reason those following a traditional Asian diet are healthy is that starch is at the center of every meal, supplemented generously with vegetables and fruits. Depending on regional differences and personal taste, that starch might be rice, sweet potatoes, or buckwheat.

While traditional soy foods provide no magic bullet, centering your diet around synthetic soy foods, or taking soy supplements, can cause real harm.
²²
In fact, the manufactured soybean derivatives may actually
increase
your risk for cancer; impair thyroid, immune, and brain function; and cause bone damage and reproductive problems.
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Manufacturing begins with an extract known as isolated soy protein, also noted on ingredient lists as defatted soy flour, organic textured soy flour, textured vegetable protein, soy protein concentrates, or soy concentrates. These isolated, concentrated soy proteins are mixed with extracts of wheat protein, vegetable oils, and sometimes starch, sugar, salt, artificial sweeteners, and even dairy and egg proteins to create concoctions meant to satisfy the health seeker’s meat and dairy cravings. The concentrated chemical cocktail often undergoes additional processing, using compression and heat, to form products that look and taste as much as possible like the foods they seek to replace: cheese, chicken, turkey, lunch meats, sausages, hot dogs, and hamburgers. Soy protein is often found in energy bars, candy bars, yogurt, ice cream, breads, pastries, and cookies.

Fake soy foods lack the vital elements found naturally in the bean’s original design: fiber, carbohydrate, fat, vitamins, minerals, and hundreds of beneficial plant chemicals. Once these components are stripped away, the results on your health can be as far reaching as constipation from lack of fiber to a reduction in endurance due to carbohydrate deficiency.

More concerning than what is missing is the fact that the concentrated, isolated proteins burden the liver and kidneys, which play a key role in excreting surplus protein from the body. In time, protein overload wears out these organs, potentially contributing to outright liver or kidney failure, especially for people who already suffer from organ damage. Excess protein leaves in its wake an overly acidic environment that leaches calcium and other materials from the bones,
over time leading to osteoporosis and kidney stones.
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,
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Adding just 40 grams of concentrated soy protein to experimental subjects’ diets has been found to plunge the body into a negative calcium balance where more of the mineral is excreted through the urine and lost in the bowels than is absorbed by the intestines.
¹
Many soy products also contain isolated wheat protein, which compounds the calcium loss.
³⁵
(See
Chapter 3
for a detailed discussion of the effects of excess protein on the body.)

Cancer is a real concern when it comes to isolated soy protein, which promotes tumor growth by increasing growth hormone levels. Resembling insulin in its chemical structure, the hormone insulin-like growth factor 1 (IGF1) accelerates the growth rate of normal tissue, like bone, as well as that of diseased tissues, like cancer.
³⁶
Adding 40 grams of isolated soy protein to the human diet increases IGF1 almost twice as much as adding concentrated proteins isolated from cow’s milk.
⁴
Cow’s milk protein is itself notorious for stimulating an increase in growth hormones; consider that milk is responsible for growing a 60-pound calf into a 600-pound cow by the time it is weaned. Increased amounts of IGF1 have been strongly linked to the development and progression of cancers of the breast, prostate, lung, and colon.
³⁶

IGF1 also accelerates aging.
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Big dogs, for example, such as Doberman pinschers and Rottweilers, live an average of 10 years, while Chihuahuas and small terriers have an average life of 13 years. The smaller dogs have lower levels of IGF1.
⁴⁰
Humans exhibit the same inverse relationship between size and longevity: Taller and heavier people have shorter life spans than do shorter, thinner ones.
⁴¹
Researchers believe our best hope for increasing longevity is by taking actions that lower IGF1 activity.
³⁹
Removing meat, poultry, fish, shellfish, eggs, and dairy are well recognized dietary changes that lower IGF1 levels. Isolated soy proteins should be added to the top of that list.

It doesn’t take much to inadvertently add 40 grams of isolated soy protein a day to your diet—the amount used in the experiments to cause calcium loss and to raise growth hormones. Snacking on a couple
of soy energy bars will do it, or washing down a soy bar with a soy shake. So will eating one soy chicken patty for lunch and two soy burgers for dinner, or starting the day with four soy breakfast patties.