Resistant Starch?

#1

Has anybody out there tested resistant starch? It seems after a potato has been cooked and has cooled and then eaten, it acts as resistant starch in the body. It functions as a soluble fermentable fiber. This occurs through a process of retrogradation. It feeds the friendly bacteria in your intestine and increases the production of short-chain fatty acids like butyrate. Some studies have found a 30-50% improvement in insulin sensitivity after just a short time of consuming 15-30 grams per day of resistant starch. It may even affect your blood sugar at the next meal you eat. Fancinating.

(Bob M) #2

That “30-50% improvement in insulin sensitivity” (if it even exists) is only if you eat a very high carb, very low fat diet. Anything else, and it’s not true.

I tried many types of resistant starch, with no benefits, only detriments. But fiber and I tend not to get along.

Also, you’ll still get blood sugar excursions with heated/cooled potatoes or white rice. Not great for those of us with blood sugar issues.

You could try something like Bob’s potato starch:

Potato Starch

This is what I used. I was able to stay in ketosis. However, I had gas, bloating, IBS, constipation, etc.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #3

Resistant starch is a commercial product designed to re-add fibre inexpensively to products from which the natural fibre has been removed.

There is a scientist who claims that you can make your own resistant starch at home, usually from rice or potatoes. It appears that you can make the resistant starch increase from something like 1.3% of the total starch to 1.6%, by a complicated process of heating and cooling the cooked item. The problem is that when you go to eat the rice or the potato, you have to heat it up to eating temperature very carefully, or the resistant starch will break back down again into regular starch; i.e., glucose.

Is the effort worth it? Only you can judge. Does it make it possible to eat potatoes or rice? Well, given that only a very small percentage of the starch becomes indigestible, it is clearly not going to turn the great majority of the starch into fibre, so again, it becomes your judgement call.

And to get resistant starch into your diet in any quantity, you would need to eat commercial products that are probably not good for you in other ways. Better to get your fibre from whole, unprocessed foods.

(Joey) #4

I’m still unclear as to the objective.

30-50% improvement in insulin sensitivity as compared to what? Eating regular starch? Not eating starch at all?

In other words, is resistant starch being touted as a treatment for insulin sensitivity? (If so, I’m extremely doubtful it would provide such a benefit. If not, what’s the objective?)

If it affects your blood sugar at the next meal you eat, I’d be really curious to understand both the extent of such an effect and the metabolic mechanism through which this happens?

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #5

Fibre is an interesting part of food. It is defined as being indigestible carbohydrate, yet Dr. Westman and others say there is some evidence that fibre can actually be digestible, at least to some extent. (I have not read any of the studies this is based on, so cannot comment.) This is one of the reasons Dr. Westman gives for advising his patients to eat less than 20 total grams of carbohydrate a day.

So the question in my mind is whether the artificial fibre known as “resistant starch” is digestible or indigestible. Would it make a difference what the resistant starch was made from? And since it is not present in nature, but only in factory-made foods (or, as Michael Pollan likes to call them, “edible food-like substances”), how much benefit can we expect?

The usual benefit of fibre, in foods where it is naturally present, is that the insoluble and soluble fibres combine to line the intestines, thus slowing the absorption of glucose and fructose into the blood stream. I suppose that resistant starch, if it contains both soluble and insoluble fibre, could do the same job, and that might possibly qualify as improving insulin sensitivity. Perhaps.

#6

When I first heard about this, I thought what an amazing cheat. So I baked a potato, put it in the fridge until the next day. I heated half of it up, smothered it with butter and in two hours my blood sugar spiked to 200.

I’ll give it a pass.

(Bob M) #7

If you try to find out how much of the potato is actually converted to resistant starch, it’s very difficult to find. But it’s really, really small. Minute.

That’s why if you want to try “resistant starch”, it’s better to actually try starch.

Like you, I saw high blood sugar after eating things like cooked/cooled or cooked/cooled/reheated potatoes or rice.

(Joey) #8

Interesting - thanks for the clarification.

I had it in my head that dietary carbs bound up in fiber reduced the availability of the carb through the shielding mechanics of the delivery vehicle. Hence “juicing” tears open fibers making the carb content accessible to the human digestive system (rather than passed through).

You’re saying that the role of fiber in human digestion is to coat the intestines?

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #9

That’s what Dr. Robert Lustig says. It’s on that basis that he says eating a whole apple is acceptable, because it slows down the absorption of the fructose to a rate that the liver can handle (but someone on a low-carbohydrate/ketogenic diet might still feel that an apple contains too much carbohydrate). He advises against juicing, smoothies, and commercial juices, precisely because those processes either remove the fibre entirely, or else mechanically damage it so badly that it becomes unable to do its job.

Another benefit of fibre is supposed to be that certain bacteria in the intestines can turn it into butyrate, which is supposed to have a healing effect on the intestinal lining. I don’t know if this benefit can be derived from industrially-produced resistant starch. In any case, Dr. Phinney says that the β-hydroxybutyrate produced in ketosis is even better for the intestinal lining than butyrate is. (Plus, you get the hormonal signaling effects of the various ketone bodies on top of that.)

(Bob M) #10

The theory was that it could. Many people had vivid dreams for instance, supposedly an indicator of this energy usage. The one thing I did get (while testing resistant starch) every once in a while was this type of dream.

The other idea was that you could manipulate your bacteria to encourage “good” bacteria, while discouraging/eliminating “bad” bacteria. The problem with this is that the tests are terrible, and there’s no way to know if this is what you are actually doing. And let’s not even get into what’s “good” and what’s “bad” bacteria.

(You've tried everything else; why not try bacon?) #11

I can just see a scientist petting a bacterium and saying, “Good boy!”