The Starch Solution Read Online Free Page A

perishable vegetables contain only small quantities of starch. Their most important role is to contribute flavor, texture, color, and aroma to your starch-based meals. They offer a bonus in the additional nutrients (such as vitamin A and C) that come along for the ride.
     
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The American Diet
     

     
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The Starch Solution
     

     
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    Why then, here in the states and increasingly around the world, as all populations undergo economic development, have we become so afraid and ashamed of this most elemental food? And what price are we paying for shunning the most basic dietary staple known to humankind?
     

S TARCH I S THE K EY I NGREDIENT
    Diet and nutrition advice is often focused on
how much
we ought to eat, and misses the point: More important than how much, how often, and when we eat is
what
we eat. Different kinds of animals require different types of diets. We humans are built to thrive on starch. The more rice, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and beans we eat, the trimmer, more energetic, and healthier we become.
     
    Starch? Really? Isn’t that for laundry? Yes, but it’s also the key to optimum health and satiety. We hear a lot about carbohydrates and whether or not we should eat them, but we don’t hear enough about the most valuable type of carbohydrate, starch.
     
    There are three basic types of carbohydrates—sugar, cellulose, and starch—each made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in specific configurations. The simplest of these—sugar—includes sucrose (the granulated sugar you bake into cookies), fructose (which makes fruit taste sweet), lactose (found in milk), and glucose (the simple sugar that comes together in chains to make cellulose and starch). Sugar provides quick and powerful energy because it is so efficiently broken down in the body. (You’ll learn more about sugar in Chapter 12 .)
     
    The second type of carbohydrate, cellulose, is made up of chains of glucose bonded together by indigestible linkages. It is found in the cell walls of plants and in wood and other organic matter. Our digestive system doesn’t have the enzymes to break down cellulose to use it for fuel, but termites do, which is why they can eat through the wood beams of your home. Although we get no energy from them, indigestible carbohydrates like cellulose are valuable to us for their dietary fiber.
     
    The gold medal for the carbohydrate most beneficial to humans goes to starch. Like cellulose, starches are made up of long-branching chains of glucose molecules. Starch is valuable to us because we can break it down into simple sugars that provide us with sustained energy and keep us feeling full and satisfied. Starchy foods are plants that are high in long-chain digestible carbohydrates—commonly referred to as complex carbohydrates. Examples include grains like wheat, barley, rye, corn, and oats; starchy vegetables like winter squash, potatoes, and sweet potatoes; and legumes like brown lentils, green peas, and red kidney beans. Starch is so important that an international scientific journal—
Starch
—is dedicated to its study. Starch is at the core of my health-enhancing diet. If you take away just one message from this book, it should be: Eat more starch. Basic to our human nature is the scientific fact that we are, and have always been, primarily starch eaters. According to the world-renowned anthropologist from Dartmouth College, Nathaniel Dominy, PhD, “A majority of calories for most hunter-gatherer societies came from plant-foods, not animal-foods, thus humans might be more appropriately described as ‘starchivores.’” Think of yourself as a starchivore, like a cat is a carnivore and a horse is an herbivore.
     
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McDougall’s Classification of Common Foods
     

Starches
Grains: Barley, buckwheat, corn, millet, oats, rice, rye, sorghum, wheat, wild rice
     
Legumes: Beans, lentils, peas
     
Starchy Vegetables: Carrots, Jerusalem artichokes, parsnips, potatoes,