safe-starch-paleo
Would eating starch improve your health? Or should we avoid it like the plague? Let’s take a look at this starch paradox and see if it’s a group of foods that might help your health.
A traditional Inuit family eats a day’s worth of food consisting of raw and cooked seafood and fermented foods. Basically they ate a 0% starch diet and most of their calories came from fat. But they are famous for their lack of chronic diseases like tooth decay, heart attacks, cancer and diabetes. So that must mean that carbohydrate is unnecessary for good health and might actually be one of the reasons our western populations are so sick right?
Well let’s take a peek at the meals of a Tukisenta family. The majority of the meal is carbohydrate, mostly starch from sweet potatoes. At an average of 94.6% carbohydrate it would appear they follow the opposite approach of the Inuit. And yet they have great health too. This group of people destroys the simple argument that carbohydrate from starch are inherently bad or disease causing.
So what should we make of this starch paradox?
I think it’s simple context is everything. When it comes to real food, the idea of “good” or “bad” is mostly argumentative trickery as the context is what really matters.
The reality is just like cortisol and LDL cholesterol are not inherently “bad” in the body, neither are real foods like potatoes and other forms of starch. As many readers of this blog know, there is a definite subset of people who CANNOT handle starch. I’m going to explore the contextual issues that actually matter in the starch debate.
