The starch question
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@pittybitty said in The starch question:
If you think that medieval societies were mostly starch based that is also wrong, a lot of sources seem to indicate more meat consumption than bread
MORE meat than bread. The logistics of that don't work out. It's crazy. It's also not even remotely what the article - backed up by TWO studies - claims whatsoever. It is saying the urban population of Barcelona ate a lot of meat in a specific year. Do they mention anything about the year? No. Because ignorant Americans wrote it!
Barcelona was UNDER SIEGE in 1462. So you can completely dismiss entirely the sweeping claim that " These statistics reveal that in late medieval Barcelona, people were eating large amounts of meat on average.". How is wartime a good way to define the average consumption? A siege especially. I hope I do not have to go into the factors of why a siege could skew the numbers.
Then it brings up monasteries and aristocrats (?)Are you claiming the feudal system was a hobby? That they burned crops and then slaughtered animals instead? Grains were the main source of calories. The article doesn't even claim the contrary.
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I’m currently working on increasing the diversity of my gut microbiome in order to handle veggies and starch. I think if one can’t tolerate starch at all, he should not eliminate it, but instead work on the gut flora.
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@pittybitty Obviously Meat is our common food throughout all ages.
My point was that once we developed diets richer in carbohydrates, that the source of those carbs has mostly been from glucose (starch) not fructose / sucrose.Its completely false to suggest that "Starch was mostly unavailable before agriculture", roots, tubers, seeds etc were all heavily utilized pre-agriculture for thousands of years. Even pre agricultural fruits had a very high starch content. plenty of the tropical fruits are also high in starch like Mamey Sapote. There are plenty of free living nomadic populations today that still thrive off of high starch diets in the forests of PNG, Central and southern America. This isn't a meat and dairy vs starch debate, the original post was about the dangers of starch.
Thanks for the medieval link, it proved my point nicely. Not that what they ate in medieval Spain really means anything but anyhow, they averaged 300 odd grams of meat per person. that's a large steak / day or about 800-1000kcal depending on how fatty. And where do we think the other 2000 kcal came from? 1kg of bread (starch) and a 1ltr of beer (Maltose (a really short starch or just two glucose)). Even once we had settled down with agriculture we still ate lots of starch, we just also had a bit more fructose from our selectively bred fruits, wine, and beet sugar.
I don't see your point on the Mongols, yes of course there are groups that don't eat starch, Maasai, Inuit, plains Indians etc. I wouldnt argue starch is needed, just that it can be the bassis of a healthy diet without harm or issue if cooked right.
Bonus points for naming the end product of all that lactose in milk?
"During the process of digestion, lactose is broken down in the ratio of 47.37% glucose:52.63% galactose"
So those Mongols drank a whole lot of glucose anyway, same as our starch eating relatives.
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@GreekDemiGod said in The starch question:
I’m currently working on increasing the diversity of my gut microbiome in order to handle veggies and starch. I think if one can’t tolerate starch at all, he should not eliminate it, but instead work on the gut flora.
Ray thought otherwise, and I agree with him. I think you should 100% remove starch to improve gut microbiome. That is working on the gut flora.
Not to mention the lack of fructose in starch! Just not an optimal food. I understand eating it out of necessity, but if we're being serious we cannot pretend it's optimal.
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@CO3 you are not improving nothing by quitting starch. You are however, symptom managing. That I can agree.
But there is no healing taking place by not eating starch for a prolonged period. It did nothing for me, at least.No starch is just another variation of the Carnivore diet, except you’re still eating carbs. But you’re still playing the game of avoidance, if elimination.
Starch may be inferior to fruit, however one should be able to tolerate starch.
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I mean what you're saying is utterly ridiculous. Have you thought this through? 'The game of avoidance'?
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@CO3 You make the genuine mistake of seeing everything through a grain farmer lense. Owning pigs was extremely common for common towns folk (e.g. not farmers) to get rid of food waste, you didn't have to buy extra food for them. Same with hens, those can also sustain themselves on food scraps. Cattle can entirely sustain itself on grass, according to your economical hypothesis nomads would have starved to death because they didn't grow any grains for their cattle to eat. I assume poorer people did eat more bread comparatively, but anyone a bit higher on the hierarchy seems to have eaten more meat than bread.
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@CO3 If you do fine with having no starch, good for you. But most folks who are somewhat physically active, they have to eat starch.
Also, if not living in a warm climate year round, starch becomes a necessity. -
@pittybitty You realize you've just done a complete 180 right?
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@GreekDemiGod Nothing to do with whether it's an optimal food bioenergetically speaking! Coffee wasn't available to us until roughly the 17th century, does that mean it was bad before we had access to it?
I repeat: the difficulty of implementation is not the deciding factor of whether a given substance is healthy or not. It also has nothing to do with whether we ate it at some point in history or any other thing that isn't related to the interaction of the substance with our body, and the environment in which we consume it.
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@CO3 @GreekDemiGod is an idiot and anti-peat on ray peat forum
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I've been focusing on a more Brad Marshall (fireinabottle) diet by mostly subsisting on starch and butter. And I've had better results than following the classic "peaty" foods. I mostly do croissants, potatoes (mashed, diced, baked), asian noodles, etc. I haven't experienced any issues with the endotoxin personally. Digestion is just fine. Personally given me more energy and more consistent temps.
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@Master By classic Peaty foods I assume you mean a diet made up mostly of perfectly ripe organic tropical fruits?
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I'm a starch fan, mostly because I don't have a lot of ripe fruit here and it's unpleasant drinking large amounts of fruit juice as a major carbohydrate. I also notice that I get stomach issues with eating large amounts of fruit that I don't get from eating rice or potatoes, and I think that they are more delicious and filling with savory meals than just sweet fruit alone.
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@CO3 Lol I got probably the cleanest/ripest fruit I possibly could in my country. Also got lots of fresh squeezed orange juice and real milk. I'm not saying it doesn't work. I certainly felt better on that diet than prior. I'm just saying I feel MUCH more stable and better energy on starch/butter heavy diet. With fruit heavy diet my blood sugar was constantly crashing. Despite experimenting with many things that supposedly increase liver storage. Butter ultimately is just great because it creates long lasting but acute insulin resistance. And that provided more energy and more stable energy no matter what I was doing. I still eat fruit though.
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@Orindere Im with you on this. when trying to hit the calories needed in a high carb diet with fruit, it's easy to hit the so called fructose ceiling. This can lead to fructose malabsorption and GI issue further down, SIBO, flatulence etc. Starch as a base, fructose for fun and animal fat and meat for nutrition.
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@STH Cope
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"Volkheimer found that mice fed raw starch aged at an abnormally fast rate, and when he dissected the starch-fed mice, he found a multitude of blocked arterioles in every organ, each of which caused the death of the cells that depended on the blood supplied by that arteriole. It isn't hard to see how this would affect the functions of organs such as the brain and heart, even without considering the immunological and other implications...."
"Around 1988 I read Gerhard Volkheimer's persorption article, and after doing some experiments with tortillas and masa, I stopped eating all starch except for those, then eventually I stopped those. Besides grains of starch entering the blood stream, lymph, and cerebral spinal fluid, starch feeds bacteria, increasing endotoxin and serotonin.
For people with really sensitive intestines or bad bacteria, starch should be zero.” ~Ray Peat PhD
