Is a no starch diet sustainable?

Truth

Cristiano

@GreekDemiGod well, I put in 3 yrs no starch peating w loads of sugar honey syrup etc., Over the past few months I tried the starch focused diet a la brad Marshall, found that it was easy to be warm after eating starch, insulin absent loads of protein, generally thermogenic, however, I noticed the fall off a few hours post meal was much sharper than when eating higher protein and sugar, no starch. I think the dropping blood sugar, while on an explicitly low protein diet, is likely more stressful. My intestines moved well enough but my concerns about starch persorption stick with me. Modern life has so many factors contributing to general leakiness, and with spike protein clotting as a new environmental toxin, I think it's worth prioritizing endothelial health, ie., avoiding any starch which might be persorbed and add to clots. Adding more egg yolks, (not whites) to milk daily, has significantly improved my temps since dropping the starch.

GreekDemiGod

@Truth For sure.

Truth

@GreekDemiGod Charlie Said himself that he takes supplements to increase transit speed, even though he's been eating this way for 1 ans half year. It seems obvious that his diet is far from optimal, and many of the foods he claims are toxic due to "fructose", such as fruits, are the foods that contribute most to rapid transit. do you lie down during the day or you spend most of your time sitting or standing ?

Man I can’t get around lots of fat when trying a starch free diet. I managed a year with lots of chocolate and ice cream…

Also, one great piece of the puzzle that made me very well-content, was Danny’s blended mushroom recipe — that made forays into low-fat way more sustainable (I still didn’t do well with low fat more than 2 days a week).

Ultimately, I’m fighting for a future where I can eat some heirloom sourdough bread in the future… Also rice and mashed potatoes

onliest

@GreekDemiGod Fiber is a meme

Androsclerozat

@GreekDemiGod yeah

pittybitty

@Shar_to_the_dae @GreekDemiGod If you struggle with negative effects from digesting starch that might be reactive hypoglycemia and would likely be caused by too little Thiamine.

Sugar worked slightly better than starch for me while I was thiamine deficient, though sometimes things would get so bad that sugar was no bueno as well.

Either way thiamine supplementation would be better than avoiding starches because a deficiency will affect a lot of other things in your life as well, not just your ability to digest starch.

@pittybitty said in Is a no starch diet sustainable?:

@Shar_to_the_dae @GreekDemiGod If you struggle with negative effects from digesting starch that might be reactive hypoglycemia and would likely be caused by too little Thiamine.

Sugar worked slightly better than starch for me while I was thiamine deficient, though sometimes things would get so bad that sugar was no bueno as well.

Either way thiamine supplementation would be better than avoiding starches because a deficiency will affect a lot of other things in your life as well, not just your ability to digest starch.

@mostlylurking I'm sure your experience with B1 Thiamin HCL would help these members.

@pittybitty said in Is a no starch diet sustainable?:

@Shar_to_the_dae @GreekDemiGod If you struggle with negative effects from digesting starch that might be reactive hypoglycemia and would likely be caused by too little Thiamine.

Sugar worked slightly better than starch for me while I was thiamine deficient, though sometimes things would get so bad that sugar was no bueno as well.

Either way thiamine supplementation would be better than avoiding starches because a deficiency will affect a lot of other things in your life as well, not just your ability to digest starch.

It is helpful to understand that when you eat starch, it converts to glucose within about 10 minutes inside your body. Starch/sugar are basically exactly the same thing from your body's perspective. Except table sugar contains fructose which is another topic that I'd rather leave to Ray Peat for right now.

Ray Peat on Sugars and Starches:
https://raypeat.com/articles/articles/glycemia.shtml
also
https://www.functionalps.com/blog/2014/06/06/ray-peat-phd-concerns-with-starches/

Both sugars and starches wind up as glucose in your blood very quickly and in a perfect world where your body contains enough thiamine to help process the glucose into ATP via oxidative metabolism, things will hum along just fine. However, if you consume more sugars and starches than you can process, because your thiamine supply runs out, you wind up sick because you have given yourself a thiamine deficiency. Thiamine deficiency is a serious health issue that can have dire consequences, including a multitude of chronic diseases, and also brain damage and death.

Dr. Lonsdale wrote a book about it:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/book/9780128103876/thiamine-deficiency-disease-dysautonomia-and-high-calorie-malnutrition
Some of the book is available to read at the link.
Here's the Intro
"Thiamine and the Mitochondria in Health and Disease:
This book is about thiamine and how its deficiency affects the functions of the brain stem and autonomic nervous system by way of metabolic changes at the level of the mitochondria. Thiamine deficiency derails mitochondrial oxidative metabolism and gives rise to the classic disease of beriberi that, in its early stages, can be considered the prototype for a set of disorders that we now recognize as dysautonomia. We will provide evidence that thiamine deficiency underlies some of the dysautonomic syndromes and make the provocative suggestion that disordered oxidative metabolism may represent a common part of the etiology in both the genetic and acquired forms of dysautonomia."

People can survive without starch; they cannot survive without thiamine.

evan.hinkle

@Not_James_Bond interesting, I’d like to hear more about B1 in relation to starch. Since my wife began supplementing B1 her SIBOesque reactions to starch seem to be gone.

@evan-hinkle Here in the UK it is often why refined flour is fortified with B1 as refined starch loses the B1 during processing, if I understand it correctly, more starch/carbohydrates consumed more B1 is necessary, you can imagine that if wholegrain foods are not part of diet then tanking B1 is very real.
I think @mostlylurking takes large doses of B1 HCL because it is relatively poorly absorbed, also due to mercury poisoning IIRC, also IIRC B2 and B3 maybe necessary.
It's all very individual of course, I myself have taken many milligrams of B1 HCL and feel better for it.

evan.hinkle

@Not_James_Bond thanks for the reply! Very interesting, and I can see how it would become necessary based on this. Did you look at Dr Lonsdale’s work in conjunction with your experimentation? I’ve come across his work before but I don’t think I understood how essential B1 is in my own personal context.