Natalie Zimmerman: "The Woefully Misguided War On Carbohydrates"

[scarlettsmum]

I am so pleased to come across this post, thanks @Westside PUFAs
For me too this explains the need for including cooked starch in my diet and why I don't feel as well otherwise and can't function without it.

 

[tca300]

I did. Especially after reading her responses to noobs on youtube:

"This comment is scientifically meaningless. There are no civilizations that live 100% without carbohydrates. The entire video was about the dangers of making fat one's primary source of calories which is exactly what would happen on a diet devoid of carbohydrates since protein cannot be a primary source of calories. You didn't watch the video, and you give no evidence for your assertions. This isn't a serious comment even worth discussing."

"You can't give nutritional advice without having a scientific basis for it, so I'm not sure what you mean by unprofessional. There is nothing radical about the nutritional advice in this video. It would certainly fit within the guidelines set by the ADA. There's nothing groundbreaking about the role of a high-fat diet in driving insulin resistance. I think it's professional and safe to recommend that people don't follow a high-fat diet and eat more boiled rather than baked or fried starches."

"The other significant increase in kcals is from flours and cereal products: 1970=429, 2010=596. What do you make with flour and fat? Gary Taubes in his books condemns ALL carbohydrates as addictive and suggests minimizing any fruit or vegetable with significant carbohydrates. He then asserts that fat can't make you fat and that fat calories don't matter, all of which is fantasy. "

"Check the USDA data: 14% of the kcals in the US diet come from added sweeteners of all kinds, down from 16% in 1970 (pre epidemic of obesity). In terms of per capita kcals: added sweeteners, 1970=332.5, 1999=421.8, 2010=367.2. Compare added fats and oils, including dairy fats: 1970=346.3, 1980=372.2, 1990=409.6, 2000=545.4, 2010=588.0. This does not include fats from meats and nuts. Total kcal increase during the same time: 1970=2,076, 2010=2,534. The American Diet has NEVER been low in fat."

"Not exactly, our position is that diets low boiled starch cause insulin resistance, low muscle glycogen storage, and thus increased appetite, craving for sugar and fat. Any diet that is low in boiled starch is of necessity rich in fat. It may also be high in sugar. In either case, fats become the primary source of fuel, which your body interprets as starvation. The natural response is for muscle cells to reject the influence of insulin to pull in glucose. This reserves glucose for the brain."

"The problem with raw-food veganism is that it exaggerates the importance of it signature feature—raw food—so much so that it demonizes cooking. Raw food is great. Who doesn’t appreciate the value of raw fruits and vegetables? Raw foods are rich in micronutrients and phytochemicals. However, there is absolutely no logical reason that promoting raw food should be linked to the demonization of cooking. Even if one wishes to follow a vegan diet, rejecting cooked food on the basis that it’s unnatural demonstrates highly flawed reasoning and will promote a deficient diet. Without cooked (boiled and steamed) starches—grains, beans, and potatoes, muscle glycogen storage will be severely compromised. Raw foodists no doubt observe the weakness in their diet, which is why many, if not most raw foodists use an escape clause, allowing some cooked food, up to 25% of the diet. They may also “allow” cooking at very low temperatures, providing at least some gelatinized starch, for example like low temperature heating of sprouted grains or beans. Cooking actually predates our species by hundreds of thousands of years. Homo erectus and Neanderthal both cooked food but neither boiled starch. Homo sapiens are the only species to have ever boiled starches."

When she says " Any diet that is low in boiled starch is of necessity rich in fat. It may also be high in sugar. In either case, fats become the primary source of fuel..."
Does she mean a diet based off of fruit would be the same as eating a diet high in fat? The fruit sugars are causing one to use fat for fuel? Could you explain this to me please?

 

[Giraffe]

I did. Especially after reading her responses to noobs on youtube:

"Not exactly, our position is that diets low boiled starch cause insulin resistance, low muscle glycogen storage, and thus increased appetite, craving for sugar and fat. Any diet that is low in boiled starch is of necessity rich in fat. It may also be high in sugar. In either case, fats become the primary source of fuel, which your body interprets as starvation. The natural response is for muscle cells to reject the influence of insulin to pull in glucose. This reserves glucose for the brain."

How narrow-minded. A diet that puts fruits and low-fat dairy center stage is neither high in fat nor in processed sugar.

 

[Giraffe]

Every athlete and bodybuilder I know prefers starch to replenish muscle glygogen, with a smaller amount of sugar for the liver, simply because it's most efficient.

Glucose and sucrose seem equally efficient.

Post-Exercise Muscle Glycogen Synthesis

eating rice or potatoes while working out or afterwards is not something my body asks for. OJ or Pepsi every time!

I also crave fruit juice or coke.

 

[Giraffe]

I'd like to seek clarification on FFAs. Free Fatty Acids- Does this refer to all Fatty Acids, regardless of whether it is saturated or unsaturated? I thought it's only PUFAs that inhibit glucose metabolism. If so, why the need for the term FFA instead of PUFA? Thanks.

In good health, especially in children, the stress hormones are produced only in the amount needed, because of negative feedback from the free saturated fatty acids, which inhibit the production of adrenalin and adrenal steroids, and eating protein and carbohydrate will quickly end the stress. But when the fat stores contain mainly PUFA, the free fatty acids in the serum will be mostly linoleic acid and arachidonic acid, and smaller amounts of other unsaturated fatty acids. These PUFA stimulate the stress hormones, ACTH, cortisol, adrenaline, glucagon, and prolactin, which increase lipolysis, producing more fatty acids in a vicious circle. In the relative absence of PUFA, the stress reaction is self limiting, but under the influence of PUFA, the stress response becomes self-amplifying.

(bold mine)

Fats, functions and malfunctions.

 

[LukeL]

@tyw I'm worried about Endotoxin build up from white rice. Is this something I should look out for?

 

[MB50]

@tyw I'm worried about Endotoxin build up from white rice. Is this something I should look out for?

If you search "short grain rice amylose" on the forum you should find a long discussion talking about this. Short grain white rice is safer in avoiding endotoxins issues because of the low amylose content. However it will also be absorbed pretty quickly and not be that satiating.

 

[lvysaur]

I've noticed that I get nearly zero gas with low temp water-cooked potatoes, while I get some with steamed potatoes and french fries.

 

[mgk]

The unique function of starch is to make cells, particularly muscle cells, more responsive to insulin signaling. Insulin, the hormone secreted by the pancreas in response to dietary carbohydrate, aids cells in pulling glucose out of the blood. For muscle cells, this translates to creating muscle glycogen.

This is an interesting idea but what's the mechanism behind the ability of boiled starch to make muscle cells more responsive to insulin? The website doesn't seem to go into detail on it. Boiled starch goes into the small intestine, is broken down into glucose molecules in order to be absorbed, it gets absorbed, insulin rises. The same thing happens with baked starch and with the glucose fraction of sucrose. How is boiled starch different on that level?

 

[gabys225]

I see the site is down, so is Natalie Zimmerman's art site. Westside, do you have any contact info for her? I wonder what happened, her site was a great source of information.

 

[cdg]

I see the site is down, so is Natalie Zimmerman's art site. Westside, do you have any contact info for her? I wonder what happened, her site was a great source of information.

The YouTube is still up: McCarbthyism

 

[Amazoniac]

Steaming must be better than boiling if you won't be immersing all the food, leaving pieces uncovered. The reason for my suspicion is that regular lids can't hold much pressure, plenty of vapor escapes and perhaps in not enough time to even the temperature inside the pan: the middle region might be its worst relative condition for cooking, compared to the top and the bottom. Steaming baskets elevate the food in a way that avoids the middle region, so no matter how much liquid you're using, the food is always cooked in good conditions.

Foods already have enough water in them to be sufficient for cooking, which is why when they're baked, wrapping suffice. But steaming will surround them with vapor and make sure that there's no dehydration. The issue is when the exterior is dry, drawing wasser from them and (combined with heat) damaging the food.

Some foods can end up soggy when they're immersed when cooking, this doesn't happen with steaming.

As for vegetables and fruits, they should, I repeat, be stewed in their own juices to avoid the loss of minerals easily dissolved in water during cooking. It seems that these valuable minerals are not so well absorbed when they are out of their colloidal state.

Too much cooked carotenes are a problem, but it's possible to add only small amounts of those (orange sweet potatoes, carrots, pumpkins, squashes, etc), adjusting for flavor and how much of them the body is able to process.

 

[Samya]

I'm on a bit of a potato research binge and came across this thread, unfortunately the author's website was taken down but using the wayback machine managed to salvage some articles which I found thought provoking, particularly the one on anthropology as I've often thought about the relatively recent advance in humans beings (agriculture, technology etc) being related to an increase of carbohydrates in the diet, rather than these foods being the downfall of our health as is proposed by some communities. I've posted the article below, enjoy! :)

Anthropology

The Role Starch in Human Evolution Part 1

Cultivating starch: rethinking the origins

Just how important was starch to human evolution? This question demands an answer because it bears directly on what humans eat today, on what we perceive the role of starch to be in the modern diet and how we view starch in relation to the epidemic of obesity and type II diabetes. It's also important because so many people buy the proposition that starch is somehow unnatural to humans or that starch was the downfall of human health and that we should eat more like our Paleolithic ancestors who consumed a diet of only meat, supplemented by fruits, vegetables, nuts, and seeds. It's important because so many people buy the claim that our genes are old and therefore, we can't adapt to food of more recent origin, a claim more appropriate to intelligent design than to evolution, more pseudoscience than science.Â
Does your dog understand you, think like you? Maybe it's because he or she eats like you? In the January 2013 issue of the journal Nature an article titled "The Genomic Signature of Dog Domestication Reveals Adaptation to Starch Rich Diet" directly contradicts the notion that it takes millions of years to adapt to a new food source. [1] In this article, researchers identified 10 genes that have key roles in starch digestion and metabolism: "We identify candidate mutations in key genes that provide functional support for an increased starch digestion in dogs relative to wolves." There's long been a debate about how domestic dogs evolved from wolves. Here researchers speculate that wolves adapted to the foods humans left lying around, foods rich in starch. Our results indicate that novel adaptations allowing the early ancestors of modern dogs to thrive on a diet rich in starch, relative to the carnivorous diet of wolves, constituted a crucial step in the early domestication of dogs. If wolves, obvious carnivores, could rapidly adapt to starch, why is it so difficult for humans, obvious omnivores?
Humans began cultivating grains, beans, roots, and tubers (the foods naturally rich in starch) about 11,000 years ago, abandoning this critical source of energy only where or when severe climate made cultivation impossible. Starchy foods now feed most of the world and provide the majority of the calories and protein. And if we began cultivating starches 11,000 years ago, it's a good bet that they were important to us long before that time. Our ancestors didn't suddenly one day quit hunting and gathering to begin cultivating crops about which they were clueless. Knowledge of their value must have gone back a very long time, but exactly how long depends upon what we mean by starch, a definition that carries with it no small degree of complexity.

What is starch?

Simply put, starches are chains of sugar (glucose) molecules that act as the primary energy store for the plant. This energy is stored in seeds (like grains and beans), roots, and tubers. Presently, starch is the most dominant human fuel on the planet. Grains and beans, roots and tubers are the foods of civilization. They are the staples of every ethnic cuisine. Can anyone imagine the Asian cuisine without rice and noodles, Italian cooking without pasta, Middle Eastern dishes without couscous or garbanzo beans, Irish cooking without potatoes or oatmeal, Mexican food without rice and Pinto beans? Before the advent of fast food, even the American cuisine was a melting pot that included staples like boiled potatoes, great northern beans, and cream of wheat. Need I go on? So, when did this dependence on starch begin?

When did we begin to use starch?

According to Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham, roots and tubers, a.k.a. underground storage organs, were important sources of food for humans as early as 1.8 million years ago. That's about the time Wrangham believes human ancestors (there were many who lived currently) began to control fire. Cooking made many foods more palatable, easier to chew, and easier to digest, allowing greater access to calories. While it's easy to understand the effect of cooking on food, not all anthropologists agree with Wrangham's timing of the control of fire, putting it closer to 400,000 years ago, though still a discovery of Homo erectus. Whatever the precise timing, starches wouldn't have been important foods until we learned to control fire because we can't digest raw starch efficiently.
As discussed elsewhere on this website, starch must be gelatinized (heated in water so that starch granules swell and burst) in order for starch-digesting enzymes to access the starch chains. This could have been accomplished long before the ability to boil water, a relatively recent development. Roots and tubers can be thrown into an open fire and cooked because they carry their own water. However, after gelatinization (which occurs as the water inherent in roots and tubers boils), the high temperatures and dry conditions of the fire drives off most of the water, shattering the starch chains (a process called dextrinization) converting the starch effectively to sugar. Still these foods would have been an important source of calories that helped our ancestors to avoid protein toxicity, something hunter-gatherers struggle with on a daily basis because protein cannot be the primary source of fuel for humans to the nitrogen byproducts generated when converting protein into fuel. Thus the claim that starch wasn't important until we began cultivating food is pure nonsense based on the assumption that our ancestors never bothered to dig roots out of the ground when they were hungry.

When did starch act like starch?

Because throwing roots and tubers into an open fire dextrinizes the starch, the next question is: when did starch act like starch? In other words, when could we get the full benefit of starch, the full potential for glycogen storage? That would await an innovation equal in importance to any in our history; the ability to boil water. I proposed this hypothesis in 2001, and it is even more valid today. Boiling technology gave our ancestors access to the starch in grains and beans as sources of fuel and made roots and tubers much more efficient at promoting glycogen storage in muscles and brain. Boiled starch, functionally different sugar and dextrinized starch, could do for our ancestors what it does for us today: it greatly increased the ability to store glycogen in muscles and the brain. The best explanation for this is that boiled starch makes these cells more responsive to insulin, better at pulling glucose out of the blood. This would have a profound effect on our ancestors both mentally and physically.
Athletes intuitively understand the benefit of boiled starch in providing muscles with glycogen, though why boiled starch is so effective is never fully explained because we have always failed to recognize the distinction between boiled and baked starches, and still do. More to the point here is that glycogen has a powerful effect on the brain. It's not news that glucose is the primary fuel for the brain, with ketones acting as a partial substitute only during emergencies when carbohydrates are not available. What is news, however, is the role glycogen plays in the acquisition of long-term memory. A 2011 article published in the journal Cell titled Astrocyte-Neuron Lactate Transport is Required for Long-Term Memory Formation shows that glycogen in brain cells called astrocytes is necessary for the consolidation of short-term, transient memory into long-term memory. [2] The effect of glycogen cannot be imitated by glucose, regardless of quantity. Though this study was done in rats, it demonstrates an important principle. Glycogen, which consists of chains of glucose molecules like starch, provides both energy and information about what to do with that energy. For humans, boiled starch carries the information needed to store glucose as glycogen more efficiently than could be done in its absence. Access to the information carried by the starch molecule occurred as a direct result of the technology to boil water, an event that we know occurred at least 40-50,000 years ago, because that's when the telltale evidence of uniquely shattered stones, indication of stone boiling could be found. [3] This puts boiling technology concomitant with the rapid advance in the mental capacity of Homo sapiens. Often referred to as the Great Leap Forward or the Mind's Big Bang, this creative threshold our ancestors crossed ushered in all the advances we now associate with modern thinking. This is the best explanation for the transition from the Middle to the Upper Paleolithic Period made only by Homo sapiens. No other explanation can account for the time, for the rapid spread of mental ability throughout a population.

The Unheralded Role of Starch

Homo sapiens, our species, were anatomically modern some 200,000 years ago, but did not leave behind any indication that they were behaviorally modern, modern the sense of how we think and approach problems, or how we interact with each other until roughly about 40 or 50,000 years ago. We defined this time as the upper Paleolithic period. What's mysterious is that it happened with no change in anatomy. Our brain didn't get bigger, or anatomically more complex. Our brain apparently didn't physically change at all, but somehow we became a lot more mentally capable. So what happened?
Anthropologists have struggled for decades to account for this rapid mental advance, made only by Homo sapiens, by resorting to explanations that are highly improbable and unnecessarily complex. For example, they suggest that one or more brain mutations caused fundamental changes in either the language center of the brain or the areas that control executive functions. Mutations provide the necessary variation of traits to be selected from in response to environmental change, but they have no power in and of themselves to drive adaptation, especially of an entire population in a relatively short period of time. An innovation that affects the source of available food, however, has exactly that power, and there is plenty of precedent for this in human evolution, notably the development of stone tools and the control of fire, each of which expanded the food choices of our ancestors. The ability to boil water is just such an innovation.
Any mutation in brain function had to be secondary to a change in environment. That's how evolution works. It requires selective pressure. What we have completely ignored in this particular case is the selective pressure that we ourselves provided and have always provided innovation. Innovation provides selective pressure by changing the available food in the environment. It's happened before with profound results. In fact, the journey of human evolution is defined by innovation, by the ability of our ancestors to respond to and shape their environment. There were three seminal events in human evolution that allowed us to survive by expanding our selection of foods. The first of these was the development of stone tools which marked our entrance into the Paleolithic period. The second great innovation was the control of fire, which had the same dramatic affect. The story of fire and its effect on human evolution is told by Harvard primatologist Richard Wrangham in his book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human. The problem with Wrangham's thesis, however, is that it stops short of considering the effect of cooking at a critical time in our mental advance. It ignores the most important fundamental in carbohydrate nutrition when it comes to humans, that there are four macronutrients, not three. Therefore, Wrangham's argument can only account for access to calories, which requires only that our ancestors could control fire, not that they could boil water.
Boiled starch is a completely unique food, one that heretofore never existed, one that carries with it the information necessary to drive glycogen storage in an unprecedented fashion. In light of the Suzuki article, it is reasonable to suggest that the ability to boil water provided Homo sapiens the potential to go from local transient memory to consolidation into long-term memory, a trait that could quickly spread throughout an entire population as simply as the spread of a new technology, as easily as new cooking technique. This is the simplest and most practical explanation for the enigmatic transformation that characterizes only our species. As much as we like genetics as the answer, it takes time for genetic changes to happen, a lot of time, unless of course, they were in response to selective pressure. The ability to boil water provided that selective pressure.
The proposition that starch is unnatural to humans, that starch is the downfall of humanity couldn't possibly be more erroneous. In fact, absolutely the opposite is true. Homo sapiens are defined by starch. The movement into the upper Paleolithic period indicated by remnants of sophisticated stone tool technology, cave paintings, body decorations, musical instruments, and sophisticated tools and other materials is the result of starch. How we managed to overlook what seems so obvious is the subject of part 2.

Works Cited

1.

Axelsson, Erik, et al. Nature 495, 360-364 (21 March 2013).
2.

Suzuki, A., Stern, S.A., Bozdagi, O., Huntley, G.W., Walker, R.H., Magistretti, P.J., and Berini, C.M. (2011). Cell 144 810-823.
3.

Bricker, H.M. (1995) Abri Pataud.

 

[milkbasedvegan]

Here’s something that might be groundbreaking:

- we are adapted to eating starch and all kinds of sugar, provided they pack in vitamins and minerals and aminos
- we are adapted to eating all kinds of fat, provided they pack in vitamins and minerals and aminos
- we are not adapted to eating foods that have loads of toxins without sufficient prepping and fermenting and soaking and sprouting and breaking down (phytates, casein, gluten, oxalates, goitrogens, saponins what have you)
- we are not adapted to eating way too damn much while sitting on our butt all day while staring at blue lights

It’s actually very simple, but it don’t sell no books.