The Starch Solution (3 page)

Over time, I tested, documented, and systematized my plant-food, starch-based therapy into the McDougall Program. When St. Helena Hospital in California’s Napa Valley asked me to implement it into their lifestyle residential program in 1986, I accepted. Their Seventh-Day Adventist faith, which endorses a vegetarian diet and a healthy lifestyle, seemed like a good match.

Working at St. Helena Hospital, one of the nation’s leading heart surgery centers, gave me lots of exposure to surgeons and cardiologists.
I offered to send these specialists my patients for a second opinion if they would reciprocate by sending me theirs. However, in my 16 years at St. Helena Hospital, though I referred many patients out for a second opinion or for other types of treatment, I never once received a referral from one of these doctors. Interestingly, when I occasionally cared for the hospital’s own physicians, or their spouses or children, they commended my protocols. They just didn’t seem to want the same simple, sensible treatments for their patients.

Still, I knew my approach was working: The radiologists assured me of this as they monitored my patients’ repeat angiograms. They reported that their arteries were opening up and healing. This was all the reinforcement I needed.

Over my years there, I saw thousands of people helped by St. Helena Hospital’s talented and caring staff. My lifestyle residential program, however, never flourished, even as my best-selling books, along with top television and radio programs, brought us international exposure. Maybe a hospital was not the best venue for a program focused on achieving health through diet rather than through a traditional medical approach. At $4,000 for my primarily educational program compared with $100,000 for bypass surgery, perhaps it just wasn’t bringing in enough revenue for the hospital.

The opportunity to improve my census came when Dr. Roy Swank, the former head of neurology at Oregon Health & Science University who designed a dietary treatment for multiple sclerosis (MS), invited me to open up my live-in McDougall Program to treat patients with MS at St. Helena Hospital. I anticipated an enthusiastic response from the hospital administration, but after lengthy discussions, they decided that associating themselves with MS patients might stigmatize the hospital since these patients never seemed to get better. I also wondered whether the limited opportunity for profit might have been a consideration.

When my contract came up for renewal in 2002, I turned it in with VOID written over the front page. I was told later that they had
thought that I would not be able to leave them, because without the organization they provided, the McDougall Program could not exist. But I had run the McDougall Program without them in Minneapolis for the Blue Cross/Blue Shield insurance company, where we demonstrated the same remarkable results that we had experienced at St. Helena Hospital: reduced weight, cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels, as well as relief from indigestion, constipation, arthritis, and other ailments. That program also showed a 44 percent reduction in health care costs in 1 year based on the insurance company’s own claims data. I’d done the same thing for Publix Supermarket employees in Lakeland, Florida. In both cases, we ran the program out of a local hotel. I knew I could easily set up a 10-day McDougall Program in any US city within 72 hours. All I needed were my staff, space, patients, and a kitchen that could prepare food the way I wanted it. The hospital’s nudge out its door was the best win yet, both for me and for my patients.

May 2002 marked our first McDougall Program at an upscale resort in Santa Rosa, California. By this time my wife, Mary, had developed an enormous repertoire of enticing recipes reflecting the program’s philosophy that would satisfy the appetites of our patients. Mary’s recipes are easy to prepare, not only in a professional kitchen, but also at home. (Nearly 100 of our favorites are included in
Chapter 15
.) The resort’s kitchen quickly learned to turn out copious quantities of food that tasted good while nurturing our participants’ health and well-being.

I have often been asked, “You are a doctor, so why do you speak against the practices of fellow physicians?” The answer is simple: I never took an oath to protect the financial interests of the medical industry. I did, however, take an oath to care for the sick and to keep
them from harm and injustice, and to never give a deadly drug or procedure. I fully realize that the views I advocate cause people with vested interests to dislike me. But I can live with that unfairness. Too many physicians and dietitians pay allegiance to the big businesses of food and pharmaceuticals rather than to their customers, the patients.

Although I believe that most of my medical colleagues are well intentioned, their ignorance of basic human nutrition inhibits their ability to heal their patients and protect them from harm. I understand this. I operated with this same colossal blind spot when I first practiced medicine, back on the sugar plantation where I was frustrated by my powerlessness to perform the most elemental function of a physician: to help my patients regain their lost health and appearance. In 2011, I authored Senate Bill 380 for the state of California. This directive, passed unanimously by the legislators and signed by the governor, requires medical doctors to learn about human nutrition—a long overdue step forward for patients. These days, medical care is changing for the better because millions of informed people are demanding improved health rather than just more procedures and pills.

The Starch Solution
represents a giant step toward healing a sick system and putting easy, healthy choices within everyone’s reach, and directly into your own hands. In this book I share what I have learned over the past 44 years about promoting health and healing illness. To help you get started, I’ve included a 7-Day Sure-Start Plan in
Chapter 14
, backed up by practical information on how to ready your kitchen, your family, and your life for this change in the way you eat.
Chapter 15
gets the foods you love on the table with nearly 100 easy-to-prepare recipes to suit every taste. Before long you will find yourself coming up with starch-centered meals effortlessly on your own. All you need to do to get started is turn the page.

H
ave you had your rice today?

This Chinese greeting—the equivalent of our
how are you?—
reminds us that, for the Chinese, whether you’ve eaten rice is the ultimate measure of well-being. Rice is that essential to the Chinese diet. Throughout most of Asia, the average person eats rice two to three times daily. Rice is also an important food in the Middle East, Latin America, Italy, and the West Indies. After corn it is the second most produced food worldwide, and the world’s single most important source of energy, providing more than 20 percent of calories consumed by humans around the globe.

In China, the word for rice and food are one and the same. Likewise, in Japan the word for cooked rice also means “meal.” Buddhists refer to grains of rice as “little Buddhas,” while in Thailand the call that brings the family to the table is “Eat rice.” In India, the first food a new bride offers her husband is not cake but rice. It is also the first solid food that will be offered to her baby.

The story is the same the world over. Whether rice in Asia, potatoes in South America, corn in Central America, wheat in Europe, or beans, millet, sweet potatoes, and barley around the globe, starch has been at the center of food and nutrition throughout human history.

Plants use water, carbon dioxide, and energy from the sun to form simple sugars through a process called photosynthesis. The most basic carbohydrate is the simple sugar glucose. Inside the plant’s cells, simple sugars are linked into chains, some of them arranged in a straight line (amylose) and others in many branches (amylopectin). When these sugar chains gather in large quantities inside a plant’s cells, they form starch grains, also called starch granules (amyloplasts).

Plants store in their roots, stems, leaves, flowers, seeds, and fruits the starch they produce. The stored starch provides them with a source of energy when they need it later, keeping them alive through the winter and fueling their reproduction the following spring. It’s what makes starchy vegetables, legumes, and grains so healthy to eat: Their high concentration of carbohydrates not only sustains the plants but also provides the energy needed to sustain human life.

Starch should be our primary source of digestible carbohydrate. The enzyme amylase in our saliva and intestine breaks down the long carbohydrate chains, turning them back into simple sugars. Digestion is a slow process that gradually releases these simple sugars from the small intestine into the bloodstream, providing our cells with a ready supply of energy.

Fruits offer quick-burning energy mostly in the form of simple sugars, but little of that slow-burning, sustaining starch. As a result, fruits alone won’t satisfy our appetites for very long. Green, yellow, and orange nonstarchy perishable vegetables contain only small quantities of starch. Their most important role is to contribute flavor, texture, color, and aroma to your starch-based meals. They offer a bonus in the additional nutrients (such as vitamin A and C) that come along for the ride.

Why then, here in the states and increasingly around the world, as all populations undergo economic development, have we become so afraid and ashamed of this most elemental food? And what price are we paying for shunning the most basic dietary staple known to humankind?

Diet and nutrition advice is often focused on
how much
we ought to eat, and misses the point: More important than how much, how often, and when we eat is
what
we eat. Different kinds of animals require different types of diets. We humans are built to thrive on starch. The more rice, corn, potatoes, sweet potatoes, and beans we eat, the trimmer, more energetic, and healthier we become.

Starch? Really? Isn’t that for laundry? Yes, but it’s also the key to optimum health and satiety. We hear a lot about carbohydrates and whether or not we should eat them, but we don’t hear enough about the most valuable type of carbohydrate, starch.

There are three basic types of carbohydrates—sugar, cellulose, and starch—each made up of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen in specific configurations. The simplest of these—sugar—includes sucrose (the granulated sugar you bake into cookies), fructose (which makes fruit taste sweet), lactose (found in milk), and glucose (the simple sugar that comes together in chains to make cellulose and starch). Sugar provides quick and powerful energy because it is so efficiently broken down in the body. (You’ll learn more about sugar in
Chapter 12
.)