The Future of Fermentable Carbs in Our Society

What does the future hold for fermentable carbs in our food society? Unlike almost all of the digestible starches, resistant starch is rather resistant to absorbing moisture. Cornflakes are made of digestible starch, which is why they go soggy as soon as you bring the milk anywhere near them. For the same reason, bis­cuits go soft unless kept in an airtight container. Breakfast cereals made from resistant starch, however, stay deliciously crisp right up to the moment you're ready to eat them, and biscuits made with this marvelous material retain their bite for far longer. Even better, replacing digestible starch with resistant starch cuts the calories almost in half.

Resistant starch, therefore, combines a host of health benefits for the consumer with an interesting set of physical benefits for the producer. Food manufacturers are convinced that there will be a growing market for this valuable new dietary ingredient, and are hastening to increase the production of resistant starches from wheat, maize, rice and even citrus peel.

In short, fermentable carbohydrates are now recognized to be an extremely important component in the healthy diet. But because they have only recently been 'discovered' (they were pre­viously considered to be a type of dietary fiber), their impor­tance has not been understood by the low-carb gurus. And unfortunately, the traditional low-carbohydrate diets are inevitably low in fermentable carbohydrates, which explains why the low-carb dieter can have poor gut function and flora, is usually constipated, has bad breath due to the process of ketosis, and in the long term maybe at an increased risk of developing serious diseases. In many ways, therefore, a phamaco-nutritional revision of the low-carbohydrate diets allows us to design an updated and improved dietary regime. This upgrade from Atkins is low-calorie, does not induce insulin surges, does not endanger the kidneys or the bones, and is undoubtedly cardio- and chemo-protective. This is a diet which recaptures the essence and the basic proportions of the way we ate back when we were hunting and gathering; but cuts the calorie content in half, and brings the Stone Age diet into the twenty-first century.

What are food sources of fermentable carbs? The best natural sources of resistant starch include lentils and legumes, and it is no coincidence that in parts of the world where these foods are staples (such as North Africa), the incidence of heart disease and colorectal cancer is very much lower than it is in the US or the UK.

Our own diet used to contain very much higher levels of resis­tant starch than it does today, but food processing technology and dietary changes such as the reduction in our intake of pulses and legumes have cut our intakes by at least half in the last century alone. Experts in the field such as Professor Joan Slavin at the University of Minnesota, St Paul, have linked this fall in con­sumption to the dramatic increases in colorectal cancer that have occurred over the same period. They advocate that we should restore our intakes of resistant starch to, at the very least, pre-World War II levels of around 10 g per day, in order to normalize our gut functions.