The Starch Solution Read Online Free
Author: MD John McDougall
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.
P ART I
HEALING WITH STARCH
C HAPTER 1
Starch: The Traditional Diet of People
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.
----
What Is Starch?
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
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.
P ART I
HEALING WITH STARCH
C HAPTER 1
Starch: The Traditional Diet of People
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.
----
What Is Starch?
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
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