Resistant Starches page 4

[Timthetaco]

Interesting subject, but I can't be bothered to ponder so deeply about the starch I eat. I've actually been getting some retrograded resistant starch in the form of cold sweet potatoes lately, mostly because I'm tired of burning off all my flesh every time I try to peel them. They're ridiculously delicious cold.

[marthat]

Potato salad with home-made mayo, anyone?? Hash browns from grated cooked potato, fried in bacon grease?


Who says it has to be a dry old potato?

[Paleobird]

I love cold potatoes and rice. Especially sushi rice. I think if people are interested in getting resistant starch, which seems to be proven in the healthy department, it is more advantageous to eat cold rice or potatoes as the cooling increases the RS. That's all I'm saying. Kind of a more bang-for-your-buck deal, or a good excuse to have some sushi.

I don't need an excuse to have sushi. That is good stuff. I would have to be up-against-starvation hungry to eat a cold potato however. Different tastes.

My point was that I don't think resistant starches are the only way to get your butyrate. Veggies and butter work too.

[sbhikes]

And I dislike cold rice. The stuff in sushi isn't cold so much as it's just no longer hot. In other words, rice put in the fridge and eaten cold is horrible but rice cooked today and allowed to cool is just rice that isn't hot anymore. Tastes the same, has the same texture as hot rice. Sushi rice also has sugar, salt and vinegar in it.

[Paleobird]

This starch is called resistant starch (RS) and many nutritionists think that it should be classified as a component of dietary fibre.
The bacteria in the large intestine produce short chain fatty acids from the RS which may help maintain the health of cells lining the colon (colonocytes) and prevent bowel cancer. These fatty acids are also absorbed into the bloodstream and may play a role in lowering blood cholesterol levels. A new study suggests that RS may also help with weight loss.

A study by Higgins et al, published in October 2004 issue of Nutrition and Metabolism showed that replacing 5.4% of the carbohydrate content of a meal with resistant starch increased fat oxidation by 23% in a sample of 12 study subjects. This increase is apparantly sustained throughout the day, even if only meal contains RS and the increased fat oxidation is sustained if one keeps eating RS on a daily basis. It appears that the RS changes the order in which the body burns food. Usually carbohydrates are used first, but when RS is present, dietary fat is oxidised first into energy before it has a chance to be stored as body fat. This study suggests that including foods high in RS in your daily diet may help with weight management.

Where is RS found?
intact wholegrain cereals/seeds/nuts (unprocessed) e.g oats, rye, wheat, barley, semolina, corn, linseed, sesame
processed starchy foods e.g some breakfast cereals (like cornflakes), white bread, rice, pasta
processed starchy foods with added RS called Hi-Maize derived from corn e.g some breads, cereals
legumes e.g lentils, baked beans (legumes have the highest content of RS)
unripe fruit, especially banana
Cooking and cooling the food can also increase the RS content
cooked cold rice (e.g sushi rice), cold pasta salad, cold boiled potato salad

Some starch may be physically trapped inside intact plant cells as in wholegrain foods like muesli and grainy bread. This starch is therefore inaccessible because digestive amylases are unable to penetrate or break down the cellulose cell walls.
The higher the amylose content of starch the greater its resistance to digestion because they form tighly packed granules in cells.

This article is only talking about replacing fast digesting carbs with resistant starch. That would definitely be an improvement to a SAD way of eating. This does not, in and of itself show that RS is beneficial, only that it's better than the refined flour option.

To be honest that list of great sources for RS sounds a lot like the USDA "eatyourhealthywholegrains" paradigm. The whole idea is based on "resisting"digestion. Why would we want to do that? How about if we eat foods that digest completely and easily, like Primal foods?

It is good for the primal eater to know which starch sources are better if they choose to add starch to their diet. But pasta salad and corn flakes? How Primal is that? My point is, why should we be taking dietary advice from someone advocating eating bread?

[Paleobird]

pklopp just posted this on the Moar Tators thread that says what I was saying only more eloquently:

Butyrate / butyric acid actually gets its name from the substance from which it was first isolated ... butter. Much like oleic acid got its name from olive oil and stearic acid from beef ( steers ) ... presumably beefic acid sounded a bit too cartoonish.

If it's butyric acid that you want, then I suggest bypassing the intermediate and unnecessary bacterial synthesis stage and eat it directly in all of its buttery splendour. Further, the gut microbiota here is a bit of a red herring, because although they do break down resistant starch, what they do with it is produce fatty acids like butyrate which the host then absorbs.

So what we have here is a symbiotic relationship where the gut microbiota flourish because you are providing an environment where their preferred nutritional substrate, resistant starch, is plentiful, and they, in turn, provide you with a fatty acid. That's fine, as far as it goes, but you would need to provide an argument as to why having a large population of bacteria in your gut that subsist on resistant starches is in and of itself a good thing. Note that this is different from arguing that butyric acid is in and of itself a good thing.

Getting back to butyric acid, in the Perfect Health Diet, the Jaminets argue that in nature, all diets are high fat diets basically due to this ability of gut microbita to synthesize fatty acids from resistant starches. So, a strictly vegetarian diet of the sort eaten by gorillas, for example, is a high fat diet, contrary to what the average person would assume. Of course, gorillas are specifically adapted for this by having a very large hind gut to host the relatively massive amounts of bacteria needed to ferment these resistant starches into fats.

If you were, by some genetic quirk, equipped with a large hindgut for bacterial fatty acid fermentation, you would certainly know it due to the massively protruding belly that you would have even in the face of ridiculously low body fat percentages ... think bodybuilders with paper thin skin and massive guts for a visual.
Further, eating resistant starch in order to yield fatty acids is a grossly inefficient way to extract energy which is why gorillas spend an inordinately large proportion of their days eating ... if memory serves it is on the order of 5 hours a day or so.

Bottom line, eat moar butter if moar butyric acid is what you want.

-PK

[otzi]

Actually, it looks like resistant starch is the only way to get butyrate. Eating butter or other things with a high butyrate content, such as kombucha, provides them to the body as a short-chain fatty acid, and is treated like any other fatty acid ingested.

Many people have made the logical conclusion that eating butyric acid is the same as eating foods that cause butyrate to be produced by the large intestine. There are numerous companies selling butyrate supplements. These are probably very healthy and important to have in the diet.

However, the colon relies on butyric acid produced by it's microbes as an important factor in gut health. The butyric acid ingested with butter, milk, kombucha, or whatever is long gone by the time it reaches the colon.




Reduced Dietary Intake of Carbohydrates by Obese Subjects Results in Decreased Concentrations of Butyrate and Butyrate-Producing Bacteria in Feces

Butyric acid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Owly]

Actually, it looks like resistant starch is the only way to get butyrate. Eating butter or other things with a high butyrate content, such as kombucha, provides them to the body as a short-chain fatty acid, and is treated like any other fatty acid ingested.

Many people have made the logical conclusion that eating butyric acid is the same as eating foods that cause butyrate to be produced by the large intestine. There are numerous companies selling butyrate supplements. These are probably very healthy and important to have in the diet.

However, the colon relies on butyric acid produced by it's microbes as an important factor in gut health. The butyric acid ingested with butter, milk, kombucha, or whatever is long gone by the time it reaches the colon.




Reduced Dietary Intake of Carbohydrates by Obese Subjects Results in Decreased Concentrations of Butyrate and Butyrate-Producing Bacteria in Feces

Butyric acid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And your body only absorbs it as the SCFA either way, it's just with resistant starch, your gut bacteria break it down into SCFA before you can absorb it instead of you eating it directly. From your Wiki article:

Highly-fermentable fiber residues, such as those from resistant starch, oat bran, pectin, and guar are transformed by colonic bacteria into short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) including butyrate, producing more SCFA than less fermentable fibers such as celluloses.

[NZ primal Gwamma]

Exactly... and down here plantains (both black and green) and yucca are eaten a LOT!

yukka???????????????? How does one eat yukka ???? It grows slowly in my garden, but i have never thought of it as an edible plant ????

[Paleobird]

Actually, it looks like resistant starch is the only way to get butyrate. Eating butter or other things with a high butyrate content, such as kombucha, provides them to the body as a short-chain fatty acid, and is treated like any other fatty acid ingested.

Many people have made the logical conclusion that eating butyric acid is the same as eating foods that cause butyrate to be produced by the large intestine. There are numerous companies selling butyrate supplements. These are probably very healthy and important to have in the diet.

However, the colon relies on butyric acid produced by it's microbes as an important factor in gut health. The butyric acid ingested with butter, milk, kombucha, or whatever is long gone by the time it reaches the colon.

Reduced Dietary Intake of Carbohydrates by Obese Subjects Results in Decreased Concentrations of Butyrate and Butyrate-Producing Bacteria in Feces

Butyric acid - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

All that study shows is that fecal content of butyrate went down with carb consumption. If it is getting to the feces, isn't it kind of being wasted in the toilet anyway?
You have yet to show that getting it created by the microbes in the hindgut is preferable to getting butter on a spoon.