Even though there’s a thousand or more (Amazon PS purchases) worldwide now on various forms of resistant starch (potato starch, mung bean starch, green plantain, green banana, tapioca starch, and even hi-maize) and so far—in compiling anecdotes for the book—positive experience outnumbers negative better than 9-to-1 in self reporting in comments, there are naysayers. Most of them are VLC and Keto Zealots, though as has been shown, they’re already so fucked with physiologic insulin resistance it doesn’t work very well (and remember who reported this—we did); which is to say, no harm, but not a lot of benefit—though long-term benefits to having a more robust, well fed 100 trillion gut bugs—whether direct feeders, co-feeders or commensals—is unknown, since there’s not a lot of fiber period, anyway.
But as Jeff Leach has suggested by actually testing shit (literally), VLC or Ketogenic fucks up your gut biome.
Jeff’s Gut With Fiber and Without
Yes, you can shift your gut microbiome (dramatically) with diet in a very, very short period of time. Below is my microbial composition – at the phylum level – after shifting my diet. In short, while maintaining a high fat / protein diet, I simply dropped out the plants and fiber. This, in theory, resulted in less fermentation in my colon which shifted pH to more alkaline. Under these conditions, the genus Bacteroides within the phylum Bacteroidetes, were able to bloom as strains of Bacteroides that are pH sensitive and don’t grow as well in acidic conditions created by the productions of short chain fatty acids and organic acids during fermentation of fiber/resistant starch (and fermentation of host-derived substrates. Take home message (IMO): acidity good, blooms of Bacteroides (which is driving the spike in the phylum Bacteroidetes in right-hand side pie), not so good. I will discuss more of this in an upcoming blog post. [emphasis added]
So, like I said, you didn’t have to hear it from some Keto-24/7/365-Zealot that it’s not going to do much for you, you heard it here. They’re physiologically insulin resistant and have a fucked up gut that’s not producing sufficient short chain fatty acids on site—and all the butter in the world isn’t going to help them. SFCA’s are needed to be produced in the colon itself. Again: you heard that here, from myself, Tim, and Marie, with data to back it up—and Marie is a trained PhD physical scientist. If anything, our bias was that it would hopefully work for keto people whereas, the bias of the keto-crowd is that it won’t do anything, and then they dishonestly act like it’s a gotcha.
So, Keto-Zealots, you might want to stop going around pretending like you’re onto something, or that it’s all a sham because it didn’t work for you with your too-fucked-up guts and insulin resistance, and even autoimmune issues brought on by tight-junction malfunction through chronic starvation modeling dietary practices.
But anyway, I have all sorts of Google alerts set up so I literally see everything that’s being said out there about resistant starch. So far tons of articles linking back to various here, 95% open mindedness, estimated 90% positive results in the primary things reported, with the primary negative (though not really a health condition) being flatulence. For most people, including me, it resolves after you un-fuck-up your gut biome. Things like bloating or weight gain (much greater weight loss being reported) are temporary, except in just a couple of instances I know of. Headaches, but several have found that SBOs resolve that quickly. Perhaps the most serious are various autoimmune flair ups, and how do you suppose they got autoimmune issues in the first place? Long term VLC and Ketosis, that’s how. Tight-junction malfunction, like I said above.
Perhaps the funniest lie of all is the pretending that this is all some radical new thing we pulled out of our ass, as the world’s biggest fart joke, or something (that would actually be funny, and we’d probably get a lot more fame out of this deal, if it were true). There’s just one problem: it’s not true. This isn’t a discovery at all, but somewhat of a rediscovery and application. The only thing novel about it is using potato starch, but Tim has explained in podcasts how he came upon that idea. He read a pig study, and guess what they gave them? Potato starch. Soon enough, he saw it on the supermarket shelf.
But let me illustrate how silly and dishonest this notion is. Go to PubMed, search the following three terms and compare the number of results.
- Resistant starch: 8,335
- Ketogenic diet: 1,881
- Paleo diet: 91
Now, for a bigger laf, narrow your results for 1-Jan-2013 to present.
- Resistant starch: 164
- Ketogenic diet: 193*
- Low Carb Diet: 6
- Paleo Diet: 1
*Scan through…99% neuro stuff (epilepsy, Alzheimer’s, etc.), not diet, weight loss stuff.
Resistant starch has been studied for over 30 years now, extensively, so when someone lafs, or says they’re going to try it so they can laf, it gives you insight into the level of ignorance and dishonesty you’re dealing with. And here’s the thing: all of the anecdotes people are posting? Sure, they’re great, but I see them mainly as motivational, to get others to just give it a shot and see how it works for them. But nobody really needs to pay any attention to self-reported anecdotes. Just consult the literature where you’ll find all the same reported benefits in terms of blood glucose control (and other things) in controlled settings, usually using about the same 30 grams per day we’ve been suggesting, equal to 4 TBS of potato starch, taken raw, always. In humans and animals as well. In fact, once I dug into it, it’s probably the most unambiguous, consistent set of clear benefits I’ve ever seen: heads and tails above all the diet war, cholesterol, heart disease studies, etc.
In the book that Tim and I are writing—and Dr. BG-AnimalPharm (link removed) is editing for science mess-ups, as well as adding some nice science sidebars and such—we’re probably at over 400 primary references at this point, tons of them published in 2013 and now, even 2014. I found stuff so new that I’ve had to go back and do edits, such as when I recently discovered that infants aren’t born sterile as has been asserted since 1900, but get an initial gut biome via placenta and amnionic fluid. It was pretty simple to discover. Just sequence the stool of a newborn, immediately, before anything could have had a chance to bloom from the bacteria picked up in the birth canal, from breast milk, or hand to mouth.
And here’s the rub, all this bla-bla from the Keto-Zealots just exposes that they didn’t even bother to consult the literature independently to verify all the above, or even the blog posts I’ve put up summarizing some of the literature.
- Resistant Starch: Now We’re Getting Somewhere (13 study summaries)
- Resistant Starch: An Overall Primer, with References (21 references)
- Resistant Starch: Now We’re Getting Somewhere, Part 2 (35 study summaries)
You’re probably wondering, did we cherry pick these? We did two things:
- Tried to use human studies where possible.
- Excluded all but maybe a couple in part 2 that were funded by National Starch or other corporate interests.
Nonetheless, I’ll have to ask Tim, or he can pipe up in comments, but in all the months I’ve been looking at this, I’ve yet to see a single study find anything but benefit to resistant starch intake.
Also, you don’t have to go dose potato starch either, if you don’t want. It’s merely about the cheapest, easiest way to get it. There’s the other options I list at the top, and here’s a post with a 7-page PDF Tim compiled, and that was a shit ton of work digging up, via tons of references.
Alright, that’s enough dealing with abject ignorance strutting around for one day. We have 16 chapters, about 350 pages fully drafted, and chapter 5 is calling my name for the 1st intense editing pass.
Don’t let the Keto-Zombies get to you.
PaleoJew 
tatertot 
sootedninjas 
Q 
Nick 
Andrew 
Brian
Great work. I have incorporated your suggestions into my paleo/PHD lifestyle the past few days. So far so good. Look forward to the book.
Well, let’s see. There are several studies that did not show what they were hoping to see, like massive weight loss or quickly improved insulin sensitivity, and there are a few that showed other forms of fiber had better results than RS, for instance wheat chaff or psyllium showed better results at clearing implanted cancer cells. There was a study that showed men benefitted more from the insulin sensitivity gains than women, and there was one that showed RS had no impact on a herditary form of colon cancer
BUT, most of those were done in the 90’s and didn’t give enough time for the gut flora to adapt, or they were just really short–like 2 day studies, or there were other design flaws, or it was just something that RS will never do. Some studies showed that RS had a few shortcomings when compared to other fermentable fibers, which is to be expected, but all-in-all, RS just keeps getting looked at harder and harder and the results keep coming up clear: RS has a big impact on the gut microbiome which leads to better insulin sensitivity, lowered cancer risk, lowered inflammation body-wide, yada, yada, yada.
The thing about RS that is different than most anything else we look at, is that it is all study/paper-based evidence, nobody was trying it out. Mostly this was because until we “discovered” potato starch, there wasn’t a reliable way to dose RS. With potato starch it’s easy and cheap.
Most any other dietary intervention, low carb/keto/vegan/etc…, have mostly anectdotal evidence that people look at and decide if they want to try, there are hardly any studies or papers, and the ones that are there, usually say it’s not so great. With RS it’s just the opposite–tons of papers saying how great it is, but nobody trying it.
Many of the papers on RS after they started realizing how important the gut flora was in all this, made comments on the range of effetiveness being related to the gut bugs of the study subjects. We have seen the same thing, not everybody responds the same way.
Now, thanks to Grace for finally getting our attention, we have some ways to help people who aren’t responding like others. There are lots of probiotic interventions, fermented foods, and some other things like parasites and overgrowths that need addressed and these will hopefully help the large majority who don’t respond to RS alone.
I think what we are seeing is that people just want an easy way out, and go straight for the potato starch. If it works, then great, but if it doesn’t work, then many will immediately come to the conclusion this is a stupid idea and move on to the next magic bullet. But maybe the real takeaway should be the fallacy behind using very low plant matter, zero starch diets as long-term strategies for health. Potato starch works because almost everyone is deficient in prebiotioc, fermentable fiber which has impacted our guts to the point we don’t know what it’s like to get a good night’s sleep, or even what it’s like to take a good dump.
I feel humbled sometimes that so many people are trying this and looking at it from all angles when all I really wanted to do, almost a year ago, was just make the point that potato starch is a valid form of RS and easily measured, cheap, and possibly effective. Up until then, every article on RS ended with “eat more potato salad.”
I wanted people to have a way to get RS when they read all the reports on how great a thing it is. I knew after just a few weeks it was working for me and had to share. At the time, Richard was about the only one who gave it a second glance. Paul Jaminet also backed RS from the start but more in a ‘real food’ kind of way. Then Grace came along and helped us complete the picture with probiotics, despite Richard and my objections that they weren’t an important element in this.
I have no doubt that one day, some really smart person will figure out the optimal RS source and dose and the optimal probiotic species we need, and exactly what gut bugs we need in our guts throughout our lives to keep us healthy, but for now, this is all we got and I intended to keep harping on it til the day comes when we know everything there is to be known.
I do want to thank Richard and tatertot for all the work. When I was diagnosed as T2DM, the first thing that came to mind was gut health. I immediately started supplementing with inulin, fructooligosaccharides, and psyllium husk while keto to lose weight (no longer keto but still moderatly LC – 60+ grams carbs a day when I was 20-50 before).
When I found RS, I thought it would be good to try. I did a personal 28 day challenged (ended this last Monday) and saw some improvement in BG and a more narrowly controlled FBG (mid-80s to low 90s now where it had been upper 70’s to low 100s with most in the high 80s).
I’ve even added some beans and rice — as long as I don’t over do it I stay in my personal goal of around 140 max after meals and a drop of under 110 by the 2 hour mark. (If anyone wonders- 4 oz by weight cooked Asian short grain rice cooked in a smart rice cooker, cooled, and then frozen — heated to under 130 degrees which is about a cup with Kerrygold Butter and I’m using black beans done the same basic way).
So, amazing success — no. But it did good, did no harm, and I ain’t gonna stop now.
BTW, I also upped non-starchy veggie intake up to 1.5 lbs by weight per day (weight uncooked if eaten raw or cooked if eaten that way) so that might be part of this as well.
What about mung bean Sprouts? Do they have the same RS as raw mung beans as listed in the PDF?
this time of year I always get a craving for sprouts.
Sorry, Charlie – Sprouts have no RS…the starch gets converted to sugar, it’s what makes them grow.
Ellen
If it’s any consolation, I asked Tim the same question a few months ago. I love bean sprouts just by themselves, or in just about anything.
another favorite dish of mine that I can bring back to my diet since I went LCHF.
Real food from “old world tradition”
How to cook mungo (mung beans)
youtube.com/watch?v=2rgAasoPYqI
@richard have you ever tried this dish ?
Hi Tatertot –
All this talk about sprouting is confusing me. What about mung beans soaked overnight and then boiled the next day? This is how my family makes it. When eaten warm, is it a decent source of RS?
Thanks.
Sprouting is soaking taken to a new level. An overnight soak doesn’t generally cause a seed to sprout. The sprouting activity involves converting the starch, a storage from of glucose, into sugar, a usable energy source for the now growing seed.
So, soaked = OK for RS
Sprouted and green/growing = no RS, but plenty of other good stuff.
Ellen,
But don’t despair, like soaking and fermenting legumes, there are fantastic probiotics and spores on the mung beans that augment health and use the fuel from the fiber (and RS foods that you eat). The spores are resistant to cooking and your stomach acid.
See the ‘soaking tips’ and what organisms you’re getting (probably analogous to mung beans)
url-removed/2013/11/how-to-cure-sibo-small-intestinal-bowel_13.html
Thanks Grace. I like soybean sprouts (not mung bean sprouts) but they emerge on the other end looking like…. sprouts. So I figured, screw it. I’m not paying money for something I clearly do not digest, at all. But, if there’s potentially good bugs on this stuff, then I’ll chow down on them.
Richard/Tim ~This is a very important post that you’ve made. We certainly are ‘bringing RS to the next level’! Intense comments there! Hopefully someday we will have StarTrek tricorders to evaluate our gut profiles and get custom spore/microbial ‘drugs’. LOL ahah. Right now I love the Genova Diagnostic GI Fx stool profile. IT provides the tools to see what’s in there and some clues as to why the gut is broken.
With antibiotics with both World Wars, we ignored the fact that they kill the colonization of our symbiotic colonizers though they saved lives from wound-related septicemia. Yet with my favorite therapeutic diets, it’s the same curse. I posted this to Spanish just a second ago.
What is the most effective way to kill and make extinct our beneficial symbiotic flora?
Over evolutionary time, our guts shrunk because our host body became more and more reliant on their work capacity so that it could enlarge the DNA genome for other important things — talking, cognition, mating, making Valentine’s LOL, hunting, defense, group dynamics, child care of progressively premature infants, et cetera. Our guts do so much and we blast them in gratitude with potent synthetic antibiotics. The ramifications are evident now.
Duncan et al (2007) AEM 73; 1073-1078
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1828662/
A study was done examining the shift in gut populations with Atkins in obese patients. The best way to extinguish our worker beehive symbionts was a fiber/RS-less diet (eg Cordain’s Paleo, Robb Wolf, Whole9, GAPS, SCD, SIBO/FastTract, VLC, Atkins, Bernstein, Phinney, Volek, Eastman, GCBC, me). (Sorry didn’t spare anyone — I’m INCLUDED tee hee)
See slides 10-14.
amiando.com/eventResources/o/p/y6a4oMBnMnwBzr/Karen_Scott.pdf
4 very significant anti-inflammatory, longevity associated and butyrate-producing subpopulations were DECIMATED by the fiber/RS-deficient diet.
–Bifido
–Ruminococci
–Roseburia (Cluster XIVa)
–F prausnitzii
Do these populations ever return? Is it like a single course of antibiotics where they may never re-establish even after 2 years?
Though he blasts potatoes, even Cordain has published that early hominins consumed ~25% of their diet from underground storage organs (starchy, fiber and RS-rich tubers).
This is the case for 2 million years of our ancestors evolution!
Several of these that are lost above are in high quantities in centenarians. Biagi et al also found the connection between “The decrease of both Clostridium cluster XIVa [Roseburia] and F. prausnitzii group members was also correlated to frailty condition, hospitalisation, antibiotic treatment and non-steroidal anti-inflammatory therapy.”
Clostridium cluster XIVa is also referred to as the Clostridium coccoides/Eubacterium rectale group which are potent cross feeders of resistant starch and raw potato starch in clinical experiments. [E rectale are poor RS fermenters but they live symbiotically with keystone gut species that DO EAT and ferment RS to secondary food (substrates) which E rectale consumes like a hog on fire.]
url-removed/2013/10/giq-and-distal-gut-microbiome-as-driver.html
Back in Oct/Nov, Tim, I don’t know if you recall but we talked about this that I sent you…
“Eubacterium rectale, Ruminococcus bromii and
Bifidobacterium adolescentis [are] the main colonisers of
resistant starch particles”
Eubacterium is also known as Roseburia, one of the species that goes extinct with low fermentable fiber diets.
benthamscience.com/open/toobesj/articles/V002/SI0010TOOBESJ/50TOOBESJ.pdf
While the great majority of cultured colonic bacteria can
utilise soluble carbohydrates for growth, a more limited
selection appear able to degrade polysaccharides present in
insoluble food particles [22,23]. Leitch et al. [24] found
relatives Eubacterium rectale, Ruminococcus bromii and
Bifidobacterium adolescentis to be the main colonisers of
resistant starch particles, and these same species were
detected using stable isotope probing with labelled starch by
Kovatcheva-Datchary et al. [25]. Many other species ferment
smaller soluble carbohydrates that are derived from the diet
or are released by primary polysaccharide degraders [26-29].
Interestingly, a higher proportion of the gram-negative
Bacteroidetes 16S rRNA sequences were recently shown to
be present in the liquid phase compared with insoluble fibre
particles in human stool [30]. This suggests that this group
mainly utilises soluble carbohydrates, which seems
consistent with what we know about the organisation of its
carbohydrate-utilising enzyme systems [27]. In contrast,
members of the low % G+C gram-positive Firmicutes phylum,
in particular a group of Ruminococcus-related organisms,
showed a preferential association with the particulate
phase [30]. There is evidence therefore that the major phylogenetic
groups of colonic bacteria differ in their substrate
preferences for soluble and insoluble dietary carbohydrates
[30].
I think the book should have a troubleshooting section called “troubleshitting”. Just cuz I think that would be funny –and helpful. :)
Q – Good idea! I was working a chapter called ‘Farts’ but I like your title better! What’s funny, is I was just reading some studies that talk about the same co-feeders Grace mentioned in the post right above yours, there are gut bugs that produce different gasses and other gut bugs that degrade these gasses. When these get out-of-balance, flatulence gets out of control.
Grace – I remember that convo well, but funny when I see it now, all these decades later, I read it in a whole new light. Back then, it solved the riddle of how RS was broken down and degraded by several key players, now it makes me think about what missing some of these key players is doing to the whole ecosystem.
Tim, what I was wondering too about the people who can’t stop farting: roseburia deficiency? It’s a lot easier to boost bifidos but what about the roseburia?
Plus, I was also wondering about the reports of initial weight gain: maybe the bad bugs that steal nutrients are getting flushed from the small intestine and the body gets more nutrients from the food. Then this initial phase appears to settle out. People need to adjust their food intake a bit, but since the PS has some appetite regulatory effects, this isn’t difficult and maybe happens naturally.
Am I slow? Again?
That’s my suspicion, gabs.
Better gut, more energy from food, takes a while to get things back in order. I thought just the PS was highly satiating but now I find that with the added probiotics it’s even more so. I don’t use the scale much, but since first starting PS back April or May I think, about 10-12 pounds gone without even trying. Hadn’t stepped on the scale in maybe a couple of months (I judge by how my pants and shirts fit) but did so yesterday when I noticed a similar thing in my face to Charles in my latest post, and it was 5 gone since last I recalled stepping on one.
For my money, those prancing around saying “I gained weight” are simply looking for a way to discredit, and they don’t even realize how ignorant they sound, since RS calories count for ZERO.
Richard, I don’t think RS is zero. The bacteria use some of the calories for themselves, the other bacteria use the products of the first bacteria for themselves. But the butyric acid, propionic acid and acetic acid do provide energy to the human body. If shit is 60% bacteria, then eating RS makes lots of more bacteria. The energy from the potato starch leaves the body in the bacteria that end up in the toilet.
So I don’t know how many calories we’d absorb in the form of short chain fatty acids. Not enough to gain 10 pounds in a month, that’s for sure.
The knock-on effect of being able to absorb other nutrients more effectively could explain the weight gain.
It’s like that NIH director’s blog article on Kwashiorkor in the Malawian twins. Good bacteria, bad bacteria.
Just saying, you’re point about the search results is unfair because you don’t use quotations around the search terms.
“resistant starch” –> 568 articles
“ketogenic diet” –> 1293 articles
The interesting thing about a solid chain like that is one would expect that a free flowing term like diet would render hundreds of thousands of results.
So, if you’re claiming that I was simply searching for ‘resistant’ OR ‘starch’ in any study, vs. ‘ketogenic’ OR ‘diet’ in any study, why I didn’t get hundreds of thousands of results for Ketogenic Diet.
Yep, he got ya! I just searched for the last year, the words Ketogenic, Resistant Starch, or Paleo in the title only.
Ketogenic – 88
Resistant Starch – 44
Paleo diet – 0
But, what’s funny, it looked like nearly all of the ketogenic diet studies were discussing epilepsy.
Q HAWWTNESS ~ur making me shit out loud
Tim TIM TIM ~everything looks different in the whole light, huh??? I tried to stuff the RED PILL down your and Richard’s throat for so an eternity but y’ll protested like whiny little grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrls
I’m serious! There should also be a “Tips for Tooting in Public” or “Farting for Dummies” section. And because there are the different types of farts that one must be cognizant of, maybe a “Field Guide to Farts.”
Sneak peek:
Pull my finger
Farts are almost unnatural. Since when does hot gas fall? Doesn’t it rise? Shouldn’t it come out the upper end of our digestive tract? Flatus is brought to the rectum by specialised contractions of the muscles in the intestines and colon, a process called peristalsis. These waves in the large intestine are what direct turds towards the toilet. Toots have a humble beginning, they start out as microscopic beads of gas that collect in pockets and empty spaces throughout the bowel, when enough of these collect, they are forced downward along with your poop towards your butt. Peristalsis creates high pressure, forcing gas to move towards an area of lower pressure, and eventually freedom. The average person expels about a quart of gas per day divided into about 15 farts per day and we don’t normally pass gas when we sleep. Generally, people can’t exude anal emissions on demand, but when they feel one coming on can easily put their weight on one leg, slightly lift the other and get some good volume and pitch. Great laughter can result when this amazing skill is accompanied by a suave hand gesture, facial grimace or wisecrack. A few notable artists employing their wind instruments have emerged throughout history;
Glad we are all on the same team again. Sometimes we get tunnel-vision and don’t want to see what’s right in front of us. We promise never to talk back again, mommy.
Sorry I couldn’t resist: youtube.com/watch?v=MHIvCKoCVBw
some of the RS studies feature starch that was baked with positive results. RS manufacturers talk about societal health benefits if the food industry included resistant starches in their food products. Maybe this would be a game changer in helping reverse obesity/diabetic epidemics. Not everyone is going to do the PS thing. Imagine if govt encouraged resistant starch minimums in schools meals. I’m having trouble finding RS numbers after baking and cooling baked goods. I know heat destroys most RS but what about retrograde starch?
This is actually happening in Australia. They have the highest rate of colorectal cancer in the world despite 20 years of ‘fiber education’. They are now in bed with ‘big-agri’ to get Hi-Maize and Barley-Max added to every loaf of bread and muffin. They set a recommendation of 20gRS/day for everyone to strive for. Hopefully it works.
tatertot have you found data on RS in baked goods using these manufactured RS’s ? Also I’ve been baking alot with PS and tapioca starch but can not find if any RS remains or if there is retrogration.
a flatbread with decent RS content would be damn useful.
No. There seems to be a whole lot of ‘industrial secrets’ in this area. I found a document one time telling bakers exactly how much of a particular fiber they needed to include in recipes for baked goods to get a ‘high fiber’ rating, it was very small, like 2 or 3g per serving. They were using a frankenfood modified potato starch, too. I’ll see if i can find it. It was very discouraging.
I think we are a long ways from seeing RS listed on food labels. Too many variables, although you’d think they could come up with something. As soon as people start asking for it and RS is selling products, you can bet the ‘High RS’ labels will start appearing.
For processed foods, all the manufacturers are interested in is getting a high fiber count to display, whether it’s from sawdust, wheat chaff, or hi-maize.
Here, read this, keeping in mind that none of the stuff they are talking about is real food (like Bob’s Potato Starch) but super-refined modified starches that will withstand the heat of baking. Maybe this is OK for gut bugs, but it ‘bugs’ me.
newhope360.com/fiber/penford-launches-penfibe-cw
Penford Food Ingredients, a leader in innovative carbohydrate systems and technologies, today announced the introduction of PenFibe® CW non-GMO white corn fiber. This corn fiber contains a minimum of 80 percent dietary fiber while simultaneously reducing calories when used in place of flour. PenFibe CW can be used in a variety of applications including baked goods and snacks. PenFibe CW is non-GMO, clean-label, non-allergenic and Kosher.
PenFibe CW has the following recommended applications and functional benefits:
Recommended applications:
· Baked goods
· Beverages
· Breakfast and nutrition bars
· Gluten-free products
· Snacks
· Tortillas
Functional benefits:
· Easy to use
· Texturizer
· Good gut tolerance
· Heat and pH stable
“PenFibe CW is another great product that addresses the nutrition gap in daily fiber consumption,” said John Randall, president of Penford Food Ingredients. “Additionally, its ability to aid in cutting calories is ideal for healthy weight management and in low-sugar products for both adults and children.”
PenFibe CW works well with Penford’s existing PenFibe portfolio including PenFibe® RS and PenFibe® RO. PenFibe RS is a potato-based insoluble resistant starch that provides at least 85 percent fiber and reduces caloric content. PenFibe RS can help lower calories and provide fiber in baked goods and snacks when it is used as a partial replacement for flour. Depending on the specific needs of a customer, these products can be blended to produce desired outcomes.
PenFibe RO is a non-GMO, potato-based soluble resistance starch that contains a minimum of 56 percent dietary fiber. It can reduce calories and provide fiber when used as a replacement for ingredients such as flour and sugar.
“We are constantly innovating to serve our customers’ needs, and right now, fiber is in high demand. Our PenFibe line is flexible enough to address the varying needs and applications in the food and beverage industry. We are excited to be able to add another great ingredient to this functional line of products,” concluded Randall.
Am only just getting up to speed on all this, fascinating posts Rich.
Am potato lectin senstive so am going to go for Tapioca Starch – from what I can tell the Bob’s Mill Tapioca Flour is the same as Tapioca Starch? Probably a dumb question but want to do this right!
Many thanks
Andrew
Richard/Tim, is this the one that has 80% RS?
Andrew,
From Bob’s Red Mill website:
Tapioca flour, also known as tapioca starch, is a starchy white flour that has a slight sweet flavor to it. Tapioca flour is an alternative to traditional wheat flours and has a variety of uses in baking. The flour is made from the starch extracted from the South American cassava plant. When the roots have fully developed, they are harvested and processed to remove toxins. The starch is then extracted from the root by a repeated process of washing and pulping the mixture, then separating off the liquid.
Thanks Jojo – Will get started then!
If you google “tapioca starch site:freetheanimal.com”, you’ll see that Tapioca Starch is not recommended.
Hi Richard,
Thanks for keeping up with this message. I have a pot of black beans simmering now in a crock pot with mangalitsa sausage, smoked ham hock, and various spices – this will be my breakfast tomorrow – having oven baked French fries with valentine’s day dinner tonight
for those of us who are still using VLC or Keto on most days to lose fat (I do it now for simplicity as I still haven’t learned portion control w carbs) – perhaps use 4-6 tbs of RS on days we do eat carbs? For me that is about 2 days a week – I always do that – I don’t test my blood sugar, but the science you have presented seems sound, so why not right?
I’d like to hear more about the autoimmune flare ups and more pointedly, what to do about them. Spanish Caravan got my attention about the danger of long term VLC (5 years for me) as I had very bad shingles 2 years ago and last summer, when I began experimenting with RS and more carbs, I’ve been slammed with something like polymyositis. I loved that RS “cured” my 40 years of weekly dysbiosis. I just couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that something (RS) that fixed my gut and gave me great sleep could “cause” my immune system to freakout. I stopped PS and all nightshades on Wednesday and dysbiosed Thursday in spite of trebling my green banana intake. I’m going to get plantain flour today to restore my gut again. Any suggestions for the immune problem?
What if healing and feeding the gut ecosystem “woke up” my immune system and it looked around and said “Holy Shit” this girl is riddled with viruses and fungus and what not, and this has been an eight month house cleaning instead of an autoimmune wig out?
Melinda, you had a muscle biopsy? Any cytomegalovirus history or antibody titre at present?
Highly unlikely it’s the potato starch.
You had shingles before the potato starch. Then you had shingles again last summer after the potato starch? Or you got polymyositis last summer when you started the potato starch? You are not clear. At least not to my tired brain.
Living in a mouldy house will cause problems. I don’t know where you live but anything like that will trigger problems as well. So will emotional trauma. So will chronic stress. I figure one less stressor would be a gut that functions well.
Thank you for your reply, Gabriella. I’m sorry I wasn’t clear. Yes, shingles 3/12. Started PS, green bananas and probiotics this last May/June. Yes to cytomegalovirus: Ebstein-Barr. Last June, I experienced 5 days of twice daily 103F fevers with no other symptoms, no gland enlargement or joint/muscle pains. I got active again and I really overdid muscle exhaustion laying tile in July and have been in a lot of pain and loss of function since then. I stayed steady with the extra carbs beans, rice, potatoes and in December I upped the PS to 2 TBP x day. Even better colonic health but in January experienced what seemed like mono. I’m underinsured so no formal testing but I’d be open to buying some tests if I knew what to choose. I’m testing avoiding nightshades now, don’t know what else to try.
I live in Tucson in a newish house so no mold. High emotion trauma and chronic stress has been a problem.
Richard –
Are you gluten free/kinda free? Also, do you believe the negative claims people have made regarding gluten? Finally, if you think gluten is harmfule then do you think RS acts as some counterbalance?
Doug
Funny you would ask. I intend to stay off the gluten grains for the most part. However, did a test last weekend while the wife was away, for the Olympics opening. I went and got a large pizza. I had beer in the fridge left from the NFC championship party (I almost never touch beer). So pizza and beer, the perfect storm for nuclear heartburn and crash coma.
Stay tuned for an upcoming post about my experience. :)
The autoimmune flare-up issue is interesting. I’ve been adding PS for a few weeks now, gradually introducing some different probiotics with the hopes of clearing up my psoriasis. Since adding the probiotics I’ve noticed a little bit of a flare-up and some other issues like brain-fog and muscle aches. A bit of googling has shown that some people report a herxheimer-type reaction to probiotics due to the die-off of nasty gut bugs. Could it be that the PS with probiotics is causing such a war that the unusual number of dead bad guys is releasing overwhelming amounts of exotoxins? I assume this would indicate that people having a negative reaction to PS and probiotics are the people with the most dysbiotic guts, and thus in the most need of intervention.
Recent research seems to indicate that psoriasis is the result of genetic expression combined with internal and external infections of staphylococcus aureus and possibly candida. This would mean that both internal and external treatments are required and that the typical medicines like steroids are just masking the underlying cause. I’m currently thinking of my psoriasis as a marker of my overall health rather than a condition that needs to be directly treated.
Dan
I believe you nailed it. TMI wise, I have had 90% bliss, 10% pain and one time last summer (way before introducing any probiotics or now, SBO pros) I was in Tahoe with family, did my usual dose of PS on the morning w water. We were all at different hotels, met in Harrah’s for lunch and I said what the hell, had a French dip sammy. And hour later I was not only farting up a storm, but this time, it wasn’t painless. I had and awful gut mess.
The thing is, I have always looked upon these sorts of events as just as possibly good as bad. I recall way back taking a bunch of betaine hci after readin Kresser’s series on GERD and within an hour, had the nastiest, awful elimination of my life, maybe. And then I felt way better.
There’s 100 trillion of them, 500-1000 species, and they are at war (I just finished editing a chapter called “Chemical Warfare” and since Tim & I are both ex-military, it is written 100% in battlefield metaphor). People always ascribe anything adverse to something bad when it’s entirely possible it’s good. The key is: acute or chronic.
“Could it be that the PS with probiotics is causing such a war that the unusual number of dead bad guys is releasing overwhelming amounts of exotoxins? I assume this would indicate that people having a negative reaction to PS and probiotics are the people with the most dysbiotic guts, and thus in the most need of intervention.”
This has been my family’s experience. I mean–I don’t know if it’s exotoxins or something else or a combo, but it’s not atypical for us to see transitional problems when things are changing in our guts. Esp in my daughter, I watch to see if the intensity decreases over time, or whether the problems stay steady or increase–the latter means that whatever I’m doing clearly isn’t a good fit for her digestion. A recent example is that all of us had noticeable negative reactions to our first cap of Prescript Assist, but given that they are generally helpful and the reactions are decreasing already, it seems like a very useful support for us.
My kindergarten-level take in the autoimmune thing: it’s nightshade/alkaloid related. A dose of potato starch right to the gut and boom, psoriasis goes crazy. At least that’s how it was for me, and after six weeks with zero nightshades it’s hugely better. It’s sort of ironic that RS is probably good for autoimmunity but PS specifically is a problem. What’s the solution? Plantain flour? Tapioca?
Eric R, probably given the way in which potato starch is produced, there would be a few micrograms of alkaloid in what a person is consuming with 4 tablespoons. This is about the same amount as arsenic in rice. Highly unlikely to cause a problem.
I don’t know what it is in the PS that set of my AI issues but I only had about 6 bad days over the 6 weeks I’ve been taking PS. I also need to report that at week 4 seeing I was taking PS I might as well reintroduce potatoes and tomatoes back into my diet. I didn’t know that the amount of potential problem was so small in PS as reported by gabriella. Anyway I got a negative autoimmune response on the morning after my first tbs of PS with it settling down towards the end of the first week, so I upped the PS to 2bs and had several bad days. The worst was when I upped the PS to 3tbs at about week 3 and I was seriously thinking about medicating. However after 2 days the symptoms started reducing and although I’m not yet at pre-PS levels of problem I mostly don’t have enough symptoms to even think about them. I had no negative sequelae to adding back (limited) potatoes and tomatoes into my diet which surprised me.
I’m 2 months into RS – 2x a day 2T. Almost everything has been solid and I’m excited to get my blood tested next month but wanted to see if anyone has seen after a couple months of usage 1) decreased libido 2) a bit of weight gain. I was wondering if a 5/2 regimen might be better. Take 5 of 7 days within a week. I also do IF and barely eat till dinner time (maybe a couple hard boiled eggs or sardines for lunch) so I’m surprised I wasn’t dropping more weight. Should start bringing in eggs/beans for breakfast ala 4HB? I was planning on adding in a couple things to see if it might help move both of these in the right direction. 1) add in apple cider vinegar 2) reduce eating cold steel cut oats 3) add in more legumes (lentils/blackbeans). Would love any suggestions.
Brian, you have too many confounders to figure this out. Was your libido better before and were you doing everything exactly the same in regards to diet and IF?
Libido was better before starting and really good for the first month of taking it while the darting was big. Now things have tailed off as far as farts and wanting tail. ;) I only really do RS and along with VLC so thinking adding in more RS from whole foods and eating a bit at breakfast might help amp up my metabolism.