The Starch Solution (8 page)

All animal foods provide essentially the same nutrition and have roughly the same impact on your health. It doesn’t matter whether you grill meat that comes from a cow, pig, sheep, lamb, or chicken, scramble eggs from a chicken or duck, or drink milk that comes from a cow,
goat, or sheep. Industry-specific food marketers would have you believe otherwise, but in fact, these foods are so similar they are essentially equivalent as far as nutrition is concerned.

Note: Protein and fat are expressed in percentage of total calories. Cholesterol and methionine are milligrams per 100 calories. Dietary acid is renal acid load per 100 calories (a negative number means the food is alkaline).

As you can see, animal foods are made up of large amounts of protein, fat, and cholesterol, with high levels of the sulfur-containing amino acid methionine and dietary acids. This is true whether you eat one of these foods on its own or combine them at mealtime in people’s favorite blenders: their stomachs.

Except for the simple sugars in milk and honey, animal foods contain essentially no carbohydrate, and they never provide dietary fiber.

Note: Protein and fat are expressed in percentage of total calories. Cholesterol and methionine are milligrams per 100 calories. Dietary acid is renal acid load per 100 calories (a negative number means the food is alkaline).

Like animal foods, starchy plant foods as a group behave essentially identically to one another. Plant foods are high in carbohydrate and fiber, low in fat and dietary acids, and have no significant amount of cholesterol. They also have sufficient, but not excess, amounts of protein on average. In other words, they provide considerably more of what is good for you and little to none of what makes you sick.

Your body can handle only so much protein, fat, cholesterol, sulfur-containing amino acids, and dietary acids. When you take in more than your body can use, metabolize, neutralize, and/or eliminate, those excess amounts act as poisons. On a typical Western diet, these toxic by-products build up in your system on a daily basis. As you can see in the previous tables, compared with starches, animal foods burden us with inflated levels of these dietary components.

As if ingesting these toxic substances isn’t bad enough, their effects are additive and cumulative. Taking in too much protein, methionine, and dietary acid weakens our bones over time. Excess dietary fat and cholesterol clog the arteries and increase the risk of cancer. In fact, these five elements—all found in animal foods in quantities far greater than we are able to use and excrete—harm us in many ways. Let’s look at each of these potential toxins a little more closely.

When we keep eating protein after we’ve met our daily requirement, the body seeks to eliminate the excess. The primary route is through the liver and kidneys. Some people may notice the strong smell of urea in their sweat and urine, one indicator of protein overload. (This isn’t the only amino acid you can identify by smell: Most of us know the familiar scent of asparagine in urine that follows a meal with asparagus.)

Excess protein takes its toll, even when we are strong and healthy. On average, we lose a quarter of our overall kidney function over 70 years of life just from consuming a diet high in animal protein.
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For those with already compromised livers and kidneys, excess protein speeds up the processes that lead to organ failure.
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Protein overload also harms the bones; each time we double our protein intake we increase the amount of calcium excreted in the urine by 50 percent, escalating our risk for osteoporosis and kidney stones.
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A 2007—2008 report on the epidemic of obesity in the United States found that 68 percent of adults were overweight, with a body mass index (BMI) between 25 and 30 compared to normal levels of 18.5 to 24.5.
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More than one in three (33.8 percent) were obese, with a BMI over 30.9. (BMI is calculated by dividing a person’s weight in kilograms by the square of his or her height in meters.)

The body stores dietary fat quite effortlessly as body fat.
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We also store surplus fat in our liver, heart, and muscles. The accumulation of
fat in these organs is a hallmark of a condition referred to as insulin resistance, which in turn contributes to heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes.
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Carrying around excess weight also puts stress on the joints, leading to osteoarthritis in the hips and knees. Excess dietary fat and body weight alter your entire cellular metabolism and can stimulate the development of certain cancers.
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Cholesterol is found nearly exclusively in animal products; plants contain only insignificant quantities.
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Like all animals, we produce all the cholesterol we need for our own uses. Unfortunately, our bodies are not very efficient at eliminating the excess; we excrete only a little more than the amount we make ourselves. When we add to our cholesterol load by eating animal foods, the excess accumulates in our skin and tendons, as well as in the arteries where it is a major contributor to vascular diseases of the heart and brain, leading to heart attacks and strokes.
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Cholesterol also facilitates cancer development.
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The sulfur-containing amino acids found in large amounts in meat, poultry, fish, eggs, and cheese act as a culprit in a wide range of problems. Perhaps most noticeable is the familiar stink of sulfur we associate with rotten eggs. In the body, sulfur causes bad breath, body odor, and foul-smelling gas and stools.

When we take in the sulfur-containing amino acid methionine by eating animal foods, we metabolize it into another amino acid, homocysteine, which is a known risk factor for heart attack, stroke, arterial diseases of the legs, blood clots in the veins, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, and depression.
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Sulfur feeds cancerous tumors and is known to be toxic to the tissues of the intestine, causing severe colitis.
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We eventually metabolize sulfur-containing amino acids, methionine included, into sulfuric acid, one of the most potent acids found in
nature. These potent dietary acids dissolve the bones and cause the kidneys to produce calcium-based stones.

Animal foods are loaded with dietary acids. After we eat them, our bones release the alkaline materials carbonate, citrate, and sodium from their generous storehouse to neutralize the acids, maintaining the body at the precise pH level needed to sustain life.
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Over time, this process weakens the bones, leading to osteoporosis. Acids from animal foods also raise body levels of the steroid cortisol,
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triggering bone loss. Thus, the chronic overconsumption of dietary acids from meat, poultry, fish, and cheese essentially causes you to pee your bones into the toilet.

Reducing or eliminating the animal foods in your diet immediately relieves the burden on your body from these five dietary poisons, and at the same time greatly reduces your risk of exposure to infectious bacteria, viruses, parasites, and prion diseases (like those that cause mad cow disease).
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The best way to cut out these toxic foods is to replace them with whole grains, legumes, and starchy vegetables—foods that provide all of the nutrition you need, along with sufficient calories and substance to give you energy and keep you feeling satisfied. Even if you are already showing signs of sickness from the excesses of meat, dairy, and eggs, there is hope. Starch has an immense ability to allow your body to naturally heal itself.