The Starch Solution (17 page)

I was raised in a suburb of New York City on a typical American diet of meat and potatoes, processed foods, and cold cuts. I was overweight, constipated, and becoming arthritic before I even reached adulthood. Beginning as a teen and continuing through my twenties and thirties, I yo-yo dieted, experimenting with every new fad, from high protein, to low carb, to food combining, to low fat, no sugar, no meat—you name it.

In my forties my health took a turn for the worse, with problems snowballing until everything hurt. I had pain in my toes and arthritis in my knees; in bed, my hips ached; I had indigestion and gallbladder problems, headaches, costochondritis, hot flashes, and mood swings. My size kept increasing along with my health problems. As I dragged myself from bed each morning after a bad night’s sleep I would survey my body for new aches. How could I feel so old in my forties? I turned to doctors, who suggested that I should eat less. They would not discuss diet
and I would not agree to medicines. I felt like a physical wreck, and I was emotionally distraught.

I looked for help in many places. After landing on Dr. McDougall’s Web site I knew at once that he was different. He didn’t advocate dieting as a way to lose weight. Rather, he suggested that a plant-based, low-fat, whole foods regimen was the path to health. As I paged through images of potatoes, rice, pasta, vegetables, and fruit I thought, “I can do this!”

I started by giving up meat and alcohol, the easiest changes for me. Then I let go of dairy, then any added oils. My body responded immediately. My nagging health problems began dropping away and gradually I was feeling better and doing more. I was having whole pain-free days. I started sleeping peacefully through the night. My headaches and hot flashes disappeared. I stopped having gallbladder attacks, and my costochondritis cleared up. With each change came greater energy, happiness, and health.

As I lost those 77 pounds I began to exercise. Now, instead of feeling sluggish, I hop out of bed feeling refreshed and excited to greet the day. In February 2008, you could have found me zip-lining through the treetop canopies of Costa Rica on a McDougall Adventure, or more recently hiking along the Oregon coast. Next up: hiking and rafting through the Grand Canyon.

O
nce you’ve convinced your friends and family that you will not perish from lack of protein on a starch-based diet, they will likely begin firing questions about other nutrients. The most common next question: How will you get enough calcium? Don’t you need milk and cheese for that?

While you can get calcium from dairy, it is not your only option, and it most certainly is not your best option. In fact, there is no good argument for eating dairy products, and there are plenty of reasons to avoid them.

Milk is as pure white as fresh fallen snow and as familiar as a mother’s warm touch. If this single food, as a sole source of nutrition, can sustain a newborn, surely it must be nature’s perfect food. Our need for milk supposedly doesn’t stop with infancy or childhood. Milk, we are told, strengthens and protects our bones in adulthood as well. These structural beams of the body are built with calcium, so it shouldn’t surprise us that milk is essential to our strength and stability.

It turns out those “facts” are what the dairy industry would like us to believe. Please don’t feel bad about having been gullible enough to believe this carton of untruths. I did, too, right up until I began to probe a little deeper into the science of calcium and milk.

The American cow-based dairy industries—milk, yogurt, cheese, ice cream, and the like—together make up a $100 billion-a-year business. That gives them plenty of income to support the approximately $202 million they have to spend on their own scientific research and other propaganda each year to spread the myth that dairy foods are not only a healthy choice, but are essential to avoiding illness.
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The dairy industry tells us: “To meet calcium recommendations, increased consumption of calcium-rich foods such as milk and other dairy foods often is necessary. Unfortunately, few Americans consume sufficient calcium, thereby increasing their risk for major chronic diseases such as osteoporosis.”
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The industry’s fearmongering seems to be working: In 2011, the average American was consuming more than 620 pounds of dairy products annually, compared with 541 pounds in 1981.
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Annual milk consumption among children ages 6 to 12 has increased to 28 gallons per child. Children under 18 years of age drink 46 percent, or nearly half, of all milk consumed.
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This will come as no surprise when you learn that 18 percent of the industry’s marketing budget is aimed at schoolchildren, an audience that does a keenly effective job of driving supermarket sales, but is ill equipped to evaluate what is best for its own health and well-being.

In my Midwestern youth, Elsie the Cow taught me that milk builds strong bones. When I moved to Hawaii as a young doctor, Lani Moo
took over, assuring me that I would never outgrow my need for milk. As I settled in Northern California to develop my practice and raise a family, the torch was passed to Clo, who dispenses dairy-friendly advice from billboards lining Highway 101. When it comes to milk, it’s hard to argue with an adorable, information-dispensing cow doing her best to ensure you don’t fall victim to the dangers of dietary calcium deficiency.

But wait a second. Have you ever met someone suffering from calcium deficiency? Is calcium a key mineral found in copious quantities in the dairy industry’s favorite product, without which our bones will fail to hold us upright?

Where does the cow get her calcium from? Does her body produce it? No. Actually, she gets it from the soil. Calcium is a basic mineral element that is neither created nor destroyed. Plants absorb calcium and other
minerals from the soil through their roots. As the plant grows, that calcium is built into its fabric from root to stem to fruit or vegetable to seed. The calcium gets into the cow when she eats grass and other calcium-rich plants. I recommend that you skip the cow altogether and go straight to the plant source for your calcium. Plants are the source of calcium and minerals that build strong bones for humans, cows, and the largest animals walking the earth—even horses and hippopotamuses—which eat no animal or dairy foods whatsoever.

If the giants of the animal kingdom can get all the calcium they need to support their massive bones, with no help from milk beyond their own mother’s milk during their infancy, wouldn’t you think plants would provide enough for us relatively small humans? In fact, they do: Until recent times, and still today in most parts of the world, people have grown into their adult skeletons with no help from milk except for when nursing as infants. They certainly had no need for or access to calcium supplements.

The problem is not finding a way to get enough calcium through what we eat; a plant-based diet of starches, vegetables, and fruits will always give you plenty of it. The problem is holding on to that calcium. Once you understand this, you can see that the logical answer is not to increase calcium intake through eating dairy or taking supplements. The best way to increase your calcium retention is to steer clear of animal proteins, including those found in hard cheeses and other dairy foods.

I don’t mean to suggest that calcium is unimportant. It is essential for all living things, from microbes to plants to animals. It is the most abundant mineral found in the human body, with the average adult carrying around 2.2 pounds of it, about 99 percent of which is stored as calcium phosphate salts in the bones. Calcium plays crucial roles, from
forming the skeleton to regulating the nervous system and blood vessel function.

The Bantu women of Africa consume no dairy products. Instead, they take in about 250 to 400 milligrams of calcium each day through vegetable sources. That’s just a quarter to a third of the US Recommended Daily Allowance of 1,000 to 1,300 milligrams of calcium for reproductive-age women.

During her reproductive years, a typical Bantu woman will have 10 children and will breastfeed each of them for about 10 months.
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With no dairy in their diet, a comparatively small calcium intake, no calcium supplements, and the tremendous demands of repeated pregnancies and breastfeeding, you would expect osteoporosis to run rampant. Yet it is virtually unknown among Bantu women.
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It isn’t until rural African women migrate to cities or to Western countries and adopt richer diets—also rich in calcium—that osteoporosis becomes a problem.
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Why the bone loss with additional calcium? Their new Western diet includes large quantities of animal proteins, which come loaded with dietary acids.
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As discussed in
Chapter 3
, these acids accelerate the excretion of calcium and other bone materials into the urine. This increased calcium output outpaces the added calcium in their newly adopted Western diet, leaving these women with a deficit.

Three organ systems very efficiently and precisely regulate the body’s calcium balance: the gastrointestinal tract, the bones, and the kidneys. When you overindulge in calcium, your intestinal cells block out much of it, with the kidneys cooperating by eliminating any excess.
If your body didn’t take these measures to avoid a buildup of excess calcium, the surplus would find its way into your heart, muscles, and skin in addition to your kidneys, eventually leading to heart and kidney failure and even death.

When you eat relatively little calcium, on the other hand, the intestine extracts more of it from your food, while the kidneys work to conserve the calcium already in your body. The body so efficiently utilizes this precious mineral that calcium deficiency due to a low-calcium diet is essentially unknown in human beings, even in those billions of people who consume calcium from no other sources than plants.