Peat Is Right About Starch

[B-styles]

Context is what matters when talking about any substance.

 

[theLaw]

Im thinking unless you got liposuction you didn't actually lose that much fat that quickly. Water retention would be much more plausible.

What the OP is describing sounds like inflammation, which can also cause fat to be stored, which can be lost very quickly when the stress is removed.

Fat can be gained and lost very quickly depending on the context, and belly-fat is almost entirely stress-related.

 

[lvysaur]

I think the most important thing here is to increase stomach acid. If you do that, starch doesn't matter.

Although there are probably individuals with lower starch digestion capabilities, especially from populations that acquired agriculture later (aka anyone who's not Mideastern/East Asian).

Anecdotally I have never gotten gaseous symptoms or tlr4 symptoms when I only eat when very hungry. Eating slowly also helps, as does physical activity.

 

[Momado965]

His post isn't condescending at all imo, I think he's mostly sharing his experience with the forums, ray peat's work and his own diet issues (like me and others, he tried to ditch starch and failed, only to recover by adding it back in).

Did you fail ditching starch because you remained hungry despite continuous eating?

 

[Wagner83]

Did you fail ditching starch because you remained hungry despite continuous eating?

No I had physical issues, rayêatclips and eire24 had too:
Haidut Email Advice Depository
Is This Too Much White Sugar?
Metabolic Advantage / Fat Free / Foods / Athlete

What do you eat? You could be craving particular nutrients, macro-nutrients or even fibers (is that possible? digestion?).

 

[Momado965]

No I had physical issues, rayêatclips and eire24 had too:
Haidut Email Advice Depository
Is This Too Much White Sugar?
Metabolic Advantage / Fat Free / Foods / Athlete

What do you eat? You could be craving particular nutrients, macro-nutrients or even fibers (is that possible? digestion?).

I eat everything except for pufa, pufa oils and legumes. The bulk of my diet is goat and cow milk, eggs- all kinds, gelatin, pineapple juice, fruits, beef liver, lamb shanks, white rice, white sugar, potatoes, wheat and barley, butter and coconut oil, tolerable vegetables and spices. - Mostly Arabic and Italian.

 

[Wagner83]

Oh ok, I thought you were looking for anwsers as to why your no-starch experiment wasn't working. It sounds like there wasn't any.

 

[Momado965]

Oh ok, I thought you were looking for anwsers as to why your no-starch experiment wasn't working. It sounds like there wasn't any.

Well there was. There was major failure.

 

[Arnold Grape]

What even?! How people exceed 3000 calories on heavy liquid will remain one of the great historical mysteries to me. That is, btw, a major piece of advice when given, which is to eat more. But emphasis is often put on the drinking of fluids for calories - FYI I'm pretty sure one of the posters above eats coconut oil; mushroom broth and low fat milk and is sanctimonious about it when asked.

 

[mayweatherking]

What even?! How people exceed 3000 calories on heavy liquid will remain one of the great historical mysteries to me. That is, btw, a major piece of advice when given, which is to eat more. But emphasis is often put on the drinking of fluids for calories - FYI I'm pretty sure one of the posters above eats coconut oil; mushroom broth and low fat milk and is sanctimonious about it when asked.

maybe it's due to a hypothyroid state?

if you have high testosterone, high pregnenlone/progesterone, good thyroid function, strong libido, low prolactin, does it even matter anyway? i dont think so. peat is talking about eating healthier foods, but i mean, look at foods that people are eating that are 100x worse, or drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes, and we are debating if eating a potato is bad or not, i feel like if you reach your health goals it doesnt even matter that much

 

[RMJ]

for me it seems not the starch is the problem but the lectins/saponins that come with starchy food (tubers, grains ...)

for example: I made the potatao protein juice twice and both times it made my acne worse but isolatet potato starch seems to be fine

 

[Travis]

A person who eats the same calories as fruit will be thinner than one eating the same calories as starch. Fruit has, on average, about one fructose molecule for every one glucose molecule (the banana is the common exception); the potato on the other hand, is essentially all glucose. Fructose and glucose are metabolized differently, with the former being converted more into lipids and the latter more into glycogen. The saturated fatty acids our body produces from fructose takes-up less space than glycogen: a starch-like molecule stored not only in the liver and muscle, but also in extracellular spaces around the midsection. In fact, glycogen is so similar to amylopectin that it has historically been debated whether-or-not amyloid deposits found in the brain are actually amylopectin or glycogen—they both stain with iodine nearly the same shade and differ only in the extent of branching. Not only are fatty acids more dense than glycogen molecularly, but this difference becomes more pronounced in an aqueous environment: Branched polysaccharides adsorb a good deal of water all the way along the entire length, something you can prove yourself at home by mixing potato starch with water at 98°F). Hence: I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume that preferentially eating starch over fruit would lead to a greater body surface area, greater body mass, and greater water retention. The glycogen-promoting effect of eating starch can perhaps work to the benefit of certain athletes, but for most inactive people it should lead to a rounder form (noticeable at high levels of consumption).

 

[Westside PUFAs]

A person who eats the same calories as fruit will be thinner than one eating the same calories as starch.

That depends on how much fat they are simultaneously eating. As far as the pure experiment in humans there is no evidence of it because there are no controlled trials of a group of people eating a fruitarian diet versus a boiled potato diet. It's not practical to compare them like that because of the lack of human data. But the real world evidence of starch eaters suggests that starch is not fattening. People who use rice, grains like teff, and tubers like yams as a main base of their diets are all lean people. These are people who don't add butter, cheese or oil to the starch. These are people in Asia, India and Africa. That is not a comparison to fruit but it is evidence of starch itself.

I recommend these:

 

[Travis]

That depends on how much fat they are simultaneously eating. As far as the pure experiment in humans there is no evidence of it because there are no controlled trials of a group of people eating a fruitarian diet versus a boiled potato diet. It's not practical to compare them like that because of the lack of human data. But the real world evidence of starch eaters suggests that starch is not fattening. People who use rice, grains like teff, and tubers like yams as a main base of their diets are all lean people. These are people who don't add butter, cheese or oil to the starch. These are people in Asia, India and Africa. That is not a comparison to fruit but it is evidence of starch itself.

I recommend these:

This is true, and it would be incorrect to call them fat since glycogen is a carbohydrate. However, I will still maintain that they will be slightly 'fuller' than a fruit eater simply due to more glycogen and the water retention that follows from glycogen storage. But of course if you use glucose at the same rate as you consume it then glycogen will not be stored. In the presence of a high fat diet, the 'switch'—the substitution of one for the other—should have an effect. If you look at the rice eating Asians, many of them are a bit 'rounder' than people who'd eat straight fruit & raw vegetables—despite still being thinner than most Westerners (having excessive glycogen & adipose tissue lipids). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, and most people should agree that many Asians have a nice form.

Some people put alot of effort into lifting weights, and many of these people often want to more their muscles more prominent. It is not uncommon for professional body builders to fast for days before a competition to rid themselves of extracellular glycogen, a polymer formed from glucose but not fructose (there are no fructans in the body).

Wheat is different is different in this regard, and much worse because of the opiate peptides released from its gliadins. These peptides are δ-opioid agonists and will cause a prolactin spike, an event perhaps mediated through the pituitary. No other 'starch' will do this (but it's actually a protein which does this), and the μ-opioid peptides found in milk and soybeans have no effect on prolactin.

Mice lacking the prolactin receptor live just fine yet are far skinnier than their littermate controls. The differences between the two groups are the most salient in the abdominal region and the breasts, or the areas where most prolactin receptor is expressed. Perhaps the main function of prolactin on the cell is to cause the massive intracellular calcium influx that it's been shown to do (in picomolar concentrations), something you'd think had evolved as a device for storing calcium for milk production. Although this effect explains the presence of prolactin receptors in the breast, the receptors found in the abdominal region are harder to understand. Perhaps the additional volume in that region had evolved to create a buffer region to protect the infant from cold temperature, falls . . . or from falling coconuts (people shouldn't sleep under palm trees without shaking it beforehand).

Males shouldn't have any prolactin receptors yet many of them do. Hyperprolactinemia causes gynecomastia, a condition that could interfere with running.

So if someone loses weight from switching from eating wheat to eating apples, I don't think they shouldn't necessarily blame starch; I think it would be more reasonable to blame gluten exorphin B₅. Here is an article if anyone wants to see the prolactin spike induced by this wheat peptide.

 

[YourUniverse]

Ray has become an authority to me, even though my serotonin is lowered and I'm less of a zombie. He's just been right, in my case, so many times when I was confused or thought he was wrong initially, that I now basically don't question him. It's sort of a problem.

 

[ecstatichamster]

@Travis d0 you think fructans often cause symptoms of gluten intolerance. Rice can’t create fructans supposedly.

 

[Wagner83]

I tried some lightly fried onion bits and my stomach felt like exploding. This happened despite good digestion for some time now. Maybe as ray says the organism can adapt to an extent overtime, if our ancestors adapted to particular foods then perhaps we tolerate them without issues while for others it's the opposite. I'm not sure everyone has bad effects from wheat.

 

[TripleOG]

Coming to this conclusion too, sadly.

I went starch-less for 3 weeks in March for the first time since discovering Peat last year. Digestion improved, no wild mood swings, nose was less stuffy, eyes didn't itch as much, and I wouldn't lose my voice after eating due to bloat and occasional indigestion. Had a mashed potato meal that ended the 3 week trial, and of course I was bloated an hour later. The next morning I had symptoms I thought were always due to seasonal/pet allergies. Upped the mushroom/carrot/cascara and went starch-less again. Symptoms disappeared. All these years I thought I had allergies may have been endotoxin related this whole time.

I come from a pretty athletic/weightlifting background. One drawback I've noticed after removing starch is my desire to weight train decreases. Think I read someone else here experienced this, as well. Wonder what's going on with that.

 

[Travis]

@Travis d0 you think fructans often cause symptoms of gluten intolerance. Rice can’t create fructans supposedly.

Fructans are far less-commonly talked about, and I don't know much about them. All educational material and ~99% of polysaccharide-based articles are focused exclusively on glucose and glucosamine polymers—the reason probably is just because we don't store fructose as fructans in our body. If we did store fructans and not 'glucans,' then I suppose they'd get a good deal of attention and we'd all know much more about them. I would assume that they are absorbed in our intestines, because even the polysaccharides commonly assumed to resist digestion—such as cellulose—are actually broken down and absorbed by humans.⁽¹⁾ (The 'textbook idea' is that any polysaccharide connected through β-bonds will completely resist digestion.) Perhaps chitinase is responsible for degrading cellulose, an enzyme discovered in the late '90s in human stomachs (chitin also has 'resistant' β-bonds). Since animals, plants, fruit, nuts, and seeds don't contain chitin, the only logical way to explain its presence in the digestive tract of humans is for digesting and inactivating any ingested yeast & fungi—where it forms a structural component of the cell wall. This enzyme is also found in the human lung where its purpose, ostensibly, is to degrade the fungal spores inhaled.

I do know that wheat has a very strong lectin. There are many good articles from the '70s and '80s showing that these unusually-strong wheat lectins are the most likely cause of the damage seen in celiac disease. All popular explanations proposed to explain this enteral celiac damage involves the immune system, but immune activation induced by any other antigen does not cause anything remotely similar. While it's true that all people with celiac disease have antibodies directed against wheat gliadins, and also that their cells release γ-interferon in response to them, this is probably just because the lectin damage pre-facilitates their absorption by first creating 'weak spots' in the intestine.

'Wheat is a hell of a drug.' ―Rick James​

Sourdough fermentation can certainly reduce the antigenic fragments down to a size where they stop being immunoreactive, or under about 10 amino acids long, but the gluten exorphins display their full activity at four amino acids in length. I am not sure whether-or-not the opiate effects can be abrogated by sourdough fermentation, but since the Lactobacillus strains used for this can obviously hydrolyze proline bonds I think you'd have to assume that exorphin numbers would be greatly reduced. I think the sum of published articles imply that sourdough fermentation using Lactobacilli will make wheat more-or-less safe to consume, or about on the same safety level as oats (but sourdough bread would still have much higher concentrations of glutamine than most foods, a growth factor & amino acid much needed by C. albicans for chitin synthesis).

[1] Holloway, W. "Digestion of certain fractions of dietary fiber in humans." The American journal of clinical nutrition (1978)​

 

[Wagner83]

Unless it's fresh and warm from out of the oven it would be a good source of your favorite polymeric carbo-hydrate, dry starch. I think in general the (overcooked?) crust is worse than the inside.