Is starch good for you, or bad for you? The question is not really about starch, but about you. Look around, everyone you see and know all look different. Check out who is wandering around the grocery store and notice the huge diversity of body shapes and sizes. We are all different on the inside just as much as we are all different on the outside. The biggest trick to gaining good health is to figure out what foods work well for you and what foods do not. Ignore what the government health pyramid says and ignore what most science studies say because they are all based on “average” responses to each study. The problem is very few of us are part of the average.
This reality was driven home once again to me yesterday after reading a long article on the benefits and problems of taking resistant starch. There are hundreds of kinds of starch. One large class of starches is called resistant because they resist being digested by our digestive tract. However various bacteria in our gut can digest them. Depending upon just what bacteria we are talking about, this could be a good thing or a bad thing. Some bacteria turn the resistant starch into special short chain fats like butyrate, which help heal our gut lining. Other bacteria turn resistant starch into poisons that inflame our gut lining.
In the article I read the author was writing about some folks that had found a particular corn based resistant starch had helped them enormously with their irritable bowel syndrome while another group of people had the same starch trigger flare-ups of their IBS. The author was reviewing many different resistant starches like raw potato starch, plantain starch, arabinogalactans from larch trees, glucomannan from konjac root, and corn starch. Many resistant starches are used in packaged foods to give them various desirable consistencies and qualities, so you are probably eating them without even knowing.
A few years ago the tremendous benefits of probiotics started really gaining steam in the public. This highlighted the importance of what else was in your diet to feed the good bacteria. A gut full of good bacteria is like a yard full of chickens – you have to feed them the right foods for them to survive. Different bacteria eat different things. Many of them like starches, in particular the resistant starches, because these are what is left over for them to eat after the first stage of digestion. We suck up most of the digestible starches for ourselves by turning it into sugar and pulling that sugar into the blood stream. What’s left over is what the bacteria grow on.
The bottom line is that no one knows just what bacteria types you have in your gut (there are thousands of types), so there is no easy way to know what types you have in your gut and in what quantities. (We each have 500 different types of bacteria on average in varying percentages.) So just from a gut bug perspective, the only way to know if a particular starch is good for you is to try it out. As little as a teaspoon can produce a reaction if your system does not like it.
As you can see, whether a starch is a friend or foe begins even before we talk about the impact of the starch on your own body cells as it impacts the bacteria we carry around in our gut. Now lets talk about the impact of starch on our own cells. As I already wrote, there are many kinds of starches. The simplest starches almost immediately turn into the simple sugar glucose and are absorbed in the first foot of the intestine – the duodenum. A puffed rice cake is a good example of just such a starch. Within minutes it becomes sugar in the blood – faster even than white table sugar.
On the other end of the spectrum is something like parboiled or converted rice. The parboiling process converts the starch into a form that breaks down very slowly in our gut. If you have any blood sugar issues, parboiled/converted rice is the way to go. It takes hours to slowly convert into sugar and be absorbed into our blood stream.
This highlights the second main difference between people – blood sugar stability. Here again, everyone is different in how stable his or her blood sugar is. Some people can eat doughnuts and drink soda and have fine blood sugar levels while others only have to drive by a doughnut shop to go into a diabetic blood sugar crisis.
This is all about very complex hormonal, neurological, metabolic, and immune system differences between people. It also has to do with just how long a person’s system has been abused by too much starch and sugar.
Over time it takes its toll.
Another realm of individual difference is the issue of food sensitivities, lectin reactions, and allergies. For instance, by some estimates, nearly half the population is sensitive to potatoes creating joint swelling and pain. All seeds and grains are covered in the plant poisons called lectins in order to keep mold and insects away. These same plant poisons affect many people, but not all people. All natural food sources of starch also contain small amounts of allergenic proteins – at least allergenic to some people. So again, without very expensive testing there is no way to know who is sensitive to what starches.
Ok, so how do we test starches for ourselves? What are we looking for?
The most common symptoms of starch reactions are bloating, belly swelling, excess gas, pain anywhere, loose stools or constipation, and back pain for the GI system. Blood sugar reactions include tiredness after eating, craving sweets after meals, headaches, and a waistline either greater than 35 inches or wider than your hips. Sensitivity reactions can be almost any symptom, but commonly include joint pain and swelling, mental confusion, swelling in the feet or hands, water retention, heart palpitations, and lung/sinus issues.
The first step to testing for reactions is to get clear of any current reactions by avoiding any possible offending foods. The classic technique is to do a lemonade diet for 3 to 4 days – that is consuming only lemon water with maple syrup for sweetening only for 3 to 4 days – no food. This should relieve any food reaction symptoms other than stubborn autoimmune stuff from foods like gluten and dairy. Since we are testing for starches specifically, we could instead do 3 to 4 days of just meats, non-starchy vegetables, and leafy greens – soups, salads, and stir-fries. If this eliminates the troublesome symptoms then proceed with the starch challenge testing. If this does not eliminate the symptoms then you will have to go the full lemonade only process to see if that gets rid of the symptoms before testing.
Test by adding one starch at a time with several hours between each test. Watch for any appearance of the symptoms you were concerned with. Obviously if you have a reaction to a starch, eliminate that source of starch from your diet for now. While this may seem like a difficult protocol, it is nothing compared to the suffering someone with IBS or ulcerative colitis goes through. If this can pinpoint the causative triggers for these conditions then it is well worth it.
If all you have is trouble with bloating and gas then a simple food diary with a record of any symptoms during the five hours after each meal may enable you to pinpoint the bothersome foods.
The bottom line is that we each have different insides that react differently to foods. There are no rules that apply to everybody in the diet world. You have to find out for yourself just what foods feel good in your tummy and give you energy and mental clarity. Foods that bloat you and make your brain fuzzy simply need to be avoided most of the time. So if you have been frustrated trying to follow other peoples advice about what is and is not right for your body, the answer is to check in with your body to find out the truth.