Starches Are the Solution to Your Weight and Health Problems

For years, the best­seller lists have been dom­i­nat­ed by books urg­ing peo­ple to eat plen­ty of meat and fat but to shun car­bo­hy­drates. The Atkins Diet led the parade; but there have been many imi­ta­tors, such as the Zone, the South Beach Diet, the Paleo Diet, and the Dukan Diet. Even some of the veg­an-ori­ent­ed books encour­age peo­ple to avoid starch­es. Yet the sci­en­tif­ic evi­dence shows us that human beings are specif­i­cal­ly adapt­ed to thrive on a starchy diet. So I was delight­ed to see that the title of Dr. John McDougall’s lat­est book is The Starch Solu­tion. He explains some­thing that nutri­tion­al epi­demi­ol­o­gists and experts on clin­i­cal nutri­tion have known for many years, name­ly that human beings stay nat­u­ral­ly slim and healthy on a diet based on unre­fined starch­es and veg­eta­bles.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Starch­es Are the Solu­tion to Your Weight and Health Prob­lems”

Yet Another Silly Study About White Rice!

If you look at arti­cles about East Asian coun­tries in issues of Nation­al Geo­graph­ic from the ear­ly 20th cen­tu­ry, you will notice two things. One is that many of the peo­ple in East Asia were eat­ing a lot of white rice. The oth­er is that only the rich peo­ple and the sumo wrestlers were over­weight. That’s because the rich peo­ple and the sumo wrestlers were eat­ing some­thing besides rice and veg­eta­bles.

Con­tin­ue read­ing “Yet Anoth­er Sil­ly Study About White Rice!”

Nonsensical Study About White Rice

So Why Is Diabetes Rare in China?

A recent study has warned us that peo­ple who eat white rice instead of brown rice are more like­ly to get dia­betes! But it leaves out a cru­cial piece of infor­ma­tion: peo­ple in Asian coun­tries whose diet is based heav­i­ly on white rice are prac­ti­cal­ly immune to type 2 dia­betes. The take-home mes­sage from this study isn’t that white rice is harm­ful, or that it would make much dif­fer­ence if you ate brown rice instead. It’s that we should be wary of researchers who fail to read the basic lit­er­a­ture on nutri­tion before they design their research.

Brown rice is the whole-grain ver­sion of rice. To make brown rice, you remove only the husk of the rice seed. To make white rice, you also grind off the bran lay­er and the germ, which is the embryo of the rice seed. In most of the areas where rice is the sta­ple of the diet, peo­ple pre­fer white rice, for two very prac­ti­cal rea­sons: brown rice goes ran­cid very eas­i­ly, and it takes a lot longer to cook.

Pol­ish­ing off the bran and germ of the rice seed removes the oils that can cause spoilage. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, it also removes most of the vit­a­min B1 (thi­amine) from the rice. Orig­i­nal­ly, white rice was an expen­sive food, reserved large­ly for rich peo­ple who could afford a var­ied diet, so the lack of vit­a­min B1 in their rice wasn’t a big deal. Unfor­tu­nate­ly, when the inven­tion of steam-pow­ered rice mills meant that lots of poor peo­ple were sub­sist­ing heav­i­ly on white rice, a debil­i­tat­ing and poten­tial­ly dead­ly defi­cien­cy dis­ease called beriberi became endem­ic in Asia. After chemists iden­ti­fied thi­amine and fig­ured out how to make it cheap­ly to “enrich” white rice, beriberi ceased to be a com­mon prob­lem. Even so, brown rice is bet­ter for you because it’s a source of fiber.

Back in the 1930s and 1940s, a Ger­man-born Amer­i­can physi­cian named Wal­ter Kemp­n­er rec­og­nized the health ben­e­fits of a plant-based diet cen­tered on rice. Kemp­n­er rec­og­nized that heart dis­ease and dia­betes were rare in Asia, where peo­ple ate a rice-based diet that was low in fat and cho­les­terol. He start­ed rec­om­mend­ing a diet based on rice, fruit, fruit juices, and sug­ar for patients with severe high blood pres­sure and kid­ney dis­ease. His spec­tac­u­lar results with these patients encour­aged him to rec­om­mend this rice-based diet for peo­ple with heart dis­ease and dia­betes. Those patients also got dra­mat­ic ben­e­fits, even though most of these patients were eat­ing white rice. So where did the authors of the study pub­lished in Archives of Inter­nal Med­i­cine get the idea that white rice might cause dia­betes?

It’s been obvi­ous since the 1870s that type 2 dia­betes is linked to obe­si­ty. We’ve known since the 1930s that the poor glu­cose tol­er­ance that under­lies it is linked to a high-fat diet and can be reversed by a switch to a starchy diet. The Chi­na-Cor­nell-Oxford Project, also known as the Chi­na Study, demon­strat­ed that peo­ple who are eat­ing a low-fat diet based heav­i­ly on white rice and veg­eta­bles stay slim and are vir­tu­al­ly immune to dia­betes. So why did the researchers just try to impli­cate white rice as a cause of dia­betes? Could it be that they have nev­er both­ered to read the his­tor­i­cal lit­er­a­ture on the sub­ject?

If you are eat­ing the stan­dard Amer­i­can diet, you are at high risk for obe­si­ty, type 2 dia­betes, var­i­ous kinds of can­cer, and a wide assort­ment of oth­er degen­er­a­tive dis­eases. That’s because those dis­eases have been linked to a high intake of ani­mal pro­tein, fat, and cho­les­terol. You can dra­mat­i­cal­ly reduce your risk of those dis­eases by switch­ing to a low-fat (<10% of calo­ries), high-fiber diet based on plant foods. As long as you get enough thi­amine and enough fiber in your diet, it doesn’t mat­ter much if the rice you eat is white.

Pho­to by sarae