I’ve heard a lot about the benefits of resistant starch so I’m giving it a go! It is supposed to be very good for not only improving your insulin response but also increasing your beneficial gut bacteria lactobacillus and ruminococcus. I’m heating and cooling potatoes to make mine. Normally potatoes spike my blood sugars when eaten just after cooking, so I’ve been monitoring with my blood glucose monitor and so far so good. Nothing above 5.6 mmol/L so it does not appear to adversely affect my levels too much.
I first learned about resistant starch listening to Chris Kresser on a podcast with Joe Rogan. Chris says the potato hack is like a feast for your beneficial bacteria. After my chocolate indulgence over Easter this seems like a good idea!
For anyone interested in more detail there’s an interesting post on Mark Sisson’s Daily Apple blog. Here he talks about how much chilling, heating and re-chilling increases the amount of resistant starch. The big advantage is that resistant starch is not absorbed in the small intestine so it does not give caloric fuel to your body but instead is converted to short chain fatty acids, like butyrate, in the large intestine and absorbed into the bloodstream or fueling the cells of the colon. Resistant starch can therefore be treated as “fat” calories not carbohydrates which is good news for anyone who likes potatoes like me but wants to stay low carb. Since I had gut issues with gluten, it’s also nice to know that resistant starch helps decrease inflammation in the gut, improves mineral absorption and helps fix intestinal permeability.
It’s hard to find nutritional information on resistant starch so I thought this was quite a good find. He even has stats on how much each cycle affects it. Here it is:
1 medium potato, tennis ball sized, 150g or so, can be looked at like this in terms of resistant starch:
Raw – 22g
Cooked – .25g
Cooled – 3.5g
Re-heated – 4g
Re-cooled – 4.5g
Re-re-heated – 5g
Re-re-cooled – 5.5g
Re-re-re-heated – 6g
For further reading there is a good article on Nutrition by Natalie’s website.