P.S. The no-starch diet

4. I feel like explaining the no-starch diet, because I am such a big fan of it now because it has helped me so much in various ways.

If you believe we evolved over millions of years, you can't deny that we evolved on a nearly-starchless diet (potatoes and bread are very recent inventions on the biological timescale, too recent for evolution to adapt us to them). So our bodies aren't designed to handle heavy starches, which turn into heavy doses of Sugar once digested. You can almost tell it just by how the digestive system is designed: we have amylase in the saliva to quickly digest small amounts of starch in our food before they reach the stomach. But "big" starches like potatoes get past that. If there are proteins also being eaten at the same time, then the big starches, which are digested in alkaline medium in the small intestine, sit in the stomach waiting (and possibly fermenting) while all the proteins are being digested in stomach acid. This is the central problem of food combining, a problem which doesn't exist if no starches are eaten.

Once the starch reaches the intestines, the pancreas has to provide three things: (a) the substance that neutralizes the stomach acid to create the alkaline medium for starch digestion, (b) the amylase enzyme to digest the starch, and (c) the insulin to deal with the large, abnormal pulse of Sugar created when the starch is digested. The poor little pancreas must get worn out! And that amylase that's getting used up to digest starch should be getting used for other functions it has in the body, such as anti-inflammatory reactions in the skin. And as we've all heard by now, excess blood Sugar has devastating effects on the body.

We evolved eating fruit, vegetables, nuts, and meat (mainly fish, because we mostly lived near water). And it just makes sense biologically to stick with that.