“I quickly felt 10 to 15 years younger!”
Georgina Hughes looked at her pill bottle and felt conf licted. She’d been taking meds for years to cope with an inf lammatory disease that left her stiff and in pain. But she knew those pills, plus eating a Standard American Diet, had damaged her gut and led to her uncontrolled weight gain. Yet eating healthy-gut foods like fermented sauerkraut and kombucha didn’t seem to help. Discouraged, she reveals, “I’d been trying to get healthier for years, knowing that disease begins in the gut.”
Then Georgina stumbled upon Tim Steele, author of The Potato Hack. She says, “Tim’s blog was the first I had heard of resistant starch.” She put his nutrition advice to work. She ate mostly cooked and cooled potatoes for up to four days a week, and tried to eat healthy the rest of the time. She lost 3 pounds every week with that trick.
Georgina also noticed she began to sleep better. Her gut health improved and her cholesterol dropped from 214 to 191. She even avoided a hip-replacement surgery. Even better: “Eating resistant starch contributed to my inf lammatory disease going into remission!”
Now Georgina says, “I still eat resistant starch almost daily because of its benefits for my gut.” She adds, “I just taught my 4-year-old granddaughter to ride a bike. That’s not anything I thought I would be doing at 67!”
“Resistant starch is something people don’t know enough about, and it can be a game changer for a woman’s nutrition.”
—Amy Shah, M.D.
the iceberg with resistant starch. Metabolism is the mechanism, and it manifests in every aspect of the body.” Sure enough, resistant starch is being looked at for its potential ability to reduce cancer, fight Alzheimer’s and reverse diabetes.
Witwer says, “It’s extraordinary. There are brilliant scientists all over the world, winning awards, studying every disease imaginable, demonstrating how important resistant starch is to health. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Witwer knows firsthand. She was prediabetic until she started supplementing with resistant starch 20 years ago. Since then, she’s easily reduced her fasting glucose level from 110 mg/dL to a healthy, normal 90. And Ann Overhulse, who lost 35 pounds with the help of eating cooked and cooled potatoes, also reversed prediabetes and got off heartburn meds.
Easy ways to get the perks of resistant starch
Eat more fiber. Most women are deficient in dietary fiber. We’re getting about 96% less than our ancestors due to the way fiber is removed from processed foods. Some experts even suggest that resistant starch offers the best science to date against processed foods. To correct the deficit, Dr. Shah recommends slowly working up to eating 30 grams of fiber daily—from different forms, including resistant starch.
Reach for resistant sources. You can find resistant starch naturally in foods like oats, beans, chickpeas, underripe (greenish) bananas and cashews. Or you can create it with clever food hacks like quickly cooling cooked rice, potatoes or pasta in the fridge overnight, then reheating them. And, of course, you can try the freezer trick with wheat or sourdough breads. Dr. Shah reminds, “It’s a special type of fiber we can easily get. You don’t have to buy anything special!”
Mind your carbs. While tweaking bread or rice improves the slimming potential of those foods, they can still cause sensitivity in some people. “The main strategy I use is placing beans at the top of the hierarchy of acceptable starches. They have more anti-cancer benefits, more plant protein, more slowly digestible starch, more resistant starch and lower glycemic load,” says Joel Fuhrman, M.D., author of Eat to Live. Bread aside, he says, “More beans, nuts, seeds and vegetables. That’s where the money’s at.”
Quantity matters. Health and weight-loss benefits come from getting at least 15 grams of resistant starch daily. You can get there by eating foods like 1 cup of cooked oatmeal, which delivers just under 4 grams of resistant starch. Half a cup of cooked pinto beans gets you around 5 grams, while fava beans can earn you up to 12 grams. But high doses of this starch can be hard to get from food alone, and some studies tout supplementing with 30 or 40 grams daily. So some people opt for a concentrated resistant starch supplement, like Supergut shake powder or Jonny’s Good Nature Ultra High Resistant Starch Green Banana Flour (available at Amazon.com).