The Starch Solution (5 page)

The term “starch” comes from the Middle English word
sterchen:
to stiffen. In its pure form, starch is a white, odorless, tasteless powder. Starch granules don’t dissolve in water, but heat causes them to swell and turn gelatinous. The starch gel cools into a paste that can be used as a thickener, stiffener, or glue. (Remember those flour-and-water paste projects in elementary school? Or papier-mâché? You might also have noticed that your cooked oatmeal or polenta turns stiff and gluelike after it cools.)

Starch is a principal ingredient in laundry products, medicines, cosmetics, and powders, with the largest nonfood use being paper production. The construction industry uses it to make gypsum wallboard, stucco, adhesives, and glues. Starch is a versatile substance in industry!

As early humans ventured north and south from Africa to colonize the rest of the planet, we relied on our ability to eat starchy tubers and grains for concentrated calories to last through the winter, after the fruits of summer and fall were gone. These starchy foods were widely available around the world and easy to gather from underground (roots, tubers) and aboveground (grains, beans). Starch’s abundant calories also supplied the extra energy we needed to increase our brain capacity and size (threefold compared with that of lesser primates).
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With the exception of wealthy aristocrats, humans throughout history have derived most of their energy from starch. Life began to change with the colossal wealth created during the Industrial Revolution of the mid-1800s. As we began to successfully harness fossil fuels, millions and then billions of people began to eat from tables heaped high with meat, fowl, and dairy—foods that previously were eaten only by royalty. You can easily see the result: We’ve inflated to resemble the rotund images of aristocrats.

When we consume too much fat, the body looks for a place to store it, typically in the belly, buttocks, and thighs. The fat you eat is the fat you wear, quite literally. Starches provide energy and an abundance of nutrients without being stored visibly as fat. Quite the opposite: They fuel us with the proteins, essential fats, vitamins, and minerals that make our bodies run like the efficient machines they were meant to be.

Starches are a clean-burning fuel, with just a small fraction (1 to 8 percent) of their calories coming from fat. They have insignificant amounts of cholesterol. Unless they have come into contact with them from animal waste or tissue, they do not harbor pathogens like salmonella, E. coli, or mad cow prions (agents causing bovine spongiform encephalopathy). They don’t store up poisonous chemicals from the environment, like DDT or methyl mercury. Unless they become contaminated by pesticides directly introduced by farmers, starches are squeaky clean.

Some starches, like potatoes and sweet potatoes, are complete foods: By eating these foods alone you will easily meet your basic nutritional needs with the exception of vitamin B
₁₂
. (We’ll get into vitamins and supplements in more detail in
Chapter 11
.) Grains and legumes aren’t quite so complete as potatoes, but add a small dose of vitamin A and C by eating a little fruit or green and yellow vegetables and you’ve got everything you need. No animal protein or dairy need be added for excellent and complete nutrition. (You will learn all about this in
Chapters 7
and
8
.)

Starches aren’t just good for you, they’re also satisfying. The abundant carbohydrates in starches stimulate the sweet taste receptors on the tip of the tongue, where gastronomic pleasure begins. Eat enough starches and your body will release hormones and go through neurological changes that ensure long-term satisfaction. Their naturally great taste and nourishing calories and the good feeling they give us during and after eating them are the reasons we refer to bread, rice, pasta, potatoes, corn, and beans as “comfort foods.”

What I love best about your focus on starch is that it’s much simpler for me to understand than focusing on carbs, proteins, and fats. I know what a starch is; I can recognize that food easily. And I can grow starchy foods in my gardens. But how do I grow a protein, a carb, or a fat? Those explanations were always too far removed from what I see on my plate.

Caroline Graettinger

It is well accepted that starches are a great source of abundant calories, providing the energy athletes need to do everything from discus throwing to extreme skateboarding to running marathons. With all
those efficient calories, you would think that starches would promote excess weight gain, but they don’t. That’s because your body efficiently regulates the use of the carbohydrates you get from starch: Even if you consume them in excess, the body will burn them off as heat and energy rather than store much of them as fat.
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Despite the drone from big business seeking to deafen our ears to it, sound advice to eat more vegetables, fruits, and whole grains—and less fat from meat and dairy products—has been given since the 1950s. In the introduction to a 1977 report from the US Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, Dr. D. Mark Hegsted of the Harvard School of Public Health wrote, “I wish to stress that there is a great deal of evidence and it continues to accumulate, which strongly implicates and, in some instances, proves that the major causes of death and disability in the United States are related to the diet we eat. I include coronary artery disease, which accounts for nearly half of the deaths in the United States, several of the most important forms of cancer, hypertension, diabetes, and obesity as well as other chronic diseases.”
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In 2002, the World Health Organization published a report explaining that the shift toward refined foods, foods of animal origin (meat and dairy products), and increased fats was behind the global epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease. The report predicted that by 2020 two-thirds of the global burden of disease will be attributable “to chronic noncommunicable diseases, most of them strongly associated with diet.”
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Our unwillingness to respond to this vast base of knowledge, from ancient to modern, has resulted in the greatest health crisis known to humankind. Worldwide, 1.1 billion people are overweight and 312 million obese, 18 million die of heart disease annually, more than 197 million have diabetes, and half of all people following a Western diet will develop life-threatening cancers.
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It’s not just individuals who are suffering. Alongside escalating human sickness we are experiencing environmental catastrophes that are due in large part to abandoning a diet based on starches in favor of putting meat at the center of the plate. As you will see in
Chapter 6
, livestock are among the top two or three contributors to every one of our most serious environmental problems, including climate change.
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As you will learn throughout
The Starch Solution,
your change to a starch-based diet will do far more than heal your body. You will be making a contribution to changes that ripple out far beyond the foods on your plate. This shift, if adopted widely, will drastically shrink the pharmaceutical and medical industries by preventing and curing common illnesses, including obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, and intestinal disturbances ranging from heartburn to constipation.

The Starch Solution
can help you to lose weight and feel and look better, and—with no extra effort—help to heal the world around you, reducing global warming and making our planet healthier and more sustainable for future generations. The only way to find out if a starch-based diet holds all these promises for you is to give it a try.

M
y wife, Mary, and I sat at a table by the bay enjoying steamed sweet corn tamales with a side of black beans at Guaymas restaurant in Tiburon, California, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge. At the next table were three elegantly dressed women, ample in size. Over the course of our meal, I watched each make her way with great difficulty to the restroom and back.

I looked at Mary and thought, “These women are at least a decade younger than you are and all three are physically disabled.” For what pleasure? Food? As the seaward breeze carried the greasy, fishy aroma of their deep-fried clams and shrimp to our table, I couldn’t help but think that the McDougall Diet could make their lives easier. I wished I could have handed them my business card, or a copy of one of my books, without offending them.

Where have all the pretty women and handsome men gone? People spend thousands of dollars on clothes, cars, makeup, perfume, and plastic surgery to achieve what they believe to be more pleasing appearances. And yet, at the same time, they sacrifice their well-being
for the sake of unhealthy foods they have developed a preference for, remaining in denial that these foods cause dependency and illness in much the same way that cigarettes, alcohol, and narcotics do. Too few people know that for free they can have all the health and beauty that money can’t buy.

Most people have been ingrained with the false notion, “Don’t eat starches, because starch turns to sugar, which turns to fat, making you gain weight.” If this were true there would be an epidemic of obesity among the 1.73 billion Asians living on rice-based diets. After moving west and replacing their starch-based diet with animal foods, people from Japan and the Philippines would become trimmer and healthier looking. But that’s not so. In fact, the opposite happens.

Potatoes are fattening, right? Then why, during our McDougall Adventure trip to Peru—where potatoes are the staple food—were the residents so trim and strong? Consider the populations around the world that look the youngest, healthiest, and trimmest. Many are in Japan, China, Korea, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines, eating mostly rice with some vegetables. In rural Mexico, we find people eating corn, beans, and squash. No one is overweight or on a diet there. The men, women, and children of central Papua New Guinea are nourished almost entirely by sweet potatoes. They have no need for Weight Watchers or Jenny Craig. In rural Africa, statuesque men and women thrive on starchy staples such as yams, cassava, millet, and beans. Worldwide, populations with the highest consumption of starch are the most trim and fit.
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Delving deeper, we discover that they have extremely low rates of diabetes, arthritis, gallbladder disease, constipation, indigestion, multiple sclerosis, heart disease, and cancers of the breast, prostate, and colon. Their diets are centered around copious quantities of starch, and they are healthy.

The body’s metabolism is genetically encoded to run most efficiently on starch. No amount of willpower, dieting, or wishful thinking will change that fundamental fact. The one simple solution to health and beauty is to eat the diet we were designed for. In addition to being healthful, a diet based on starch offers a multitude of rewards.

Starches Satisfy the Appetite:
The hunger drive keeps us alive. You cannot fool hunger by pushing yourself away from the table, putting down your fork between bites, eating from a small plate, or counting calories. You will never train yourself not to experience the discomfort associated with hunger, even if you practice until you are 90 years old.

The control you do have is over the foods that fill your plate. Meat, dairy, animal fats, and vegetable oils lead to excess weight gain and illness. Starches, vegetables, and fruits support a trim, fit body and a lifetime of excellent health.

You may have heard that all calories are the same when it comes to body weight. That’s not true, especially when it comes to satisfying the appetite and accumulating fat. Three components of food provide the fuel we know as calories: protein, fat, and carbohydrate. Starches like corn, beans, potatoes, and rice offer abundant carbohydrates and dietary fiber and are very low in fat.

Satisfying the appetite begins with filling the stomach. Compared to cheese (4 calories per gram), meat (4 calories per gram), and oils (9 calories per gram), starches contribute only about 1 calorie per gram. They help you to feel full for just a quarter of the calories in cheese and meat, and one-ninth of those in oil.
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Plus, they offer a great deal of satisfaction. Research comparing the way carbohydrates and fats appease the appetite shows that carbohydrates lead to hours of satiety, whereas fats have little impact. In other words, when you fill up on starch you stay full for a long time, whereas when you fill up on fats and oils you still want to eat more.
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