STARCH – The Delicious Devil

“Starches increase the stress hormones, interfering with progesterone and thyroid.” -Ray Peat

For those who follow Ray Peat’s science nothing is more debatable than starches. Too often my elderly friend defends her routine of eating her English muffins every morning and those Club crackers all day long saying how she has eaten grains her whole life and has lived to be a hundred years old. I tell her, while looking at her red elephant ankles and big belly, that grains for the first fifty years of her life were much different than our altered pesticide laden “Frankenwheat” of now. Besides the chromosomes being altered to making the wheat three times bigger than it is suppose to be which the body has trouble figuring out how to find it easy and friendly to deal with, inorganic wheat with it’s pesticides and cheap added vitamins causes even more inflammation in the body…

“Industrially processed grains have most of the nutrients, such as vitamin E, the B vitamins, manganese, magnesium, etc., removed to improve the products’ shelf life and efficiency of processing, and the government required that certain nutrients be added to them as a measure to protect the public’s health, but the supplementation did not reflect the best science even when it was first made law, since food industry lobbyists managed to impose compromises that led to the use of the cheapest chemicals, rather than those that offered the greatest health benefits. For example, studies of processed animal food had demonstrated that the addition of iron (as the highly reactive form, ferrous sulfate, which happens to be cheap and easy to handle) created disease in animals, by destroying vitamins in the food. You should read the label of ingredients and avoid products that contain added iron, when possible.” -Ray Peat

The American food pyramid in those last fifty years was so misguiding suggesting to eat IN ONE DAY 8 to 12 servings of grains a day, and we wonder why Americans are so fat!

“There isn’t anything wrong with a high carbohydrate diet, and even a high starch diet isn’t necessarily incompatible with good health, but when better foods are available they should be used instead of starches. For example, fruits have many advantages over grains, besides the difference between sugar and starch. Bread and pasta consumption are strongly associated with the occurrence of diabetes, fruit consumption has a strong inverse association.” -Ray Peat

In my health journey grains have not been helpful to me in any way, and have been just the opposite. I have found sprouted oats to be the lesser evil of all of the grains, but even eating those don’t help me lose weight. The only starch I eat nowadays are the sweeter new potatoes and white sweet potatoes. Both of these have more sugar and far less starch and I boil them rather than bake or fry them to remove even more starch. Ray Peat says starches prepared properly for human consumption and paired with fats is “safe” not “optimal”…

“When starch is well cooked, and eaten with some fat and the essential nutrients, it’s safe, except that it’s more likely than sugar to produce fat, and isn’t as effective for mineral balance.” -Ray Peat

Dr. William David the author of “Wheat Belly” talks about the opioid effect of wheat, gluten and other grains. Grains quiet the brain and I see it in my father every time he has them. He gets quiet and gives up on the day just wanting to sleep. If he eats more he has full blown Alzheimer’s. When he is with me for weeks without grains his memory is normal and he loses a lot of weight. I just feed him fruit and sugar instead.

One of the major keys to the best health of my life at sixty is the avoidance of grains. It is funny to me comparing the American food pyramid to Ray Peat’s food pyramid and think that Ray Peat is the crazy one!