The Starch Solution (12 page)

The Guidelines suggest: “Enjoy [y]our food, but eat less.” That may work well as a sound bite, but is it advice people can and will follow? If we were all so easily able to control the quantity of food we put into our mouths, would we see food continually being supersized into jumbo and colossal portions? Would so many people be overweight? What we
can
recommend to assure that the population remains healthy is that we eat less of foods that are harmful and instead fill up on foods that are satisfying, comforting, and filling: starches.

The new USDA report includes no discussion of the important role of starch in satisfying the appetite without the harmful effects of meat, poultry, dairy products, and fat. Healthy and filling calories that cause no harm are the cornerstone of any successful diet, and starch fits the bill perfectly. For the most part, however, the report shrouds starches in negative connotations, mentioning “refined starches” that need “to be minimized or excluded along with solid fats, sugars, and sodium.” The recommendations are so noncommittal that they can easily be interpreted to support a low-carbohydrate, high-protein (Atkins-type) diet, which is an exceedingly dangerous one.

I sit on the advisory board of the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM;
www.pcrm.org
), a Washington, DC—based nonprofit promoting ethics and effectiveness in preventive medicine. PCRM filed a lawsuit against the USDA and HHS over their 2010 Guidelines, stating:

The problem is word choice. For healthful foods that people should eat more of, the Guidelines are clear. They encourage readers to eat more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. But when it comes to foods people need to eat less of (e.g., meat and cheese), the Guidelines resort to biochemical terms instead of listing specific foods, apparently out of fear of upsetting food producers. That is, the Guidelines call for limiting ‘cholesterol,’ ‘saturated fat,’ ‘solid fat.’ Similarly, while dairy products account for more than 30 percent of the saturated (‘bad’) fat in the American diet, the Guidelines disguise this fact by splitting dairy products into many categories, including cheese (8.5 percent), butter (2.9 percent), whole milk (3.4 percent), reduced-fat milk (3.9 percent), dairy desserts (5.6 percent), and pizza (5.9 percent), so their contribution to ill health is harder to see.
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PCRM urged that portions of the Guidelines be rewritten using terms that make clear the risks of consuming meat and dairy products. The suit also raises concerns about members of the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee having ties to the meat and dairy industries, including one member who served on an advisory council for McDonald’s, and another who worked for the Dannon Institute.
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This isn’t the first time PCRM has challenged the USDA and its ties to agribusiness. In 2001, the organization won a lawsuit against the USDA, bringing national attention to the heavy influence of the meat, dairy, and egg industries in the development of our nation’s food policies. US District Court Judge James Robertson ruled that the USDA violated federal law by withholding documents revealing bias among members of its advisory panel.
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The organization has exposed other inconsistencies and conflicts, including that the federal government spends about
$16 billion
every year on agricultural subsidies, the majority of which support foods it has suggested we consume less of.
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PCRM has developed its own version of the USDA’s original 1956 Basic Four Food Groups recommendations that were later reformulated
into its familiar Food Guide Pyramid.
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PCRM’s New Four Food Groups recommends five or more daily servings of whole grains, four or more of vegetables, three or more of fruits, and two or more of legumes. These guidelines reflect current knowledge and research on the importance of fiber, the health risks of cholesterol and fats, and the disease-preventing power of many nutrients found exclusively in plant foods. They also note that plant foods are an excellent source of protein and calcium, previously believed to come primarily from meat and dairy products. In other words, these animal foods are no longer recognized as a necessary part of a healthy diet; in fact, they are contrary to a health-promoting diet because of the cholesterol, fat, chemicals, microbe contaminants, and other harmful components they contain.

There is still much work to be done before the USDA cycles back from serving as the “Agribusiness Industries’ Department” to its original role as the “People’s Department.”

Concerns about financial influence, politics, and some problematic wording aside, the 2010 Dietary Guidelines have ended any doubt about which foods most support our health and which contribute to harmful and sometimes fatal illnesses. They establish a clear direction for restoring our nation’s health and reducing its exorbitant medical bill.

The new guidelines bring to the public’s attention a message I have been communicating for nearly four decades. From 1983 until the early 1990s, my books promoting simple dietary solutions to complex health problems were major bestsellers. In the early 1990s, my publisher suggested it was time to change my writing style. An editor told me that my books supporting a starch-based diet were out of date, and that diet books now must focus on increasing meat and protein and decreasing carbs. “Dr. McDougall,” she advised, “we would like you to make this change in your future books to reflect the new trend.” I reminded the editor that essentially all respected science corroborates that eating animal products
results in heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and obesity, while research over the last 70 years has shown that a diet based on starches, vegetables, and fruits makes people healthy. I reminded her that I was not in the book business simply to make money, but to help people improve their health. With six national bestsellers under my belt, and more than a million copies in circulation from this company alone, I parted ways with the publisher. History confirms that my editor was right: Diet books were indeed headed in the direction she predicted. History also has proven me right: Those diets made people sick, while my approach made them healthy.

I am heartened to see the tide turning back at long last, with the USDA promoting vegetables at the core of a healthy diet. It is your job and mine to keep steering this ship in the right direction so that we can, at long last, heal our ailing nation and put funds now waste-fully directed at agribusiness and unnecessary health care expenditures to better use.

T
he Starch Solution
is meant to assure your health and well-being through a relatively simple shift in the way you eat. But how well can we really feel in the face of devastating environmental destruction? In addition to epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and other weighty health concerns, we find ourselves facing climate change and ecological damage of epic proportions. Moreover, vast swaths of the world population suffer from malnourishment and starvation while those of us living in prosperous western nations indulge in our favorite foods.

As luck would have it, the very same actions that can save your health and that of your loved ones will also mitigate the monumental environmental and food access problems that plague the world we live in. It is the ultimate win-win: Improve your health and you will be doing your part to heal the world, with absolutely no added effort.

The decision to pile our plates high with meat, poultry, seafood, eggs, and dairy does not just threaten our personal health. What may seem like very personal choices about what we eat day in and day out have an
enormous impact, with dramatic effects that go far beyond our own enjoyment and well-being. Consider these consequences of our food choices that affect all beings living on Earth, and the planet itself:

• We are suffering from rampant and increasing chronic illnesses from overindulging in foods that put our health at risk. Most critically, we consume too much protein, too much fat, and too much cholesterol. (We may also consume too much sugar and salt, but this is not nearly as critical a concern as eating animal foods.)
  
 

• At the same time, we fail to benefit from the widely available nutritional elements that can improve our health—chief among them dietary fiber and complex carbohydrates (found only in plant foods).
  
 

• We are faced with enormous national debt, in part due to the spiraling public health costs of caring for a population that is sick and getting sicker as a result of what we eat.
  
 

• Animal foods are one of the primary contributors to climate change, otherwise known as global warming. Climate change is exacerbated by the way animals are raised, slaughtered, and prepared, in addition to their production of ozone-killing methane gas.
  
 

• The production of animal foods takes an enormous bite out of resources that could secure sufficient food for all of the world’s populations that now face starvation. It takes about 7 pounds of edible, healthy grains to produce just 1 pound of beef, 4 pounds for a pound of pork, and 2 pounds for a pound of chicken.
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We are in the midst of a pandemic health crisis. More than 1.1 billion people are overweight, nearly as many (1 billion) are hypertensive (have high blood pressure), 312 million are obese, and 197 million are diabetic.
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As a result of these chronic conditions, 18 million people die from heart disease every year. Yet because these diseases generally come in for the kill only after the victims have passed through their
reproductive years, the seeds of further destruction are firmly planted in the unhealthy habits passed along to the next generation. If ever there was a vicious cycle…

One would hope that the world’s leaders would have banded together by now to address this catastrophic human suffering, but they have not even acknowledged one of the primary causes—our worldwide dependence on meat and dairy products. Why? Because political and commercial interests profit from brushing that reality under the carpet. In fact, so little attention is devoted to educating the public about this problem, and to making the changes required to address it, that you could easily get the impression that the science about animal foods and human illness is inconclusive. But the science is conclusive, and it is frightening, and it doesn’t take a medical education to understand it, as you are seeing over and over again throughout this book.

Tied to our rising levels of chronic illness are continuing and escalating environmental catastrophes. You see it everywhere: Weather is becoming more erratic, more intense, and more destructive, as witnessed not only in new highs (and lows) of the thermometer, but also in the swell of hurricanes, tornadoes, severe flooding, and droughts. Many of our most prized plant and animal species are threatened with extinction. Diseases are spreading. Crops are failing. We are burning the candle at both ends, pushing extremes of heat and cold, fire and ice. Without intervention, many scientists predict our planet Earth will become inhospitable to human life, and then to any form of life at all.
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Some say our only chance for salvation is a radical reduction in the Earth’s population, currently bulging at seven billion people. Fatalists say this will come about by nuclear war or a viral pandemic. But is that our only choice? Or is it worth testing less severe measures to improve our lot, such as dramatically reducing our dependence on animal foods? That one change would at least give us time to address other pressing problems, such as our dependence on fossil fuels.

It is no longer news that livestock are a major contributor to global warming, accounting for 18 percent of global warming gases, more than the 14 percent contributed by all forms of transportation combined.
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So why are we putting our focus in the wrong place? Why are we not discussing this elephant in our global living room?