The Starch Solution (6 page)

Before I understood the importance of a starch-centered diet, my meals consisted of red meat (no carbohydrates), chicken (no carbohydrates), fish (no carbohydrates), cheese (2 percent carbohydrates), and animal fats and vegetable oils (no carbohydrates). After finishing a full plate of these foods I still found myself ravenous. My second plate left my belly feeling a sense of physical fullness, yet I was still yearning for more. After my third plate of carbohydrate-deficient foods, I finally received the signals that it was time to stop eating: I felt overstuffed and in pain. Still, because I remained unsatisfied, I remember thinking, “If I had room, I would stuff in one more pork chop, I’m still so hungry.” At times, I wondered whether I might have emotional issues with food. After all, I had just downed large quantities and I was still starving. It wasn’t until I began eating sufficient amounts of appetite-satisfying carbohydrates that I realized my “mental illness,” commonly known as obsessive-compulsive overeating, was completely cured by this simple shift in my diet.

Excess Starch Does Not Turn to Body Fat:
A widely held myth holds that the sugars in starches are readily converted into fat, which is then stored visibly in our abdomen, hips, and buttocks. If you read the published research, you will see that there is no disagreement about this whatsoever among scientists, and that they say that this is incorrect!
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After eating, we break down the complex carbohydrates in starchy foods into simple sugars. These sugars are absorbed into the bloodstream, where they are transported to trillions of cells throughout the body for energy. If you eat more carbohydrate than your body needs, you’ll store up to 2 pounds of it invisibly in the muscles and liver in the form of glycogen. If you eat more carbohydrate than you can use (as your daily energy) and store (as glycogen), you’ll burn the remainder off as body heat and through physical movement other than sports, such as walking to work, typing, yard work, and fidgeting.
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Turning sugars into fats is a process called
de novo lipogenesis.
Pigs and cows use this process to convert carbohydrates from grains and grasses into calorie-dense fats.
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That’s what makes them so appealing as a food source. Bees do it, too, converting honey (simple carbohydrate) into wax (fatty acids and alcohols).

I was talking to my neighbor and he noticed that I had lost weight. My coat now buttons! His comment was that I looked great and to keep up the good work and lay off the mashed potatoes. We both have some great recipes for mashed potatoes. Of course I said nothing to the contrary, but those mashed potatoes have been my daily main course many days with a side of vegetables. There’s so much misinformation about starches. No wonder people are so fat and fail on other diets.

One thing I noticed after a couple weeks on the diet is that my intense cravings for meat, dairy, and oil are gone. I switched from coffee with cream and honey to hot lemon water. Bingeing thoughts are gone. I had a couple of stress-filled days this past week and instead of eating everything in sight to soothe myself, I just ate some mashed potatoes and broccoli, spinach, and corn. That was filling, my favorite foods, and that was it. No more stress or overeating. Great plan.

Sincerely,

Suzanna Browne

We humans, on the other hand, are very inefficient at converting carbohydrate to fat; we don’t do it under normal conditions.
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(The cost for this conversion is 30 percent of the calories consumed.
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) Subjects overfed large amounts of simple sugars under experimental laboratory conditions, however, will convert a small amount of carbohydrate to fat. For example, both trim and obese women fed 50 percent more calories than they usually ate in a day, along with an extra 3½ ounces (135 grams) of refined sugar, produced less than 4 grams of fat daily (less than
¹
⁄
₈
ounce).
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That’s just 36 extra calories stored as fat per day. You’d have to overeat all of those extra calories and table sugar every day for nearly 4 months just to gain 1 pound of extra body fat.

In the seventies, researchers from the Food Science and Human Nutrition Department at Michigan State University (my alma mater) asked 16 moderately overweight college-age men to add 12 slices of white bread (at 70 calories a slice) or high fiber bread (at 50 calories a slice) to their diet daily.
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On average, subjects eating the extra white bread lost 14 pounds (6.26 Kg) and those adding the high fiber bread lost 19 pounds (8.77 Kg) during the next 8 weeks. Appetite-appeasing breads worked by replacing the easy-to-wear fats found in the meats, dairy products, and vegetable oils, causing them to spontaneously, without any additional conscious thought or effort, lose the weight. The general health of these college students also improved as reflected by a very large and rapid reduction in their blood cholesterol levels (by 60 to 80 mg/dL).

This is my challenge to you if you are one of the few people who is not yet fully convinced about the power of the Starch
Solution: Simply eat more starch without intentionally giving up anything else in your current diet. This commitment means adding daily any one (or a mixture) of the following to your regular diet:

4 cups of steamed rice

4 cups of boiled corn

4 mashed potatoes

4 baked sweet potatoes

3 cups of cooked beans, peas, or lentils

4 cups of boiled spaghetti noodles

12 slices of whole grain bread

Simply add this extra 600 to 900 calories (divided throughout the day) of your choice of grains, legumes, or starchy vegetables to what you are already eating in order to see remarkable benefits, just as the college-age men did.

The warning about carbohydrates turning to body fat is a myth and nothing more: In humans, even substantial quantities of refined and processed carbohydrates contribute only a trivial amount to body fat.
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The same is not true of animal and vegetable fats, however. A passenger on a cruise ship gains an average of 8 pounds on a 7-day voyage—caused by dining on buffets of meats, cheese, oil-soaked vegetables, and high-fat desserts.

So, where does all the belly fat come from? It bears repeating: The fat you eat is the fat you wear.

Fat Is the Metabolic Dollar Saved for the Next Famine:
After you eat dairy, meat, nuts, oils, and other high-fat foods, you absorb their fat from your intestine into the bloodstream. From there, it is transported to billions of adipose (fat) cells for storage. This is a very efficient process: It uses up only 3 percent of the calories you consume to move the fat on your fork and spoon to your body fat.
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This storage takes place almost effortlessly after every fat-filled meal. If you have your body fat chemically analyzed, it will reveal the kinds of fats you commonly eat.
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Margarine and shortening, for example, result in high proportions of trans fats in stored body fat. A diet high in cold-water marine fish shows omega-3 fats. The saying “from my lips to my hips” expresses the real-life effect of the Western diet. Fortunately, starches contain very little fat for you to wear.

Starches Help Us to Radiate Vitality:
Every year, millions of people lose weight without necessarily improving their health. In fact, these weight-loss methods often cause illness. The best example of this negative effect of dieting is the once-popular Atkins-type, low-carbohydrate, high-protein approach. These diets work by severe carbohydrate deprivation, which causes a state of illness (with the common outcome of ketosis). When people become sick they lose their appetite and lose weight. This method for losing extra pounds is analogous to the weight loss seen in people taking cancer chemotherapy drugs.
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To the careful observer, people following low-carbohydrate diets look and act sick, too.

A starch-based diet, on the other hand, brings radiant health along with the loss of excess body fat. Endurance athletes know the benefits of “carbo loading.” In addition to enabling peak performance, a starch-based diet improves blood flow to all tissues in the body. The skin glows with a clear complexion from the improved circulation. A welcome byproduct of eating low-fat starches is the elimination of oily skin, blackheads, whiteheads, and acne. From weight loss and the resulting relief from arthritis, people on a starch-based diet feel active, agile, and more youthful.

I learned the facts of life from my father many years ago. We were close and discussed all matters frankly. As we walked down a busy street one day, he noticed my eyes drawn to many of the young women passing by. He said, “The reason you find some of these girls especially attractive is that they look healthy.” My hormone-fueled boyish response was, “That’s not what I am looking at, Dad.” It took me many years before I understood how right he was. Health is attractive, by natural design, for the preservation of the species. Sexually, we are drawn to healthy people because those are the ones we want to mate—and share our genetic material—with. This characteristic of human nature enhances the chances that a loving relationship between man and woman will result in the highest quality offspring. Overweight, and even more so, obesity, is a glaring sign of malnutrition and poor health. Youth is associated with health; this is one reason young people are so attractive. As we age, our health deteriorates along with our good looks. One important benefit for people following the Starch Solution is graceful aging and preservation of the attractive spark of life.

In platonic relationships health is also a magnet that pulls people together. In times past, villages depended on the strengths of their individual members in order to survive. Physically fit people could hunt, gather, and defend on behalf of all members in the community. The sick were a burden, and often banished. These same principles transfer to the business world of today. Appearing healthy means you are more likely to add to the common goals of the company. Hearty employees work harder, for longer hours, more cleverly, and more efficiently—they are valuable contributors. Good health radiates your worth to others, resulting in personal advancement.
The Starch Solution
provides you the best opportunity to be healthy and attractive.

My great-grandmother, Laura Bristow, lived to be 106 eating a “well-balanced diet.” I recall her telling me when I was a young child, “Johnny, you eat too much meat; it’s going to make you sick.”

Years later, when I was 31 and had given up almost all animal foods, and she was 102, she asked me to drive to McDonald’s to buy her a hamburger—a 30-cent paper-thin patty of ground beef with two pickle slices and a blob each of mustard and ketchup, all hidden between two halves of an airy white bun. She cut the hamburger into quarters, shook one quarter in my face, and admonished, “If you ate a little more meat you would be healthier.” She ate two of the quarters and put the rest away for later.

My great-grandmother picked at tiny platefuls of traditional American foods, drank a quarter cup of diluted coffee each morning, and had one small glass of red wine on holidays. Unlike me, she was the picture of moderation.

I am not a restrained person and neither are most of my patients. In my youth, I started the day with several mugs of strong coffee. I frequented all-you-can-eat buffets and fast-food restaurants, and I smoked two packs of Marlboros a day. Often, I unwound at the end of my stress-filled day with a whiskey or two. I paid a big price for this behavior: a cholesterol level of 335 milligrams per deciliter, 50 pounds of excess body fat, major abdominal surgery, and a debilitating stroke, all before the age of 25.

I realize most people are not as excessive as I am. But most do allow at least one of these overindulgences in their lives, and for many, that one extravagance is unending forkfuls of rich foods. For passionate people like us, any attempt at moderation results in continued dependence and recurring failures.

The phrase “everything in moderation” has been preached through much of human history. It didn’t work in times past and it doesn’t work for most people today. Have you ever met a smoker who quit by cutting down? An alcoholic who sobered up by switching to beer, or having just
one drink a day? Westerners are addicted to their steaks, cheeses, and pies. Teasing us with a little bit of our most tempting vices is not a viable solution. Cutting down on the portion size of fried chicken, gravy, biscuits, and ice cream is slow torture for most, and is one of the primary reasons diets fail.

The startling observation that almost all people in Western societies are fat and/or sick with diseases that will wreck and shorten their lives should have health professionals up in arms, demanding an immediate and complete end to this senseless suffering, regardless of the expense and effort. Instead, the loss of a father or husband to a heart attack, the loss of a mother’s breast to cancer, the blinding of a friend from diabetes are accepted consequences of our birthright to eat like aristocrats. To mitigate these food-induced tragedies, we are told to eat a little less of the same things.