Starchy foods have been a mainstay of the human diet for thousands of years. For many people starchy foods provide their primary source of affordable calories each day. While starches are a bad idea for a sizable portion of the population, they are very usable for the larger percentage of folks.
Remember, we are all individuals. There is no one right diet that will produce health for everyone. Even more to the point, the diet that is perfect for you might easily kill someone else over time. Keep this in mind whenever you listen to or read diet advice from so-called “experts”. Biochemical individuality overrides everything in the diet world.
One thing we can look at that applies to most people is the consumption of poison – it is bad for most people. What we miss is that a lot of the foods we regularly consume are poisonous. We tend to think of poisons as something that will kill us within minutes, like a poisonous mushroom. But most poisons take years to do their damage. Obvious examples are heavy metals like lead and mercury. They take years to cause their damage. Plant toxins are similar to heavy metals. In small doses our liver can usually detoxify and neutralize most plant poisons if our liver is working well. In larger doses the poisons slowly damage the body on many levels.
The poison I would like to focus on in this letter is sugar. Yes, it is a plant poison in humans when the dose exceeds what our liver can process. There are two components to the sugar story – the two molecules that sugar is made from – glucose and fructose. Each affects us differently, and our tolerance is different for each.
“Wait a minute!” you say, “I thought that our body needs sugar for energy. How could it be a poison?” For most people sugar is the gasoline their body engines use to run everything. But like gasoline, sugar is very dangerous – it chemically ‘burns,’ and if it burns the wrong things, you get tissue damage. What happens in the body is very much like the famous chocolate factory scene from the classic TV show “I Love Lucy”. Watch this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NPzLBSBzPI
If you take in exactly the right amount of sugar your body needs and can process, everything works fine – like the first minute in the assembly line in the chocolate factory. If you take in too much, chaos happens – just like when the assembly line goes too fast.
Everybody has been told that we eat way too much sugar in this country. But what they are not being told is that every starchy food is sugar. Breads, potatoes, rice, corn, anything starchy is just long chains of glucose sugar that break down into sugar once you eat them. Some things like rice cakes actually get into the blood stream faster than eating straight sugar does. When the blood sugar spikes up too high you get burning of your tissues. Your blood sugar is supposed to stay around 70 – 80. At that level it slowly enters cells where it is turned into cellular energy for your body. But after a high starch meal your blood sugar can spike up to 200 to over 300 – bad news. You have no place to put all this extra sugar so your body is now being poisoned by the excess sugar. This poisoning manifests slowly as hardening of the arteries, dementia, heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and so on. These diseases have reached epidemic proportions over the last 100 years.
So how come 200 years ago they did not have all these diseases? They ate lots of starchy foods back then. They may not have had the white sugar we have now, but they had tones of starch in the form of bread, beans, potatoes, rice, and so on. I mentioned how the liver processes the sugar we eat, but there is another part to the puzzle – our muscles. Sugar is stored in two places in the body – our liver and our muscles. When we eat a load of starch, our liver will try to store the excess. It will try to convert the excess into fats to store in our fat cells. But this is a slow process. The bulk of the excess sugar from a starchy meal is supposed to be stored in our muscles.
About 200 years ago 95% of people had lifestyles that required hard physical labor every day. Their muscles used up all the sugar stored in them every day and were always ready to store more sugar when it was available. We don’t have that lifestyle today. Unless you are a carpenter, roofer, professional athlete, or have a similar hard physical job, your muscles never use up the sugar stored in them. So when you eat excess sugar, they are already full. They can’t lower the sugar levels in your blood. Consequently your gasoline is not being stored in the gas tank, but being spilled all over the car. This is why what should be good food for us poisons us. Our gas tanks are too full because we don’t empty them out every day.
Our body tries to save us by ramping up our ability to convert and store the excess food as fat, but this ramping up creates even more inflammation.
Science tells us that exercise affects our ability to loose weight almost not at all. You have to exercise intensely for an hour just to burn a measly 400 calories. Yet look around – check out those folks that are riding bicycles all the time or doing long distance running. How much excess fat are they storing? They aren’t, because they are emptying their gas tanks regularly. They burn their arteries up with excess oxygen from the excess aerobic exercise, but they have empty gas tanks to store the sugar from their meals.
We have an obesity epidemic. It is worldwide. Even poor countries have this problem because starch is the cheapest food. The problem is we have not adapted our diet to our modern sedentary lifestyle. Our starchy foods are now poison because we don’t use up the sugar they turn into. Is a slice of toast (gluten free in my case) with your eggs in the morning a problem – no. Is a stack of pancakes with syrup, or a big breakfast muffin or pastry a problem – a big yes. That baked potato with dinner turns into more sugar than your body can handle. Is a burger with a bun a problem – probably not. Is a burger with French fries and a soda a problem – a serious yes.
If you want to eat your starchy foods without consequence, you have to work your muscles hard enough to use up the sugar stored in them every day. That little workout at the gym three times a week is not going to do it. If you have a sitting job there is no way you can get the amount of exercise to deplete the muscle-stored sugar. If you want to avoid the typical degenerative diseases most people are getting these days, this means you have to stop eating the quantities and types of starches you are eating now. That means switching to vegetables as a main food source. Going Paleo and eating lots of meat has similar problems. Excess protein in the diet is simply converted into sugar and the same problem results. The body can’t store protein, and excess laying around is toxic, so it converts it into sugar thinking it will be stored in the liver and muscles. When that does not happen then it is converted into body fat.
Folks with highly physical jobs can end up burning 4000 to 5000 calories a day. Sitting jobs can end up using only 1500 to 1800 calories a day, yet the average person still consumes 2500 to 3000 calories each day. Can you see the problem? Starches can be perfectly healthy foods for most people when they are eaten in the right amounts – amounts matched to their personal activity levels. For most people that means a single 1 to 2 ounce serving of starch at each meal, no more.
Personally, I am skipping the potato so I can snag the chocolate chip cookie after dinner.