Skip to main content

Safe Starches? Whatever

Doris Day, on a movie plot suggested by Tony Randall: "You mean, I leave Rock Hudson for you? Forget it!"

 
From left: Doris Day, Rock Hudson, Tony Randall.

Have you heard about the Perfect Health Diet? It's the one where you eat a pound of safe glue starches a day--foods like potatoes, sweet potatoes, rice, and some others I've never seen in a grocery store, even though I do my shopping at a few different grocery stores in a city of two million people (Denver). You also eat one-half to one pound of meat a day. There's more to it, but that's the general plot: a mostly paleolithic diet with a boatload of starch.

Some people are reacting as if someone came up with the chocolate diet. I don't see what all the fuss is about. The diet cuts out or cuts way down on most neolithic foods because they have irritants and antinutrients, but we already knew that. It encourages eating natural fats, organ meats and fibrous vegetables because they're nutritious, but we already knew that, too. 

In practice, if you're already on a low carb diet, the Perfect Health Diet replaces some of your bacon cheeseburgers with rice. The Jaminets, the authors of the diet, report that some people felt a lot better with more starch in their diets. Perhaps they just needed a potassium/magnesium pill instead of a bunch of sugar, which is what starch breaks into in your digestive tract. If there are any other nutrients in rice or root vegetables that I can't get from a salad, I'm afraid I don't know what they are.

I've had extremely good results on a low-carb diet: GERD gone, shoulder pain gone, bloating gone, four-hour naps gone, dental plaque gone, over 20 pounds of fat gone, midafternoon slump gone, and so on. I don't see a reason to dump Rock Hudson for Tony Randall.


Comments

Chuck said…
nice analogy....roll with what works for you.

i think that a lot of people in the paleo world are warming up to "safe starches". people used to be carb phobic but not so much anymore. i think the potential problem is confusion among the less informed. a lot of people are metabolically deranged and need low to very low carbs to fix things.
Lori Miller said…
Agreed--if you've found a diet you're happy with, there's no need to start adding back anything. But I think even some people who ought to know better are jumping on the safe starch bandwagon.

To Paul Jaminet's credit, he stated in a later post on Jimmy Moore's blog that the "regular" Perfect Health Diet wasn't meant for diabetics.

Popular posts from this blog

Moving on to YouTube

Remember when the blogosphere was a wild ride? Doctors, writers and researchers dove into research, picked apart studies and stood up to official advice and conventional wisdom that didn't work. We found each other in the comments and made a community.  Along the way, Dr. T. Colin Campbell's research got exposed as shoddy by an English major, Tom Naughton made us laugh, "safe starch" fads made us scratch our heads, "Diabetes Warrior" Steve Cooksey almost went to jail, CarbSane trolled everyone who was anyone, and CarbSaneR trolled the troll.  Now it's very quiet. Blogs don't come up in Google search results anymore and even if they did, most of the bloggers have stopped writing.  That's why I've moved on to YouTube. Videos do come up in search results and my shorts--which are mostly what I make--get pushed out to hundreds of people or more. My videos are on food and health (biohacking), but also on growing things and fixing things. If you...

We Hate the ADA; Why does the Perfect Health Diet Get a Pass?

Some people keep touting the Perfect Health Diet as low-carb, but carb levels that are mostly in the triple digits aren't generally regarded as low-carb; in fact, one of the authors says low-carb diets are unhealthy. A lot of us hate the  American Diabetes Association's advice for diabetics: start with 45g to 60g of carbohydrate per meal and go higher or lower from there. That's 135g to 180g of carb. Perfect Health Diet advice for diabetics: eat 20% to 30% of your diet as carbohydrate. On 2,000 calories, that's 100g to 150g of carb. On 1,700 calories, that's 85 to 128g; on 2,200 calories, that's 112 to 168g. Depending on your carb and calorie intake, carbs would be 85g to 168g per day. That's not a mile off from the ADA's recommendations. Paul Jaminet, one of the authors of the Perfect Health Diet, says, "the basic biology here is that the body's physiology is optimized for a carbohydrate intake of about 30%." He warns against a ...

Not Only Cheaper, But Easier

A while back, I wrote about saving money on break time coffee and snacks. I haven't done very well putting it into practice. But a post by James Clear today got me thinking about it again: Warren Buffett uses a two-list system to prioritize things. Check it out --and follow the instructions. Using Buffett's two-list system, two of the goals I ended up with were taking care of myself and saving $400 more per month than I already am. As I said, I've been wanting to save money, and the system made me really focus on this. I came up with 11 money-saving ideas, six of which had to do with food. Buying hamburger in bulk. Ranch Foods Direct sells one-pound packages of 80% lean pastured ground beef in bundles of 20 for a lot less than Whole Foods. Sprouts only carries super-lean beef that's grass-fed, and it's more expensive, too.  Not driving to Whole Foods. Whole Foods is out of my way, and saving a weekly trip saves gas. Coffee at home, tea at work. Tea is fr...

Palpitations Gone with Iron

Thanks to my internet friend Larcana, who alerted me to the connection between iron deficiency and palpitations, I doubled down on my iron supplements and, for good measure, washed them down with Emergen-C. It's a cold medicine with a mega-dose of vitamin C, plus B vitamins and minerals. I don't think vitamin C does anything for a cold (a friend bought the stuff and left it at my house the last time she visited), but vitamin C does help iron absorption. After doubling up on iron in the last three days, I feel back to normal. (I'd already been taking quite a bit of magnesium and potassium, so I probably had sufficient levels of those.) How did I get so low on iron? Maybe it was too many Quest bars instead of red meat when I had odd cravings during my dental infection recently. Maybe because it's too hard to find liver at the grocery store and I haven't eaten much of it lately. Maybe the antibiotics damaged my intestines . And apparently, I'm a heavy bleeder . ...

Fly with Reuteri

If you're planning to travel by plane and you want to keep enjoying the benefits of l. reuteri yogurt, you might have gotten sticker shock from the price of l. reuteri probiotics. MyReuteri * costs $46 to $83 for 30 capsules, depending on the CFUs (colony-forming units, or the number of viable microorganisms). If you're thinking about economizing by putting some yogurt in a sturdy container and taking it with you, you can do that. I'll break down the pros and cons and look at some alternatives.  Photo from Unsplash . Cost Yogurt might be less expensive than probiotics, but it isn't free. A half-cup serving costs about 70¢ to make if you start with a previous batch. It contains about 90 billion CFUs if fermented for 36 hours.  This is a lot less than $5.56 for two capsules of 50 billion CFU MyReuteri, but for a one-week vacation, you'd only save $34 by eating yogurt instead. (You can freeze any unused capsules for later.)  Furthermore, the yogurt would have to go in ...