Thought that would get your attention in a war zone!

Hello, low carbers. I heard you were discussing RS and I just wanted to drop in and talk about it a little.

I started my career as an anonymous low carb dieter right here on LCF, since then I branched out to many other diet websites, blogs, and forums in search of 'magic bullets'. I have posted in various places as Otzi, Tatertot, Timbo, Tim, and EEDude.

I did a stint on Atkins back before the internet without reading the book...lost 30, gained 50--you've heard that before, right? When I came to LCF in 2010, I think I had a stat of "240-240-190". It quickly became "240-190-175". About 6 months into my time here on LCF, I stalled at the 180ish range and that's when I started looking at what I was doing.

I tried the paleo diet for a while and that got things moving again. I think the missing piece for me was exercise. I started a bodyweight program and went from being able to do zero pullups do 30 and also sprinting, squats, pushups and lots of walking. Paleo brought me to 170, but I really, really wanted 160.

I went fullbore ketogenic last year and also did some of the potato diets you have heard about. I hit my 160 last Fall, but it was miserable. I was cold and couldn't sleep, my cholesterol numbers and thyroid labs weren't impressive, I could barely exercise. But I was at 160!

I read the Perfect Health Diet in January this year and decided to go the 'safe starch' route. I started eating potatoes and rice with every meal and experimenting with other 'off-limits' foods like beans, corn, sugary fruit, etc... I started the year at 168 and I'm sitting comfortably at 175 now. Feeling great, exercising, and didn't gain much body fat. Clothes still fit as well as they did at 160.

Along the way here, I discovered the term 'Resistant Starch'. Just google it and you will have reading material for months. RS is an important factor in feeding gut bacteria and linked to improved colon health and glucose, cholesterol, and triglyceride regulation. The trouble with RS is that to get it from real food requires you to eat loads of carbs. The trend in the world is to get RS from bakery products with Hi-Maize added. Hi-Maize is a special corn starch with lots of RS. I researched RS and found it is most plentiful in green bananas, raw/cold potatoes, beans, oats, and rice. These foods are mostly pretty nasty and/or high carb/high calorie.

I also discovered you could get all the RS you could ever want, at a low calorie count, by eating pure potato starch. Tapioca starch seems to be a close second.

I have been on a bit of a mission to get this info out there. One day soon, you will start seeing lots of ads and articles extolling the virtues of RS. These ads will want you to eat Hi-Maize or some other grain based food. If you read something, hear something, or see something that makes you want to start increasing your RS intake--you now know it can be done simply with raw potato starch. Uncooked. Added to food or drink.

RS isn't about weightloss or fad dieting. It's about colon health and related benefits.

AKMAN
240-175-190

I experimented with it briefly but starch makes my autoimmune disease flare up, so I quit toying with it.

I can get all the resistant starch I want from a pork chop.

This goes against everything I have read about gaining digestive health if you already have IBD, IBS, colitis etc. so I am out.

Akman, fat tissue grows, both because there's more triglycerides in there, and because there's more fat cells. Those cells are alive like any other cell. Simply cutting carbs cannot kill those new fat cells, and so they remain. Those new fat cells are also supported by new blood vessels, and they remain too. This is one reason you had to go to extremes to reach an otherwise unreachable body weight. But of course, you couldn't keep that up, since you couldn't endure the side effects. As well you didn't: You were making yourself sick. Don't despair, we'll be able to fix that soon enough. There's a trial for a new peptide drug called Adipotide, which reduces fat tissue physically such that there's fewer fat cells.

As for resistant starch, maybe you're right. But I see no anthropological rationale for its use every day. Every day use is only made possible by agriculture and world commerce, thus we are not adapted to use it every day. The same goes for any claim of benefits for the colon or anything else.

Given your start weight, I think the problem at 160 was that it was probably underweight for you. The lower end of the bmi scale is for naturally lean people--people who have trouble gaining weight in the first place (or people born into paleo/non-obesogenic societies in the first place). You haven't established that the improvements you've had while eating resistant starch aren't simply the result of eating more food and attaining a healthier bodyweight.

I disagree with Martin on the availability of resistant starch, though. There are plenty of natural sources of the stuff, and our ancestors were very, very smart. I'd expect that the advantages of storing all kinds of food against shortage would have occurred to somebody very early on.

I read recently that during one of the world wars, the American government considered the possibility of farming cat's-tails, apparently it gives a better yield (better depending on your bias ) even than potato. Since it's not a wildly popular foodstuff, I assume this was wild cat's-tails they were talking about.

If you have those conditions, you may want to avoid RS. SIBO is out-of-place gut flora and can cause IBD, IBS, etc... This out-of-place gut flora feeds on RS, making things worse. Hopefully one day there will be a cure for SIBO that doesn't starve good gut flora, or kill it with antibiotics.

Actually, I think quite the opposite. Agriculture and world commerce caused an abrupt decline in RS intake. H-G people ate loads of RS as evidenced in coprolite studies. In Africa and Asia, plantains, manioc (tapioca), and taro have been a food source forever. Early American H-Gs had potatoes and imported taro, corn, and legumes.

Quite a bit of study is being done right now on 'stale maize porridge' a staple in bush Africa of poor people who seem immune to gut disorders.

As to daily adaptation--I think we may not need a daily dose of RS, but gut flora change fast, with each meal actually, constantly neglecting their needs results in gut dysbiosis. Everyone is fully on board with the concept of probiotics, but scant attention is given to prebiotics. A healthy gut requires approximately 30-50g/day of a fermentable fiber substrate--this is not the dietary fiber listing on nutrition labels, that figure also includes non-fermentable fiber.

Sadly, I fell into the trap of wanting to look like the guys on the cover of Men's Health. My new goal is to live a long time eating good food and keeping metabolic syndrome markers in a healthy range (cholesterol, trigs, bp, glucose, body fat, lean body mass, sleep quality, etc...)




I've never implied that. RS is something I stumbled across and thought that it made sense to add to an already healthy lifestyle. I can say that since adding it to my daily regime, my FBG and A1C are lower and my lipid labs have improved. I think that obesity and metabolic syndrome can be reversed without ever touching RS wittingly. However, I also think RS is important for a healthy gut.




Cattails may have been very important for early humans. The pollen is easy to collect in quantities needed to feed a large band of people for months, stores well, and turns up in coprolite samples around the world. The roots are a source of easily accessed starch that stores well and also turns up in coprolite samples. I know people think 'Cattail? WTF?' but have you ever seen a cattail marsh, the kind found in swampy areas of the Great Lakes or European lowlands? Miles and miles of cattail marshes. Acre for acre, cattails produce more starch than potato fields.

But, please guys, keep in mind...I'm not trying to spin this into a crazy lose weight fast scheme. RS is getting a lot of attention. It's been studied for 30 years. Big Agro is very busy trying to get RS into every loaf of bread and croissant in the world. My entire point isn't that you absolutely need, or absolutely should start adding RS to your diet. My entire point is that if one day you decide that you want some RS, you don't need to eat grain or bakery products--it can be found in many sources, even low carb ones.

Thanks, akman. How much potato starch do you recommend?

Just out of curiosity: how much RS is in chia seed, if any, do you know?

I think a good recommendation is about 20g of RS. That's 2-1/2 TBS of potato starch.

I like to use potato starch to make up the difference. For instance, today I ate a green banana for breakfast, roughly 10-15g of RS, and will be having some potatoes later today (5g). I will not use any potato starch today.

Some days, if I eat hardly any carbs, or just a serving of rice (2-3g RS), I'll put 2-3TBS of potato starch in a smoothie. A really good way to use potato starch is to mix it with coconut milk, milk, or water and mix in with frozen blueberries or any fruit, really. Just gives it a thick sauce. It also mixes well with yogurt and sour cream. I like to mix 2TBS of potato starch with some sour cream to eat with a baked potato.

If you do decide to use potato starch, it HAS to be unmodified and not heated. Once it begins to thicken, the RS is gone forever. I like the stuff from Bob's Red Mill. It's cheap and available almost everywhere, and on Amazon. Any brand will work. Potato Flour is a different thing and won't work.

You can make your own potato starch easy enough, too. Look on YouTube for 'How to Make Potato Starch'.

RE: Chia Seeds; not much RS in the amounts that people eat. They are roughly 5% by weight, so you'd need to eat like 2 cups of ground up seeds for any benefit. I think chia seeds are a good source of fiber and other nutrients and use them from time to time, just not for a source of RS.

The big RS foods are: Green bananas, raw plantains (or plantain flour), raw potatoes (or potato starch), cooked and cooled potatoes, legumes, oats, and rice. Just about anything else you can think of has much less RS than rice. Rice has about 2g RS per cooked cup. If you allow rice to cool (like sushi rice) it has about 5g per cup.

There are a few other pretty good sources of RS, but they are not typical US foods, like taro root, cassava starch, and manioc.

Green bananas are probably the least objectionable to most people. Eat them as soon as you can peel them. If they are too hard to peel, you can use a knife, but it takes some willpower to eat a banana that is that green!

I buy green plantains, cut them into thin strips, air/sun dry them, and use them as crackers. 1 plantain contains about 50g of RS!

I see. Your reference point is modern HG. Their physiology is the same as ours. We could argue that the fact they ate it doesn't meat they were adapted to benefit from it. I mean, we eat tons of crap we're not adapted to eat nor benefit from, then claim a bunch of benefits from other crap that's just less crappy.

Stuff found in coprolite can be argued to be indigestible, hence why we find it in coprolite. We could argue that it's difficult to show that eating indigestible foodstuff is good for us, or for any other animal for that matter.

A staple of poor people. Now that's a different problem altogether. Your reference point is modern people here too. Also, it's very difficult to argue the physiological benefit of a foodstuff that would otherwise not be chosen had they access to better foodstuff. This problem applies to olive oil for example. It's believed olive oil is better than animal fat (like lard for example), but the whole idea is flawed to begin with. Olive oil was the poor man's choice, while lard was the preferred fat. Ancel Keys was poor, the whole idea comes from him. Here's an interesting experiment with various fats, including olive oil: http://forum.lowcarber.org/showthread.php?t=433300 It's only n=1, but if olive oil is better for all humans, then it should show up in all experiments of n=1. The same logic applies to RS. If it's supposed to be good for all humans, then there is no exception. SIBO, IBS, whatever, RS should be good all the time.

That's because an appropriate diet has the unique ability to return one to good health. If RS does not return one to good health, or worse makes an existing condition worse, then it's not an appropriate diet. The argument of bad gut bacteria that feeds on RS is a good one since it exposes the main flaw of RS. If RS can feed bad bacteria, then it will feed it. Since bad bacteria isn't necessarily absent, but just present in smaller numbers than good bacteria, RS will cause this bacteria to increase in number. We could argue that this is mostly a problem of gut flora profile. But then we could also argue that if RS can feed bad gut bacteria, the environment is primed to receive the bad bacteria, makes it easy for it to establish itself. Just one individual of this bacteria is enough for this.

Men have always been able to shed weight easier than women. The majority of members here, as in any weight loss forum, are women. Look at photographs back though time. You'll see the occasional fat man, but it's expected that all women will end up fat, particularly if they had kids.

Women save fat to nourish fetuses, even if ability to carry said fetuses has passed through time.

I went through a phase about twenty years ago where my diet consisted of nuked potatoes and Heinz cocktail sauce. Lost a TON of weight. Felt like ABSOLUTE GARBAGE.

Tell Big Dick Nikoley to stop posting while he's drunk.

Before this gets too muddled, the debate as I see it, is this:

Is gut flora an important aspect of health?

Are prebiotics needed for proper gut health?

What amount of prebiotics should be met or exceeded on a daily basis?

What are the best prebiotics?

Does RS have properties that make it better than other prebiotics?

Is RS required in any way?

Any other argument is outside the realm of what interests me.

I don't know all the answers to my questions.

Oh look, another man with <100# to lose has solved the weight loss problem for the universe.

If only it worked for everybody else the way it worked for you, the 30-60 billion dollar a year diet industry would be out of business.

I'm glad it worked for you, though.

But it's probably an assumption you haven't the experience yet to see is likely due to several factors that aren't really about finding the perfect food.

PJ