By
Dr. John McDougall
The following article is the first chapter to The Starch
Solution. Please
read it with a critical eye and send your comments back to me at
[email protected]. You are welcome to share this with friends
with copyright attached. This version was updated on 3-4-09.
The Starch Solution
This truth is simple and is, therefore, easy to explain. You must eat
to live. But the choice of what you eat is yours. There is an
individual, specific diet that best supports the health, function, and
longevity of each and every animal. The proper diet for human beings is
based on starches. The more rice, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and
beans you eat, the trimmer and healthier you will be—and with those same
food choices you will help save the Planet Earth too.
My recommendation for eating starches puts glazed looks on people’s
faces, and many dismiss me as certifiably crazy. They think of starch as
something used in the laundry to stiffen shirts. Starch brings back
memories of pasty bland-tasting goop, and white, airy Wonder Bread. Most
disturbing is that nearly everyone believes starches are fattening and
nutritionally inferior foods. Fortunately, common knowledge is
completely wrong and the proof is right before your own eyes.
The most important evidence supporting my claim that the natural
human diet is based on starches is a simple observation that you can
easily validate for yourself: All large populations of trim, healthy
people, throughout verifiable human history, have obtained the bulk of
their calories from starch. Examples of once thriving people include
Japanese, Chinese, and other Asians eating sweet potatoes, buckwheat,
and/or rice, Incas in South America eating potatoes, Mayans and Aztecs
in Central America eating corn, and Egyptians in the Middle East eating
wheat. There have been only a few small isolated populations of
primitive people, such as the Arctic Eskimos, living at the extremes of
the environment, who have eaten otherwise. Therefore, scientific
documentation of what people have eaten over the past thirteen thousand
years convincingly supports my claim.
Men and women following diets based on grains, vegetables, and fruits
have accomplished all of the great feats in history. The ancient
conquerors of Europe and Asia, including the armies of Alexander the
Great (356 – 323 BC) and Genghis Khan (1162 – 1227 AD) consumed
starch-based diets. Caesar’s legions complained when they had too much
meat in their diet and preferred to do their fighting on grains.1
Primarily six foods: barley, maize (corn), millet, potatoes, rice, and
wheat have fueled the caloric engines of human civilization.
Starches Consumed Throughout History
- Barley – Middle East for 11,000 years
- Corn (maize) – North, Central, and South America for 7,000
years
- Legumes – Americas, Asia, and Europe for 6,000 years
- Millet – Africa for 6,000 years
- Oats – Middle East for 11,000 years
- Potatoes – South America (Andes) for 13,000 years
- Sorghum – East Africa for 6,000 years
- Sweet Potatoes – South America and Caribbean for 5,000 years
- Rice – Asia for more than 10,000 years
- Rye – Asia for 5000 years
- Wheat – Near East for 10,000 years
Our DNA Nails It
Based on our anatomy and physiology experts have long concluded that
primates, including humans, are designed to eat a diet consisting mostly
of plant foods. The natural diet of chimpanzees, our closest relative,
is nearly pure vegetarian in composition; made up largely of fruits; and
in the dry seasons when fruit is scarce, they eat tree seeds, flowers,
soft pith, and bark; with termites and small mammals making an
insignificant contribution to their nutrition all year long.
Recently, scientists have proven through genetic testing that we are
designed to thrive best on one category of plant food known as starch.
Human and chimp DNA is roughly 99% identical, but that 1% difference,
which includes genes to digest much more starch, proved crucial for the
evolution of humanity's earliest ancestors. Examination of the number of
copies of the gene for the synthesis of the starch-digesting enzyme,
amylase, has found an average of 6 copies in humans, compared to only 2
copies of this gene in other primates.2 This genetic difference results
in the production of 6 to 8 times higher levels of starch-digesting
enzymes in human saliva. The limited ability of chimpanzees and others
in the great ape family to utilize starch tied their species to the
tropical jungles where fruits are abundant all year long.
Starches were a critical food source for the ancestors of early and
modern humans. The ability to efficiently utilize starch provided the
opportunity for us to migrate out of Africa—to colonize the rest of the
planet (to locations where fruits are plentiful only in summer and
fall). Starch-filled tubers and grains act as storage units for
concentrated calories that last throughout the winter, are widely
distributed geographically, and are easy to gather. Their abundant
calories also supplied the extra energy necessary for the brain to
evolve from monkey-size to human-size (a three times difference).3
People Are Starch-Eaters
People should be thought of as “starch-eaters;” just like cats are
“meat-eaters.” Until recently, except for a small number of wealthy
aristocrats, members of the human species have obtained the bulk of
their calories from starch. After the mid 1800s with the creation of
colossal wealth during the industrial revolution and the harnessing of
fossil fuels, millions, and then billions, of people were able to eat
from a table piled high with meat, fowl, and dairy, once available only
to royalty. Look around you—the consequences are obvious—everyday people
appear rotund like the kings and queens pictured in old paintings. Look
a little further and you will discover the Starch Solution.
Starch is a “complex carbohydrate” made up of long chains of sugar
molecules, stored in the plants’ parts for their future use. During the
growing season, green leaves collect energy from the sun and synthesize
sugars that are converted into tiny starch granules. The plants use this
stockpile for survival over winter, to re-grow the next year, and to
reproduce. Starchy plant-food-parts selected by people for eating are
simply called “starches.” Tubers (potatoes, sweet potato, cassava),
winter squashes (pumpkin, butternut, hubbard), legumes (beans, peas,
lentils), and grains (barley, corn, rice, wheat) serve as organs for
storing starch.
Green and yellow vegetables, such as broccoli, cauliflower, and
asparagus, accumulate relatively little starch, and fruits are made up
of simple sugars, not complex ones. All animal foods, including beef,
chicken, fish, shellfish, eggs, milk, and cheese, contain no starch at
all.
While easily providing the abundance of calories needed for winning
marathons, starches do not promote excess weight gain. That is because
the human body efficiently regulates carbohydrates from starches,
burning them off, rather than storing them, when consumed in excess. How
effective is our body’s regulation? Obesity has been unknown among
billions of Asians with a wide variety of activity levels who have
followed traditional diets based on rice. However, these people’s
immunity immediately disappears when they switch to meals based on meat
and dairy foods, because the human body unsuccessfully balances for
excess fat consumption—storing these calories in the abdomen, buttocks,
and thighs. The fat you eat is the fat you wear.
Starches are very low in fat (1% to 8% of their calories), contain no
cholesterol, do not grow human pathogens, like salmonella, E. Coli, and
“mad cow” prions, and do not store poisonous chemicals, like DDT and
methyl mercury. Outside surface contamination, for example, from cow
dung and pesticide sprays, may occur, but that is not a fault with the
plants. Starch is clean fuel.
The carbohydrates abundant in starches pleasurably stimulate the
sweet-tasting sensory buds on the tips of our tongues. Here gastronomic
enjoyment and satisfaction begin. Because of their natural rewarding
properties—having great taste and nourishing calories—people refer to
beans, breads, corn, pasta, potatoes, and rice as “comfort foods.” In
addition to “clean and efficient, satisfying energy,” starches provide
an abundance of other nutrients, such as proteins, essential fats,
vitamins, and minerals. Some single starches, for example potatoes and
sweet potatoes, are “complete foods” and can easily meet all of our
nutritional needs alone. Grains and legumes are deficient in vitamins A
and C. The addition of a small amount of fruit or green and yellow
vegetable easily provides for these vitamins, making a diet based on
these seeds (grains and legumes) sound.
Unguided Wealth Stole Our Health
My parents lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s. My
mother’s family could not even afford to pay the rent on their
apartment—the generosity of their landlord kept them from living on the
streets of Decatur, Illinois. The sparse diet her family ate during
these hard times was made up of turnips, rutabagas, and potatoes. My
mother’s painful memories caused her to make a promise that her children
would never have to suffer as she did.
Growing up I ate eggs and bacon for breakfast, meat-filled sandwiches
for lunch, and beef, pork, and chicken were the centerpieces of every
dinner. All three of these starch-deficient daily meals were washed down
with glassfuls of milk. The effects on my personal health were
instructional. For as far back as I can remember, I suffered daily
stomachaches and brutally immovable constipation. At age seven I lost my
tonsils. I was often sick with colds and flu. My lack of endurance put
me in last place in gym class. Oily skin and acne marked my face as a
teenager. At age 18 an uncommon incident happened to me—I suffered a
major stroke with total left-sided paralysis. My own mother called me
fat in my early twenties (I was 50 pounds overweight). When I was 25,
the abdominal pains became so intolerable, that I underwent exploratory
surgery. My mother’s wish was fulfilled; I never suffered as she did.
Her intentions were good ones; she fed our family based upon the best
nutritional advice of the times—most of it provided to the public by the
meat and dairy industries. Calcium and protein were worshipped as the
nutrients most vital to any meal plan. Concerns about the adverse
consequences of these animal foods on human health and the environment
were recognized in these times, but largely dismissed by food
industry-funded scientists as unimportant.4
Dietary Change Is Terrifying
Almost all of us were raised on meat, poultry, milk, cheese, oils,
flours, and sugars. These items have provided most of our
life-sustaining calories. To give these familiar foods up, in our minds,
means starvation. This would be akin to asking us to stop breathing or
to go thirsty—unbearable, if not impossible, tasks. I remember well my
first experience with foods different from those I was raised on. Mary,
my wife of 37 years now, was pregnant with our first child, Heather, in
1974. We were living on the Big Island of Hawaii at that time. Buzz and
Susan Hughes, a couple we had met at our childbirth education class,
invited us over for dinner. Susan had prepared a casserole of wheat and
barley, a Caesar salad, vegetable side dishes, and a peach pie for
dessert. The meal was tasty, but a drastic departure from my usual beef,
chicken, cheese, egg, and ice cream menu. Even after second helpings my
stomach was still empty of its customary fillings. On our drive home
after dinner, I felt unsatisfied and actually believed that I would be
unable to sleep through the night without “food.” I entered the front
door of our house, which led directly to the kitchen with a well-stocked
refrigerator. I eagerly opened the bottom bin where the sliced turkey
was kept and made myself a Dagwood sandwich. After eating sufficient
amounts of fat, protein, flour, and sugar, I slept well.
I adjusted mentally and physically after only a few more healthy
eating experiences, and soon learned how much more tasty and satisfying
meals based on mashed potatoes, bean burritos, mu shu vegetables and
rice, spaghetti and marinara sauce, and soups and breads are than meals
based on animal muscles and lactation fluids. The Starch Solution is a
simple switch: rather than getting calories from fat and protein, the
primary fuel for people becomes carbohydrate. Instead of starvation,
this change means fuller appetite satisfaction and radiant health. The
more meat and dairy you replace with starch the trimmer and healthier
you become—this is not an all or nothing proposition. This book is not
about becoming a vegetarian or a vegan. However, when you are finished
reading, your consumption of starch-deficient foods will plummet, along
with excess weight, physical and mental suffering, and need for
medications and surgeries.
Expect Economic Shifts
The adoption of a starch-based diet by any sizable share of the
world’s populations will have major ramifications, because huge profits
are at stake and industry will fight back. The food industries’ goals
have been, and always will be, to entice the consumer to eat more meat,
poultry, seafood, dairy products, and processed foods because those are
the high profit items. Rice, corn, and potatoes are plentiful, easy to
grow, and cheap. Switching to a starch-based diet will not only affect
the food industries, but will also drastically shrink the pharmaceutical
and medical businesses by preventing and curing common illnesses,
including obesity, heart disease, diabetes, arthritis, and intestinal
disturbances ranging from heartburn to constipation.
Implementation of the Starch Solution may appear impossible because
the hands of commerce reach into every area of politics, science, and
education. The food industry employs to their advantage lobbyists,
influence peddling, the revolving door syndrome, and massive
agricultural subsidies. Their money corrupts medical doctors,
dietitians, scientists, professional associations, and medical journals.
With a donation, according to a memo from the American Dietetic
Association (ADA), Coca-Cola becomes an “ADA Partner in the
Association’s corporate relations sponsorship program. The program
provides Partners a national platform via ADA events and programs with
prominent access to key influencers, thought leaders and decision makers
in the food and nutrition marketplace.”5 The Oklahoma Beef Council (OBC)
sponsored several American Heart Association (AHA) events in the spring
of 2006 to communicate how lean beef easily fits into a heart-healthy
diet.6 The newly released 2006 AHA Diet and Lifestyle Recommendations by
no coincidence include heart-attack-causing meat as part of a
heart-healthy diet.7 The American Dietetic Association and the American
Heart Association are only two, among dozens, of respectable sounding
organizations that you once believed in, who receive funding from food
interests—and as a consequence they act as fronts for industry.8
Major universities, such as Harvard and Tufts, are also funded by
food interests, and they perpetuate industry-favoring lies that keep the
consuming public from making correct decisions about their diet.8 For
example, Tufts University’s nutrition department (which receives funding
from Procter & Gamble and Kraft Foods) tells the public, “Plant protein
sources, although good for certain essential amino acids, do not always
offer all nine essential amino acids in a single given food.”9 The
scientific truth is all single starches and vegetables contain all eight
essential and all twelve nonessential amino acids in amounts and
arrangements that always meet human needs. The nutritional falsehood
about “amino acid deficient plants” spread by industry-supported
universities causes people to add artery-clogging meats and dairy
products to their diet in order to get “complete protein.” Almost no one
can be trusted because so much money taints them.10
The food industries win over the public by an advertising campaign
that convinces us that “a well-balanced diet” is best. Meaning that
almost anything and everything that is sold in the supermarket should be
part of the human diet. People should select from cat food (meat) to
calf food (milk) and foods you would never feed your favorite pets, such
as cakes, donuts, and candy bars, according to the food industry. They
also divert our attention away from proper eating and the dangers of
their products by providing unattainable solutions, like “exercise more”
and “eat less” to lose weight. The rising epidemics of obesity and
sickness worldwide, under the tutelage of the food industry, prove a
more truthful answer is long overdue; and that is for the world’s
peoples to obtain the bulk of their food from one or more healthy
delicious starches.
We Know Better
Despite the deafening drone from big businesses, since the 1950s
there has been sound advice to eat more vegetables, fruits, and grains,
and to eat less fat from meat and dairy products. In the introduction to
the 1977 report issued by the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Nutrition
and Human Needs, Dr. Mark Hegsted of the Harvard School of Public Health
said: “I wish to stress that there is a great deal of evidence and it
continues to accumulate, which strongly implicates and, in some
instances, proves that the major causes of death and disability in the
United States are related to the diet we eat. I include coronary artery
disease, which accounts for nearly half of the deaths in the United
States, several of the most important forms of cancer, hypertension,
diabetes, and obesity as well as other chronic diseases.”11
In 2002, the World Health Organization published a report on how the
nutrition transition towards refined foods, foods of animal origin (meat
and dairy products), and increased fats is causing the current global
epidemics of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases and predicted
that by 2020 two-thirds of the global burden of disease will be
attributable to diseases mostly from diet.12
Because of our inability and unwillingness to respond to the truth we
are now suffering the greatest health crisis ever known to humankind.
Worldwide, 1.1 billion people are overweight and 312 million obese, 18
million people die of heart disease annually, more than 197 million have
diabetes, and half of all people following the Western diet develop
life-threatening cancers.13
The Western Diet Is a Planet-killer
The stakes are greater than a few billion fat, sick people. Marching
side by side with mounting levels of human sickness are escalating
environmental catastrophes due in large part to abandoning our diet of
starches for livestock at every meal at every dinner table. According to
the report, Livestock’s Long Shadow –Environmental Issues and Options,
released in November of 2006 from the United Nations Food and
Agriculture Organization, livestock emerges as one of the top two or
three most significant contributors to every one of the most serious
environmental problems.14
For thirty-two years I have believed people would rise up and take
action once they realized that the vast majority of human sickness and
suffering in developed countries is due to eating animal and junk foods,
and that the simple solution is to switch to a starch-based diet. The
masses have remained quiet. For the past decade I have witnessed the
growing epidemic of childhood obesity—a misery caused largely by the
fast food giants. All this time I have waited for informed citizens to
rise up in protest, or at the very least, to boycott the perpetrators of
this child abuse. The sellers of easily procured beef burgers and milk
shakes thrive, successfully uncontested by a single one of us.
Until now, inaction meant other people and their children became fat,
sick, and died prematurely—somehow, we have been able to live with those
immoralities. The truth is that most human beings find the destruction
of fellow human beings, even little ones, acceptable. You can assume
these same people will sit idly by and let the entire earth be
destroyed. But we cannot let this happen, because this is our world,
too. This time, failure to act means that we and our children will be
lost, along with those who do not seem to understand or care.
An amazingly simple win-win opportunity stares us in the face: a
global switch to a starch-based diet will solve the diseases of
over-nutrition and put a big dent in global warming with one
U-turn—since the up-to-now insatiable appetite for foodstuffs made from
livestock (cows, sheep, pigs, and chickens), with abandonment of starchy
plant foods, are at the root of both disasters. We must implement the
Starch Solution.
Quick Paybacks with Starch
A switch back to the kind of diet followed by most people who have
ever walked this earth would have enormous and widespread benefits. The
Starch Solution could prevent more deaths in one year than have been
prevented by all the antibiotics, diabetic pills, cholesterol-lowering
statins, and blood pressure pills prescribed over the past half century.
Not one case of type-2 diabetes has ever been cured with insulin, nor
has any patient with coronary artery disease been cured by heart
surgery; yet a switch to a starch-based diet has been proven to stop and
reverse these as well as most other chronic diseases. The net toll on
human lives saved in the first decade of implementing the Starch
Solution would be greater than the lives lost by all wars fought in the
20th century in Western countries.
Abandoning meat and dairy foods would overnight result in more
savings in fossil fuels than all the solar farms, windmills, and nuclear
plants that could be built in the next three decades. Consider that most
vegetable produce requires about two calories of fossil-fuel energy to
cultivate per one calorie of food energy; with beef; the ratio can be as
high as 80 to one.15 Because livestock products account for 18% of
greenhouse gas production, compared to 14% for all transportation, this
simple, long-overdue diet change would have a greater effect on the
rapidly approaching environmental apocalypse than would removing all
cars from the highways worldwide.14 For everyday food choices, consider
that growing four pounds (1200 calories) of potatoes generates 14 times
fewer greenhouse gases than producing a pound of beef (1200 calories).16
Potatoes also provide much more food, health, and appetite satisfaction
than beef at the same time.
Individuals can expect an immediate personal financial payback. The
average daily cost of eating all 3 meals at fast food restaurants is
about $14 (US). On a starch-based diet you can easily feed yourself for
$3 or less a day. Your medical expenses can be eliminated in most cases
and your personal productivity will skyrocket overnight.
Truth Is The Solution
We are prevented from solving problems ranging from acne to species
extermination by false information. Starch as our food source must no
longer be vilified. Meat, poultry, fish, and dairy can no longer be
exalted. Currently, past the age of 30, in Western countries, almost
everyone is overweight, on medications and/or has risk factors, like
high cholesterol or high blood pressure, which predict premature
disability and death. Fat, sick people will have much greater difficulty
solving the health, environmental, financial, and military problems
threatening our existence. In addition to the obvious mental and
physical impairments caused by their illnesses, their own dinner plates
blind them to the right answers. Once a person learns the truth and
switches to a starch-based diet then the solutions become clear. The
solutions are so simple and easy to explain that a 7-year-old can
understand that the cure for heart disease and restoring the oceans back
to life are the same.
The goal of this book is to provide you with one big simple
solution—a starch-based diet. That’s all there is to it. You don’t have
to think “good” thoughts, worship weekly, run marathons, be blessed with
hardy genes, or carry around lucky charms to solve your health problems
and to make a sizable contribution to reversing the accelerating trends
of environmental ruin. All you have to do is change the composition of
the foods on your plate and eat. That’s the Starch Solution.
References:
1) Durant, Will. History of Civilization, Vol III. Caesar and Christ.
Simon and Schuster, New York, 1944.
2 Perry GH, Dominy NJ, Claw KG, Lee AS, et al. Diet and the evolution
of human amylase gene copy number variation. Nat Genet. 2007
Oct;39(10):1256-60. http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17828263.
3) http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/science/10starch.html?ref=science
4) J. E. Oldfield, The Future Meat Industry in Service to Mankind:
Social and Economic Concerns J Anim Sci 1979. 48:415-419. http://jas.fass.org/cgi/content/abstract/48/2/415
5) http://www.beverageinstitute.org/includes/The%20Coca-Cola%20announcement%203-1-08~%20Final.pdf.
6) http://www.oklabeef.org/files/dollars_and_sense_PDF/august.pdf
7) http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/114/1/82
8) http://www.cspinet.org/new/pdf/lift_the_veil_guts_fnl.pdf.
9) http://www.thedoctorwillseeyounow.com/articles/nutrition/protein_2/
10) (http://whattoeatbook.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/1808_002.pdf
11) http://zerodisease.com/archive/Dietary_Goals_For_The_United_States.pdf
12) Bulletin of the World Health Organization 80:952-958. http://www.who.int/bulletin/archives/80(12)952.pdf
13) Hossain P, Kawar B, El Nahas M. Obesity and diabetes in the
developing world--a growing challenge. N Engl J Med. 2007 Jan
18;356(3):213-5. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/356/3/213
14) http://www.fao.org/docrep/010/a0701e/a0701e00.HTM
15) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1879192,00.html
16) http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=the-greenhouse-hamburger
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