The Starch Solution (11 page)

Unhealthy eating habits, along with smoking, drinking coffee and alcohol, and taking drugs, have been known since antiquity to be at the root of many human maladies. The challenge comes in recognizing these
lifelong behaviors and habits as the source of repeated injury to the body, then putting a stop to them, once and for all.

Change can be challenging, but understanding the source of suffering makes it considerably easier. It all begins with a simple understanding of one basic truth: The diet that best prevents disease, best supports the body’s innate healing mechanisms, and best promotes sustained weight loss is a low-fat diet based on starches, with added vegetables and fruits, and with no animal products or free oils (like olive or corn oil). A giant step toward health and spontaneous healing is yours for the taking. You should expect big results after making these big changes to a starch-based diet.

You will find more than a hundred similarly fascinating Star McDougaller stories and the science that supports such remarkable healing on my Web site,
www.drmcdougall.com
.

Acne

Asthma

Cholecystitis (gallbladder pain and inflammation)

Cholesterol (high)

Constipation

Diabetes (type 2)

Diarrhea (chronic)

Hypertension

Obesity

The list goes on. You will not be disappointed with your body’s abilities to heal. Give it a chance.

A
s Americans, we place our trust in the United States Department of Agriculture to help us choose foods that will keep us healthy. But does it really have our best interests in mind?

In 2011, the USDA enacted two policies that limit the nation’s consumption of starchy vegetables and grains, the very foods that offer the best hope for addressing our current epidemics of obesity, diabetes, and heart disease as well as a host of other medical challenges. These are the foods that have provided the bulk of human sustenance throughout recorded history, that continue to nourish large populations around the globe that cannot afford to put meat, dairy, and processed foods at the center of their plates, and that place the lowest demand on our environment.

In its January 2011 report,
School Meals: Building Blocks for Healthy Children,
the USDA Committee on Nutrition Standards for National School Lunch and Breakfast Programs recommended reducing starchy vegetables, like potatoes and corn, to 1 cup per student per school week.
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Instead, children are encouraged to eat turkey sausages, cheese omelets,
beef egg rolls, hot dogs, hamburgers, pepperoni pizza, roast beef, deli ham, chocolate milk, and margarine. It doesn’t take a nutrition degree to see there’s something terribly wrong here.

The second policy prevents needy families from using WIC coupons to purchase potatoes.
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The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) provides vouchers that mothers use to buy food for their families. Only WIC-approved foods may be purchased with the coupons, and the new regulation specifically excludes potatoes from the list. A WIC recipient could use the coupons to load butter, sour cream, and cheese on her baked potatoes, then wash it down with a glass of whole milk, but could not use the coupons to purchase the only healthy part of that meal: the potato itself.

These two policies suggest that limiting access to starches will encourage greater consumption of green, yellow, and orange vegetables. That might seem admirable on its own merits; the more colorful the vegetable,
the more vitamins and antioxidants it might contain, and therefore the healthier it might be to eat. But that simplistic argument masks a more complex reality.

Eating more very low-calorie vegetables and fewer starches leaves people feeling hungrier. (Think of a plateful of broccoli, cauliflower, lettuce, kale, and pea pods for breakfast.) They will need to eat something else to make up the rest of the calories they need and satisfy their hunger. The easiest way to do that under the USDA recommendations is with meat, dairy, eggs, processed foods, and oils. Not only are these foods at the center of our nation’s worst health problems, but they also are among the most expensive in the supermarket. With a diet high in nonstarchy vegetables, meat, and dairy, families in need won’t have an easy time stretching their food budget to the end of the month.

A national food policy promoting healthy starches would fuel schoolchildren with comforting, familiar foods that please their palates and satisfy their bellies. Instead of filling up on fatty, processed meats and sugary flavored milks, they would fill their bellies with whole grains, beans, and potatoes (starchy vegetables), setting them on a path toward healthy eating for the rest of their lives. Promoting these foods to WIC recipients would provide the same benefit to families, and would help assure their ability to put food on the table for the entire month. As a nation, we would save money through increased productivity and reduced health care costs. It’s an undeniable win-win.

If we are not benefiting from these USDA policies, who is? What’s the motivation for taking the healthy, filling, widely enjoyed potato and other starches out of the equation and essentially replacing them with foods that have been well established to cause illness?

Whether by design or as an unintentional side effect, the key beneficiaries of these policies are the beef, poultry, egg, and dairy industries that benefit from increased consumption of their products.

To make sense of all this, you need to understand something about the USDA.

When Congress created the US Department of Agriculture in 1862, Abraham Lincoln dubbed the USDA the “People’s Department”: At the time, farmers and their families made up roughly half of our nation’s population. (By comparison, less than 1 percent of the US population now claims farming as its occupation.) The agency’s role was expanded when Congress passed the Food and Drugs Act of 1906 in response to the uproar following publication of
The Jungle,
Upton Sinclair’s expose of the filthy and brutal meatpacking practices of the time.

The number of US farms peaked at 6.8 million in 1935. The nation’s population totaled more than 127 million at the time, meaning that there was one farm for approximately every 19 Americans. By 2005, the US population had more than doubled, and just four companies (Tyson, Cargill, Swift & Company, and National Beef Packing Company) controlled the processing of 84 percent of the country’s beef.
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Three of these same four, along with one other, processed 64 percent of the nation’s pork. Processing of chickens and turkeys is also limited largely to four companies.
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Instead of representing the common interest, the agency has been corrupted by its sanctioned allegiance to agribusinesses into ignoring scientific evidence that goes against industry interests. The USDA’s conflicting allegiances and responsibilities are at the core of our inability to address the costly epidemics of obesity and other diet-related illnesses. No matter how easy and obvious the solution may be, we will never get to it so long as big agriculture and public health are represented by the same federal agency.

It wasn’t until the 1970s that the USDA took control of food assistance programs to become the nation’s leading authority on dietary recommendations. Beginning in 1980, and every five years since, the USDA and the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) have jointly
published dietary guidelines that drive much of the nation’s nutrition and health policy, funding, and activities. The HHS’s Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion and the USDA’s Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion coordinate development of the guidelines.

A major factor influencing the nation’s dietary policies is the revolving door that shuttles industry leaders into roles as legislators and government regulators, then back into industry. Members of the USDA have had known associations with the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, the National Pork Board, the National Livestock and Meat Board, the American Egg Board, ConAgra Foods, the National Dairy Council, and Dairy Management Inc.
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In other words, health care, nutrition policy, and agribusiness are all tucked cozily together in a king-size bed.

As part of its expanded role, today’s USDA is responsible not only for overseeing the safety of our food supply, but also for tackling the nation’s growing epidemic of obesity. Still core to its role, however, is supporting and promoting agriculture. The USDA’s twin roles representing these two often opposing concerns, compounded by corporate
lobbying that is widely known to corrupt our food and health care systems, are a conflict of interest that calls into question the agency’s motives and credibility, as well as its conclusions and recommendations. How can a consumer really know, for example, whether cheese and dairy are recommended because they are truly good for our health or because they support businesses the USDA is charged with protecting?

For the most part, we cannot know the motive behind a particular dietary recommendation or piece of proposed legislation; the USDA’s reports do not pick apart its conflicting interests. However, what is in the best interest of agribusiness is often not in the best interest of your and your family’s health. We are on our own in interpreting its recommendations. Based on nearly 40 years of helping patients improve their health through diet, I think the interpretation is pretty clear: Although the USDA was created to represent our farm-based population, 150 years later the agency has morphed from the “People’s Department” into the “Agribusiness Industries’ Department,” primarily serving the interests of giant, consolidated, politically influential food production and distribution corporations.

In July 2010, I responded to the USDA’s call for written comments on its Dietary Guidelines for Americans, suggesting that it look at starch’s long and positive history of contributing to good health and evaluate its biased views of the scientific literature and factual errors that favor the livestock industries.
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The following January, I was heartened to learn that the USDA had revised its Dietary Guidelines for Americans to something less industry friendly and more in keeping with the interests of the people.
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Americans were told to “emphasize nutrient-dense foods and beverages—vegetables, fruits, whole grains, fat-free or low-fat milk and milk products, seafood, lean meats and poultry, eggs, beans and
peas, and nuts and seeds.” If its interests were purely in our health, it would have left out the seafood, meat, poultry, eggs, and dairy. Still, the 2010 Guidelines emphasize the importance of whole grains, all vegetables (both starchy and nonstarchy), legumes, and fruits. They also discuss the DASH (Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension) and Mediterranean diets as well as the benefits of vegetarian and vegan diets. This is indeed a step in the right direction.