*Starch, or the Decline and Fall of the AS Organism!*

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I love avocado mush with carrot sticks, but I accept that it might not be everybody's cup of tea. The thing is there are all sorts of things that are quick and simple and not expensive.

Oh yes, I have noticed, and apparently this is normal, that when you cut out starch and reduce the number of individual foods you eat each day you need far less food. It's amazing how efficient the body/gut is on small amounts of really good stuff, ( like AS are more efficient/competent/able when not overloaded in fact ! ), so nuts and dried fruit don't work out as expensive as you think they will.

PS. Another good quick one is tinned fish, ( tuna, sardines, pilchard, mackerel etc ), with green salad or broccoli or cucumber. Fresh coleslaw too, pref homemade. And big salads with just a bit of ham, or stir fried veg, ( mushrooms, broccoli, and soya sauce/seasalt) with ham/chicken.


It's strange isn't it. I tried going on a fruit fast at Uni and didn't last a day, not because "I gave in/caved in" to real hunger or even cravings, but because I began to feel afraid.

Society teaches us that you need three meals a day, meat/fish and two veg, lots of wholegrains etc, and it is astonishing how driven we are by that conditioning.
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Last edited by ouinon on 18 Feb 2009, 10:22 am, edited 3 times in total.

Hope I didn't misunderstod your theory.
But if I didn't it's wrong in so many ways.
1. We evolved from monkeys, chimps (98% identical genes) eat atlest 20 different typs of fruit and nuts every day. And with the degree of ripe (?) and the diet of insects and other monkeys simply kills off your theory of our stomachs would "overload" becouse of our history.

2. Our stomach gives away three types of info:
If it's empty/If it's full/If something is wrong with it.

The "gut feeling" don't come from the gut, it comes from your brain.

3. Not all autistics were the engine of humanity in the past either. You oversimplify our traits.

4.

I think you see my point.

5. My grandfather grew up on a farm in the far north of Sweden and had no access to any nerby store, everything they ate they produced or gathered themselvs. They ate a lot more than ten ingredients per day.

6. You mix up ingredients with types of food.

7. You ignore the fact that a lot of the ingredients we get through our meals are the same as the previous meals gave us.

8.

A lot of the bacteria in our stomach has nothing to do with our digestprossess, they are simply there to kill of any invaders.

This is somewhat incorrect (sugar is very fast to digest); Some plant-based foods are slower to digest, true, this means that we benifit from a prolonged energy input from them, easaly compensated by mixing in "faster" types of food.

9. A hundred years is a nanosecond in human evolution. And don't forget that during this time "humans" where several different species and that Homo Sapiens comes from a very limited genetic pool due to an near extinction event reducing our population to a few thousand.

10.

Sugar is a starshy and exists in every form of fruit and berry there is...

Edit: I'm going to sleep now, have fun.

They do? Do you have a source/link for that figure, ( 20 )?

I just looked at a couple of sites, including one on Goodall's work, and another two, and found that chimps are largely fruit, ( 60%) and leaf, ( 21% ) and only 3% meat, eaters, and chimps exhibit strikingly different dietary habits among different populations. For instance the chimpanzees in the Gombe eat almost exclusively the nuts of the palm oil tree.

None of them eat potatoes, cereals, ( corn, oats, wheat, rice, etc ), or other starchy foods, and they tend to stick to the same food for hours on end, exhausting a tree's/group of trees' particular fruit/nuts/seeds before moving on.


Our stomach perhaps. But have you heard of the Enteric Nervous System, which is the nervous system wrapped in and around the intestines, and almost completely independent from the brain? It does a lot more than say if the intestines are empty or full.


You misquote me. I did not say "all autistics" nor "engines" at any point.


No, actually. Did I say that anyone should eat all of those on the same day?


I don't think that's why they're there, but it is a function that some of them have ended up serving. What was your point though?


Sugar is not a polysaccharide, nor a starch, therefore it is indeed fast to digest.


Protein is even better for "prolonged energy input", without all the problems associated with starch digestion.

False, ( see above ). Sugars are either mono or a di - saccharides, not polysaccharides, definitely not starch in other words, ( lactose is the only sugar which is slightly more complex than a standard di-saccharide ).

Starch is made of sugars/saccharides, many of them attached together, but it is not at all the same thing as the simple sugars, ( mono and disaccharides like fructose, glucose, sucrose, etc ) which are in berries, other fruit, honey, sugar cane, etc.
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Last edited by ouinon on 17 Feb 2009, 6:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.

PS. Silvervarg.

Saying that starch is a sugar is like saying that gluten is an amino acid. Gluten is made up of amino acids, as starch is made up of sugars. In fact you could say that starch is the equivalent of gluten, which is the largest protein humans eat, because starch is the largest polysaccharide/carbohydrate that we ever eat.

Interestingly, monkeys will not eat unripe fruit. They will spit it out if they eat any by accident. And unripened fruit does contain polysaccharides/starch. The ripening process gets rid of them.

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I think the Western diet is bad for all humans, ASD or NT and the sooner the human race realises this the sooner many diseases can be reduced in prevalence.

Absolutely.

But I think that NT's probably don't suffer from the same kind of "overload" problem as AS. And so long as AS refer to "overload" as one of the most serious ways in which they are disabled in work places/shops, etc I think that gut-overload has to be taken into consideration.

Why should employees be required to change lighting fixtures, chemicals for cleaning use, arrangements of telephones etc, if the AS person suffering from overload will not also do everything possible themselves to cut down on overload to their 300 square meters of intestinal surface area?

I think people don't realise just how vast and complex and delicate the gut is. Nor understand the way in which it is "battered" by the passage of food. The number of cells stripped off the intestinal lining every day is astronomical.

If AS treated their gut as if it was themselves, only exposing it to a very few foods each day, and no starch, I think many would rediscover levels of energy and confidence and clarity that had thought was lost forever, aswell as a capacity to deal with environmental stimulation which would surprise them.

Wondering whether this might well be what lies behind so many AS children refusing to eat more than a couple of foods. Children are perhaps still aware of the effect on their guts of a lot of different foods.

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Ouinon, I'd be more likely to consider your theory to have merit if you hadn't taken such a literal view of "gut reactions" to support your theory.

No, she didn't mix up anything there. Ingrediants are types of food. If something has multiple ingrediants, each ingrediant is a different food. So, if I eat a product with 20 ingredients, I'm eating 20 different foods. (Or, perhaps, 10 foods and 10 chemicals.)

I dont think they have the same problems as us, no. There are some very specific problems with tolerating some foods that ASD people primarily have. A lot of people with ASDs have gluten and casein sensitivity. I have a friend who I think is on the spectrum and has Coeliac.

I think the Western diet is very low in fibre and provides a lot of other sorts of digestive problems for NTs. Many get regularly constipated because white flour was stripped from its fibre and made into pastries, cakes, pies etc which make it more difficult for the intestine to move the food along its way. I think NTs have more problems at the large intestine whereas ASD bodies have an earlier reaction, at the small intestine.

Not to mention the addictive nature of sugar, which is not commonly acknowledged.

I think your theory is on the right track. In addition to being poor in nutrients, grains, beans, and potatoes contain families of toxins called enzyme blockers and lectins. Potatoes also contain glycoalkaloids.

The intestines are like a kind of forest. The 300 square metres are the surface area of a tube which is folded and "crinkled" and covered in millions of tiny tendrils called villi, which move the food along, absorb nutrients, and secrete various substances, ( self-protective ones and signal-chemicals, among others).

The villi shed cells in incredible numbers despite the protective fluid, and villi "die"/shrink/are flattened if the food regularly provokes auto-immune reactions, ( which happens when the guts think that something is a foreign body to be attacked but it is actually part of the gut itself ).
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Last edited by ouinon on 18 Feb 2009, 4:47 am, edited 2 times in total.

It was a documentary on TV.
I talked about those who has a choise when it comes to finding food.
Of course there are exeptions.


Not quite, if it were Atkins diet wouldn't work. The best way is to mix starch and proteins, the starch makes the body store the fat in the meat for later use.
What problems?


You are talking about a sugerboost (right words?). If you eat faster foods (fruit etc) you'll need to eat more often and can afford to have a more unstable bloodsugar level. Of course you feel better when you have a high bloodsugar level. But it means you'll have to eat allmost constantly.


All children has that stage, and AS people are more likley (my interpetation) to get stuck in it for a longer time hence to their security thinking and dislike of changes. A studie here in Sweden showed that no children ate salad in the school lunch exept those who were regulare served salad at home.


That they are there and kill off what's coming down, no matter what you eat. And why should some kind of food be more likley to attract harmfull bacteria?


"It is capable of autonomous functions such as the coordination of reflexes(vomiting etc), although it receives considerable innervation from the autonomic nervous system and thus is often considered a part of it. Its study is the focus of neurogastroenterology.

It can be damaged by ischemia."
It's not a tongue.


Mayonnaise: (I'll translate as much as possible)
Veg. oil (rape)
Egg yolk
Water
Vinegar
Sugar
Mustard
Preservation substance (E202)
Spices
Stabilizition substance (E415, E412)
Colouring substance (E160a)
The last four was not food. This means that either we count typs of food or typs of ingrediences.
Foods here being things of sufficient quantity that the stomach must activate to digest.
Ingrediences are not.
If it's indeed chemicals and flavors he count, then all the other chemicals in the fruits must be counted in, which makes this very silly, very fast.


There might be a language difference here, our translation does include sugar.




I didn't say they eat unripe fruit, I said that the degree of ripe differ. As in, they eat it anyway through not fully ripe fruit. When they are hungry they eat allmost any fruit they come across, it's later they start to get picky.

Just noticed this morning, ( because my son's father had picked up some bumpf in the street and left it in the bathroom ), that it is almost Lent, the 40 days fast. Funny coincidence; here I am suggesting cutting out starch, simplifying diet, etc, and it's Lent next week.

I set you all a challenge. Cut out all obvious starch, and reduce the number of individual foods you eat each day to about 7, for the 40 days over Lent, and see how you feel at the end of it.

By obvious starch I mean

bread incl. pitta breads and burger buns
pasta
pizza
breakfast cereals incl. porridge, cornflakes, muesli
potato
cookies, crackers, biscuits, and cakes
potato incl. crisps
rice
sago and tapioca and manioc and similar flours.
corn, incl. chips, tortillas, and cornflour-thickened sauces and soups
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Last edited by ouinon on 18 Feb 2009, 4:54 am, edited 3 times in total.

The guts/intestines of many/most people in the West/developed countries are probably rather like The Old Forest, ( in "The Lord of the Rings" ). Villi have been chopped down and burned, and a wall has been built around the forest/gut to protect the village/civilisation from it. The Enteric Nervous System is half asleep but dangerous, trying to absorb/digest parts of yourself.

Going on an exclusion diet, or fast, is like putting up sentries at the borders of the forest, and only allowing friends to enter, as the elves do around Lorien. If you start protecting your guts you may discover the strength there is in them.

And if you protect your gut you may be able to respect it rather than fear it, communicate with it rather than ignore it. The Enteric Nervous System once woken up and on your side is a formidable ally. It can "eat up" stress, ( when it is not overloaded the gut neutralises the acid that the stomach produces when under stress ), as the trees of Fangorn, led by the Ents, eat up the Orcs at the Battle of Helms Deep.

PS. I am now wondering how Tolkien came to choose the name Ents?

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The more I think about it the weirder, ( and more significant ), it seems that so few people are prepared to consider protecting the gut when thinking about overload.

So many threads talk about the experience of overload, and how it disables them, and yet almost noone mentions the gut, despite the fact that its surface of 300 square meters is exposed to, and interacts with, the environment, ( in the form of food ), 24 hours a day every day.
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Last edited by ouinon on 18 Feb 2009, 7:39 am, edited 1 time in total.

That is obviously why the inuit indians/"eskimos", ( that ate no starchy carbohydrates until recently ) are famously so thin!

Your body does not need starch in order to store fat. But eating starch does perhaps encourage your body to create, and fill, more unhealthy "white fat" cells, ( as opposed to the healthy "brown fat" cells ).

Eating starch with proteins slows digestion down drastically. When you eat protein on its own, ( without starchy carbohydrates ), the stomach takes about 6 hours to digest it. When you eat starchy carbs on their own it takes 4-5 hours. But when you eat protein with starch the meal stays in the stomach for 11 - 12 hours.

The combination, ( of starch and protein ), is so much more difficult to digest that the stomach has to produce far more acid enzymes to deal with it, and this makes the job for the guts/intestines much harder in consequence, requiring the secretion of even more neutralising and self-protecting fluids, and causing more damage to villi.


No. I am talking about relief from the background clamour of an overloaded gut, and the capacity to withstand stress which a healthy gut provides by neutralising the acid produced by the stomach when we are anxious/afraid etc.

If all you ate was fruit, yes, ( which is why people use fruit for cleansing/purging fasts ), but not if you eat meat, nuts, fish, vegetables, and seeds aswell.


Untrue, speaking as a mother, but also as someone who didn't go through a stage like that either.


Some bacteria positively thrive on certain foods. Klebsiella for instance, ( bacteria which prevents healing of membranes in the body, particularly in the lungs but also elsewhere ), loves starch because its cell walls are made of starch, precisely because starch is so indigestible that it makes a very effective armour.

Whereas "friendly" bacteria, which help us with digestion, ( making vitamin B's more available to us for instance ), and help to keep down the numbers of "unfriendly bacteria, will be decimated by certain unhealthy gut conditions.


You are still talking about the stomach, rather than the intestines/guts.


When animals, including humans, are very hungry they will eat many things that they would not otherwise. That does not mean that those things are good for them.

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