Deadly Harvest: The Intimate Relationship Between Our Heath and Our Food (26 page)

Remembering that starch is not a great thing to be putting in the body, let us keep things in perspective. There are occasions when there are small amounts of starch in a protein dish, like a few bits of sweet corn in a tuna salad. This is unimportant provided that the protein dominates. The trouble arises when the proteins and starches are equally balanced and they fight each other for priority. This is the case with so much of what we eat today—for example, steak and French fries, hot dogs, hamburgers, and tuna sandwiches. Starch/protein combinations cause trouble when they are present in nearly equal proportions and they fight each other for dominance.

Fruit/Protein and Fruit/Starch Combinations

Eaten on their own, fruits pass quickly through the stomach and are rapidly digested in the small intestine. On the other hand, if fruit is eaten at the end of a meal, it is kept waiting in the stomach. If this happens, most modern fruits will start to ferment and produce gases and harmful compounds, such as fusel oil. Digestive processes are also disrupted and the fruit’s nutritive value is compromised. This is a main cause of digestive upsets, gas, headaches, and gastro-esophageal reflux disease (GERD).

Fruits have a predominantly acid nature. Acid inhibits ptyalin production in the mouth, thus conflicting with starch digestion, and inhibits gastric acid production in the stomach, interfering with protein digestion. Fruit and starch combinations lead to disoriented digestion and the arrival in the colon of poorly digested,
Candida
-feeding starch particles. Fruit is best eaten on an empty stomach.

Milk

Milk forms a bad combination on its own. After the age of about 4 years, a human does not have the enzymes to properly digest dairy products. Notably, we do not secrete the enzyme rennin to separate milk into curds and whey. As a result, the half-curdled mixture proceeds through the digestive system, improperly digested and causing mischief on the way. In most adult humans, the milk sugar lactose arrives in the colon undigested, where it feeds bad bacteria, producing gas. The body perceives lactose as an antigen, so it also creates mischief with allergic reactions, such as damage to the colon lining, headaches, and diarrhea. More subtly, lactose is strongly suspected of playing a role in autism, chronic fatigue syndrome, and attention deficit disorder (ADD).

Milk fat is also largely undigested, because the adult digestive system fails to separate the fat (in the curds) from the calcium (in the whey). The two combine to form insoluble solids that pass, unchanged, the full length of the digestive tube and out the other end. In this way, the calcium in milk is largely lost to the body.

Summary—Digestive System Clues

From this quick appraisal of the digestive system, focusing on just a few key areas, we throw into high relief the factors that are beneficial to it and those that are harmful. From our study of colon health, we find that a high non-starch plant food diet is healthy. On the other hand, starches, sugars, grains, dairy, and a high-meat, high-sulfur diet are unhealthy.

We have seen that babies are well adapted to consuming the milk of their species, but the adults are not. This notion is reinforced by a look at food combining. Nature did not design our digestive systems to cope with starches, dairy, and sugary fruits. This strongly reinforces earlier clues from other fields of enquiry. Now, we’ll look at these food items individually to find out what creates these problems.

DIETARY CLUES

Grains (Cereals)

All grains are mostly composed of starch. White wheat flour is about 75% starch, whole wheat flour is 67%, rye flour 75%, white rice 85%, oatmeal 65%, and corn flour (maize) 92%.
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The products made from them are also mostly starch: spaghetti is 71% starch, corn flakes 77%, white bread 46%, and whole-grain bread 40%. Starches from all grains are rapidly converted to glucose, provoking an unhealthy glycemic and insulin reaction. So, when you look at a slice of bread, think 4 teaspoons of sugar; a cup of cornflakes is equal to 5 teaspoons of sugar; and 1/2 cup of rice is 6 teaspoons of sugar.

Primatologist Katharine Milton has studied the foods eaten by apes and monkeys in the tropics and draws comparisons with how human food must have been in our evolutionary past.
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She finds that grains are a poor source of micronutrients. Grains have massively displaced more nutritious plant foods from our modern diets. This is why makers of breakfast cereals are obliged by law to “fortify” their products with a long list of classic micronutrients. Of course, this is no substitute for the rich variety of background micronutrients found naturally in many plant foods, all working with each other in harmony to nourish our body in the way it recognizes.

Cereals, like many other plants, have developed defenses against being eaten. These defenses take the form of antinutrients, toxins that are designed to upset the biochemistry of the creature that eats them. Seed-eaters (from fungi to bacteria to insects and birds) have developed resistance to these antinutrients, but primates (man included) have never been grain eaters and have low resistance to cereal toxins. It may come as a shock to learn that cereal toxins have been undermining human health for millennia. In this book, we call these “background” toxins: they do not kill you right away and often they do not produce any obvious symptoms, but silently, in the background, they are undermining our health. Researchers Loren Cordain
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and the Dane H. Frøkier
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have studied and reported on their effects. Let’s look at four types of antinutrients.

Lectins—
Lectins can batten on to carbohydrate-containing molecules anywhere in the body. They pass easily from the gut into the bloodstream and disrupt the work of any body cell to which they attach themselves. They are powerful provokers of all kinds of autoimmune diseases, including allergies, asthma, lupus, and arthritis, and are even suspected of causing autism in susceptible children. Lectins cause the gut to be more porous, allowing bacteria, fungi, and food particles to flood into the bloodstream and create mischief. Most Americans, with their depressed immune systems and vague headaches and allergies, are unknowingly suffering from this effect. In extreme cases, a porous intestine develops into leaky gut syndrome.

Alpha-amylase inhibitors—
Alpha-amylase inhibitors interrupt the activity of the starch-digesting enzyme amylase and damage the pancreas. In addition, they are strong allergens, which explains the “baker’s asthma” referred to in Chapter 3.

Protease inhibitors—
Protease inhibitors interrupt signals from the intestine telling the pancreas to reduce secretion. As a result, the pancreas continues churning out the hormone cholecystokinin like a runaway flywheel. This disrupts normal digestive processes and the stress on the pancreas can lead to abnormal enlargement and cancer.

Alkyl resorcinols—
Alkyl resorcinols disrupt a wide range of body functions: they disintegrate red blood cells, disrupt DNA maintenance, abnormally increase blood clotting, and depress production of human growth hormone (HGH). HGH is needed, even in full-grown adults, for cell renewal and to maintain health as we age. Depressed HGH might also be part of the explanation why humans lost stature when they took up farming (see chapter 3).

We introduced the most powerful allergen in grains, the gluten complex, in chapter 3. Recent research finds that one in 133 Americans has a full-blown gluten allergy called celiac disease.
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Japanese researcher Hideaki Tsuji finds that it is the portion called gliadin that is responsible for celiac disease.
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In addition, it causes killer lymphocytes to malfunction and damage the delicate mucous membrane lining the intestine. It withers away the villi and provokes crypt cells to proliferate in a pre-cancerous way.

Apart from gluten, there are dozens of allergenic substances in many types of grains, including rice, barley, and corn. Some people suffer allergic reactions, even anaphylactic shock, to the barley present in beer. Tsuji says that rice is the foremost allergen in Japan. He describes eight major allergens in wheat, four in barley, three in rice, and two in maize.

Heirloom Grains: Quinoa and Amaranth

The grain quinoa has a particularly high content of the poisons cyanide and saponin. Saponin is a heart-stopper related to digitalis; Amerindians used the concentrated extract on their poison arrows. Amaranth accumulates poisonous levels of nitrates and oxalates, toxins that cause inflammation and may lead to swelling of the throat to the point of suffocation.

Vegetables, Starchy

In the modern diet, there is only one big player in the category of starchy vegetables—the potato. But in passing we mention that parsnips, sweet potatoes, yams, and plantains are also starchy and give “bad” blood sugar spikes; that is, they are high glycemic. Carrots and beets are not starchy but, depending on their age, variety, and other factors can have a high sugar content. They, too, can be unhealthily glycemic.

The potato is a newcomer to the human diet and it is starchy. In all its forms (baked, boiled, mashed, fries, and so on) it is strongly glycemic, so it is classed as a bad carbohydrate. Its ability to raise insulin levels is even greater than the glycemic index would suggest. These properties alone make the potato a poor food for humans.

Potato is a poor source of micronutrients as well. This might not be important if Americans consumed potatoes frugally and rarely, but they consume it in vast quantities every day. In this way, it shoulders aside the consumption of much more nutritious non-starchy plant foods. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) classes potatoes as a vegetable, as though it has equal nutritive value as, say, a tomato. Americans are thus led to believe that they have filled their vegetable quota by filling up on French fries. They are mistaken: filled with potato, the population is nevertheless starving for all those ingredients needed in trace amounts from authentic non-starchy vegetables.

As with cereals, we have to wonder about the presence of plant toxins in potato to which humans have no resistance. Agricultural researchers Leslie Plhak and Peter Sporns have studied and reviewed this interesting question.
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Potatoes fall under suspicion because they are part of the same plant family (Solanacea) as the poisonous and narcotic plants henbane, deadly nightshade, belladonna, and mandrake. It turns out that potatoes are charged with many background toxins, of which the most potent are glycoalkaloids. Potatoes have been responsible for a number of human poisonings—up to 30 deaths and over 2,000 cases of non-fatal poisonings have been documented. The
British Medical Journal
observes that there is certainly a vast reservoir of unreported cases.
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Symptoms of potato poisoning include vomiting, diarrhea, drowsiness, confusion, weakness, and coma. In those cases where people have died, it has been from strangulated bowel, respiratory failure, and cardiac arrest. From these unfortunates, it has been possible to calculate the fatal dose. Researchers estimate that the safety factor is just four-fold against toxic poisoning for a one-pound serving.
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It should not be surprising that episodes of glycoalkaloid poisoning, some fatal, have occurred.

Glycoalkaloids do their damage on several fronts. First, they can form a soapy lather that destabilizes membranes, particularly those lining the intestinal tract. They inhibit production of the nerve enzyme cholinesterase, which is a likely cause of their neurological effects. Finally, they encourage mutations in the cells of the liver, nerve tubes, and immune system.

Vegetables, Non-Starchy

We do not generally think of plants as a meaningful source of protein, yet indeed they are. Young leaves routinely eaten by primates in the tropics contain 10% to 20% of protein dry-weight
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and gorillas build and maintain their muscles entirely on plant protein. In contrast, modern species of intensively cultivated plants tend to have lower protein content, but there are exceptions: Brussels sprouts contain 24% protein per 100 grams dry-weight.

Can humans get enough protein from plant foods alone? We need less protein than we think—about 75 grams per day for an average 165-pound adult. That equates to about 2 pounds (1 kg) of Brussels sprouts per day. Not impossible! This book is not about making us all vegetarians, but it is useful to see how plant food is adding to our protein intake, which implies that we do not need as much high-protein food as we think.

Monocot and Dicot Plant Foods

Humans and other primates find their plant food mainly from the class of plants called angiosperms, which are flowering species. Angiosperms are, in turn, divided into two main classes, monocot and dicot. Monocot species includes grains, cereals, and other grasses. Dicot species include what we think of as salads and colored vegetables.

Wild leaves typically have a high percentage of indigestible cell wall material, up to 35%. It is almost entirely the types of soluble fiber called “unlignified hemicelluloses and cellulose.” Such fiber is common in dicot vegetables. The human gut is good at degrading this type of fiber, which is found in carrots and cabbage, for example. The human gut is much less efficient at degrading the fiber from monocot plants, such as wheat bran. According to Dr. Milton, most primates focus almost entirely on the dicot plants with their soluble fiber.
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This is just the type of fiber that our bodies need and the low intake of fiber today has serious consequences for human health. Non-starchy plants are, of course, naturally rich in micronutrients, notably the myriad “background” micronutrients that are so important to our biochemistry.
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