The Starch Solution (7 page)

Throughout my life I have been enthusiastic about everything: schoolwork, hobbies, sports. I was born that way, and scientific research establishes that, like the color of our eyes and hair, our personality traits are determined in part by genetics.
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Early life experiences fostered my exuberant nature. So now, even if I wanted to, I could not become a moderate person. Still, I love life and do not want my high-spirited personality to kill me, as it almost did in my youth. This is one reason that motivated me to discover a solution that works.

I now direct that forceful energy toward supportive behaviors rather than destructive ones. I have learned to love healthy foods and I eat them without reservation. Windsurfing is one of my passions, and I eagerly anticipate long walks carrying my youngest grandson in a backpack. My favorite drink is sparkling water—I drink a lot of it. In short, there is no limit to the good things I passionately pursue in life.

Excess and health need not be mutually exclusive, so long as you take a little time to learn which excesses are health enhancing rather than destructive. The Irish poet and dramatist Oscar Wilde once said, “Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.” I encourage you to take these words to heart and live life enthusiastically, with health-supporting behaviors.

I have been heavy most of my life, but until I
began this way of eating, I
did not realize that I had been obese for almost all of my adult life. I did Weight Watchers twice, the Fit for Life diet of the mid-80s; I
tried the South Beach Diet and many others. I
was losing no significant amounts of weight, even after being very compliant, and gaining it all back each time. I
know better than to fail like that! I
’m a smart, educated woman; what is the matter with me?

In late 2009, I turned 60. I began to really suffer the effects of being nearly 100 pounds too heavy for my 5-foot-3 frame. My right hip and right knee began to hurt and give way at random times. I could not do cleaning that involved getting on the floor, and changing bed sheets was agony. My adult children were coming home to visit for Christmas, and I felt bad that I couldn’t prepare a clean house for them.

Somehow, I was lucky enough to find a link to some testimonials about Dr. McDougall. During the first shopping trip for groceries for his plan, I was in an agony of pain. It was enough to begin, though. I have to say that the first bite of brown rice, after 5 years of eschewing carbs, brought tears to my eyes! It was like welcoming back an old friend! The
starch-based diet has been satisfying and filling. It is also easy to shop for, and meal planning is so simple.

There were two strategies that I found valuable. The first was to always be prepared. Every weekend, I would make a general food plan that I shopped and cooked for, making enough food for the week’s lunches and dinners. I did this to keep myself from “poor me syndrome”—the condition of feeling that I am hungry and it will be so long until I can get to food, I had better eat whatever is at hand. I instead developed “enough syndrome”—I have had enough and there is food already prepared for me at home. Second, I developed an attitude toward non-plan food that told me: “It is not food.” The chocolates in the jar in the office, the cheese in the drawer at home, the fried calamari on the table at the restaurant were no longer food to me—no more than the table linens or the candles were food. I knew what I was going to eat, and it would be available soon, and I was not about to start gnawing on “not-food” while I waited.

Within a month, the pains had begun to recede from my hip and knee. I am now at about 130 pounds, and I have lost more than 92 pounds. It took me about 18 months to lose the weight, averaging about a pound and a quarter per week. I have gone from a size 26 in jeans to a size 4 (not Levi’s, I readily admit)! I have gone from a 3X to an XS. Buying new clothes has been the biggest expense on this journey! I went from being someone in denial about being obese, convincing myself that I was quite healthy simply because I didn’t have a lot of reasons to visit the doctor, to someone who is actually vibrant with health. I can crawl on the floor to get iPhone pictures of my baby granddaughter in action, and then get back up again; I have brought down my cholesterol and blood sugars; I can run without tiring for 20 minutes. I went from being old before my time to a woman who is looking forward to all the years to come.

T
he benefits of a starch-based diet go far beyond controlling weight and improving personal appearance. Choosing starch over animal foods to meet your energy and nutritional needs protects you from a wide range of illnesses and injuries that come bundled with a typical Western diet. If I sound dramatic when I talk about the dangers of what you are eating it’s because this is serious business, and I am by profession a medical doctor. The balanced diet most people take for granted as being healthy—and that is endorsed by medical experts and the USDA—is actually toxic to humans.

When we think about food being harmful, our first concern is that it will make us feel sick immediately after we eat. You probably learned the painful lesson as a child that it’s not a great idea to go to a carnival and stuff yourself full of corn dogs and cotton candy, then take a ride on the Ferris wheel. If you travel, you may have taken along a pink bottle of Pepto-Bismol to ward off unfamiliar bacteria. Perhaps you follow the news and avoid foods that cause food poisoning from E. coli, Listeria, and salmonella that have been recalled due to contamination.

What you might not realize is that many of the foods you consume without suddenly feeling ill can be equally risky, or even more so over the long haul. Meat, poultry, fish, seafood, milk, and eggs are a slower type of poison, but they are every bit as dangerous as the ones that let you know right away you have made a big mistake. (A poison is a substance that causes injury, illness, or death, especially by chemical means.) You may never suspect these foods as the culprit when you become ill with heart disease, cancer, or inflamed joints as long as four decades later. The long lag between consuming these harmful foods and noticing the symptoms fools most people into believing they are safe. In fact, the overabundance of protein, fat, cholesterol, methionine (a sulphur-containing amino acid), and dietary acids in these foods leads us down a dangerous path from the moment we take our first bite.

What if the effects of the food choices we make were instantaneous? What if eating a plate of fried eggs caused excruciating chest pains? Or a stroke and paralysis followed a prime rib dinner? A cancerous lump appeared a week after eating a grilled cheese sandwich? Would you continue to eat those foods? Probably not. If the ill effects came quickly enough that we easily associated them with the foods that caused them, we would widely recognize animal foods for the real and serious risks they pose. Because the effects are not immediate, we have to dig a little deeper to understand how these foods affect us.

Choices about what we eat aren’t very different from other lifestyle choices. If smoking a pack of cigarettes was followed by a week on a respirator, or if drinking a bottle of gin caused instant liver disease and coma, few people would make the choice to use these toxins. But choose them they do, because although they may have some unpleasant immediate effects, the perceived pleasure that people experience in the moment wins out over the damage that comes later.

There is one fundamental difference between the danger of animal foods and that of cigarettes and drinking. With tobacco and alcohol, the risks are nearly universally understood. We know the facts.

Meat, poultry, fish, seafood, cheese, milk, and eggs, on the other hand, are widely considered an appropriate, even essential part of a healthy diet. Most people eat these risky foods believing that they are nutritious and life sustaining. They may understand that eating too much fat or cholesterol, or too many calories, makes them vulnerable to health consequences, but that doesn’t stop them from eating those foods. It may cause some conscientious people to relegate them to special occasions, or to substitute “leaner” versions of their favorite foods. We don’t consider the danger inherent in eating these foods because nobody has told us how harmful they really are. We have been misled by medical doctors, dietitians, and advertisements bought by the food industries. It’s not a conscious effort to harm us and our families; it’s “just business.”

Food companies use “unique positioning” to promote their products. Whether seeking to sell beef, cheese, eggs, or chicken, each industry positions its product by elevating some benefit it wants you to associate with it. This type of marketing has convinced us that milk and cheese build strong bones with their generous supply of calcium. Got beef? Then you’ve also got plenty of iron. Chicken on the menu? Great, that’s an outstanding source of lean protein. Fish for dinner? What better way to get your brain-building omega-3 fatty acids? At least that’s what these industries would have you believe. But are the claims true? Do they tell the whole story?

Marketing efforts by the meat and dairy industries have convinced us that calcium, iron, and protein are essential nutrients we should seek out in large quantities. In food and supplements, they are sold as a kind of insurance policy against deficiency-caused illnesses. These nutrients are indeed essential, but what the animal product and pill marketers won’t tell you is that illnesses from deficiencies of these nutrients are virtually unknown, and that common plant foods fully meet our calcium, iron, and protein needs. There actually is no known nutritional advantage to choosing red meat, poultry, dairy, or eggs for their high density of particular nutrients. In fact, high nutrient concentrations come at the expense of others: milk and cheese are deficient in iron, while red meat, poultry, and eggs (apart from the shells) provide almost no calcium. These cannot be considered balanced foods: When you eat them you end up with too much of some nutrients and not enough of others. The ones you get in excess pose real and well-documented risks.

In my 44 years of practicing medicine, I have never seen a patient sickened by eating potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, rice, beans, fruits, or vegetables, except in rare cases where the foods were spoiled or contaminated, or where they triggered an uncommon allergy or food sensitivity.

What I do witness every day are serious diseases that stem from eating animal foods, including heart attacks, strokes, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, osteoporosis, and cancer. It doesn’t matter whether those foods were processed by a large corporation using additives and chemicals, sold directly by a trusted organic farmer, or raised in your own backyard. All animal foods cause illness when consumed in amounts typically found in the Western diet. Why? Primarily because they are the wrong foods for humans.