Book review: The Starch Solution

Can we learn something from a thinly veiled Vegan propagandist?

[This post is accidentally over 7,000 words. I swear I was just going to do a quick review of the book, but given that I am currently doing a HCLF diet and have a lot of thoughts on the topic, it became a sprawling diatribe with a decade of suppressed anti-vegan sentiments finding their way to the surface.

tl;dr: Don’t bother reading the book. The name tells you everything you need to know, and there’s very little interesting scientific or new info in it. If you’re on top of HCLF discussions on Twitter, my blog, or r/SaturatedFat, you already know everything in there.]

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Last week I read The Starch Solution by John McDougall. It is one of THE books in the HCLF space, from what I’ve seen maybe only 2nd to The China Study, a book ripped to shreds by Denise Minger 15 years ago for being intellectually dishonest and motivated by vegan ideology. This is the same Denise Minger who later (10 years ago) would write In Defense of Low Fat, maybe the seminal work that influenced ketards like myself that there could be something like a healthy “carbosis” diet.

Overall, I was not particularly impressed. The science is often shoddy, McDougall makes many category errors that seem to invalidate his entire hypothesis and “solution,” and it’s just in general a very emotionally charged book light on ideas.

In addition, his strategy doesn’t seem to work well for me at all.

McDougall comes off as extremely unsympathetic, and I forgot how much nonsense and dishonesty is standard in mainstream diet books.

I suppose I’m more used to the “nutrition science” diet books that I’ve reviewed lately, e.g. Burn, Omega Balance, Nature wants us to be fat, or The End of Craving.

The Starch Solution feels significantly “dumbed down” as if it’s mainly targeting people who don’t know much and don’t want to know much about nutrition. It also is about 40% recipes by pages, and tbh as a current starch-eater I was not impressed by those.

But, credit where credit is due: McDougall gets some key points right (avoid PUFA despite them being plant based), and this book and others like it are the entire foundation of what the HCLF people in r/SaturatedFat, and probably most modern high-carbers or vegetarians/vegans are doing.

The Author

McDougall introduces himself as a “larger-than-life, type-A personality.” For whatever reason, he had a stroke at age 18 - extremely uncommon and tragic, of course. Somehow he convinced himself that the stroke was due to his “rich diet” full of meats and dairy. How, somehow, nobody else gets strokes at 18 years of age despite eating the same high-meat, high-dairy SAD diet doesn’t seem to occur to him.

He comes off as a very ideological movement vegan, even if he never outright says it. That is, he never claims to be a vegan, or that you, the reader, should be vegan. But there’s a chapter on how cow farts destroy the climate, and every time he mentions actual vegans, he commends them for being so morally righteous. He also worked for several years at a Seventh Day Adventist hospital in Napa, California, and they are apparently vegetarians, which he thought was a pretty good fit.

John McDougall. Photo from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._McDougall

He also has an entire chapter in this book titled “Confessions of a Fish Killer” in which he admits to having enjoyed fishing & eating fish in the past, for which he seems to be deeply ashamed.

Labeled “vegan” or not, it appears from the book that he does not eat ANY animal products, including honey. He even tells an anecdote in which he is served a beyond-meat style soy hamburger that tastes so much like real meat that he is disgusted and leaves the restaurant, not having finished his meal. Even the taste of meat disgusts him now. (I say now, but he died in 2024.)

He claims that all animal foods are, inherently, literal poisons:

Meat, poultry, fish, seafood, milk, and eggs are a slower type of poison [than E. Coli or salmonella], but they are every bit as dangerous as the ones that let you know right away you have made a big mistake.

-Starch Solution, p. 34

Overall he has an extremely zealous vibe, and that alone puts all his claims into question.

But given all this, and with a huge grain of salt, can we learn something from McDougall?

The Rich Diet

I’ll admit the word “rich” in nutrition has always irked me. It always struck me as a word only used by boomers, and they always just seemed to mean “fat” but in a negative connotation.

But “rich” is a positive word! Who wants to be poor? Would you want to eat a poor diet?

McDougall uses it constantly, pretty much as a synonym with “Standard American Diet,” the way some modern nutrition scientists will call the SAD a “high-fat diet” when it’s only about 37% fat.

Maybe there is some sort of vegan-communist connection and “rich” actually means “bad” to him.

In any case, he makes basically the exact same error that many ketards make: he went from the SAD somewhere else in the swamp triangle, and just “getting off the X” is of benefit almost no matter which way you go:

Karb Russet in Escape from SAD

If you start out at the SAD, pretty much the most unhealthy swamp composition known to man, everywhere you go is better. Follow the blue arrow, and become a ketard. Follow the red arrow, and become a protein/starvation bro. Follow the yellow arrow, and you might become a vegan or maybe just a HCLFer.

These people move off the SAD and see their health improve, and so they extrapolate that vector and assume it’s the entire causal relationship.

If removing some animal products/fat from the SAD made you healthy, CLEARLY animal products and fat are the cause of all disease.

If removing carbs from the SAD made you healthy, CLEARLY carbs are the cause of all disease.

If removing either carbs or fat in favor of protein made you healthy, CLEARLY the solution is to eat less carolies, which are the cause of all disease.

But of course we know this to be myopic, which is the entire point of Denise Minger’s great article In Defense of Low Fat: it was aimed at ketards, telling them to PLEASE accept the reality that lots of people, historically, have done fine eating insane amount of carbs. Including McDougallites!

I wish somebody had opened McDougall’s eyes on this like Minger did for me and many other disillusioned ketards.

So.. who dunnit?

Throughout the book, McDougall references the “rich diet” or “a diet dominated by meat, dairy, fat and processed foods” or a diet rich in “animal and vegetable fats” - wait, what?!

Yes, that’s right. John McDougall is EXPLICITLY against seed oils. He thinks all fat is bad, including polyunsaturated fats from seed oils and even olive oil. He explicitly says that the Mediterranean Diet is healthy IN SPITE, not because of, olive oil.

Say what you want, he is consistent in his hatred for fats.

After the typical intro/biopic part of the book, I was curious to see what exact food components or mechanisms he blames that make animal products (and vegetable oils!) into literal poisons. Luckily, he explains it quite explicitly in a chapter called Five Major Poisons Found in Animal Foods, starting on page 33:

1. Protein

2. Fat

3. Cholesterol

4. Methionine (a sulfuric amino acid)

5. Dietary acids (as in, pH levels)

Protein

McDougall seems to think that excess protein is inherently bad. This is a position I’m not too far from believing myself. Of course, the devil is in the details: what makes it “excess protein?”

Like many vegans, he argues that the actual protein requirements in humans are absurdly low, and you couldn’t give modern Americans a diet that only contains the RDA levels of protein (~8%). It would simply be so unpalatable that everyone in your study would drop out. Certainly, it would be near impossible to go below the required intake. The average American eats double the RDA at 16% protein.

I agree with that. I have to go to extreme lengths to restrict protein to 6% of TEE on my ex150 heavy cream diet, to the point that people don’t believe me when I tell them what I eat.

Even just eating most starches plain, e.g. rice, wheat, or potatoes, will net you 7-13% protein, depending on the starch. Bread flour is commonly 13% protein. If you eat even a small amount of meat, beans, or lentils on top of that, you’re easily into SAD territory of around 16%.

Imagine trying to run a study in which people could ONLY eat white rice and vegetables, no legumes, no meat, no cheese, no flour products. How many people would stick to that diet? That diet would be higher in protein than the RDA requirements.

Now I’m not quite convinced that eating high amounts of protein is always bad for everybody. Maybe it’s conditional, e.g. on genetics, or on some other metabolic dysfunction.

The anecdotes in people bear this out: lots of people can eat infinity protein and never get fat or diabetic from it. But for some people, about 30% in my estimation, some level of protein restriction (vs. the SAD level of ~16%) is required to be metabolically healthy.

Now it could be that we just have different protein genetics. Or maybe it’s scumbag linoleic acid from seed oils again, messing with our protein metabolism? I’m not sure yet.

McDougall, though, is sure. Not only are excess levels of protein bad, but especially those from animal sources!

And that’s because they’re “rich” in..

Methionine

Methionine is one of the sulfuric amino acids, along with cysteine and cystine (I think one of those is a precursor to the other).

I have previously speculated about certain amino acids being worse than others, mostly with a focus on BCAAs, the branched-chain amino acids.

But SAAs, sulfuric amino acids, have also been examined by some people, and I’ve long had them pointed out separately in the Foodulator:

For all we know, it might really just be one specific amino acid, or one specific class, that causes whatever issues are resolved by “protein restriction.” Lamming Lab’s studies seem to clearly indicate that they can prevent & even reverse “high-fat diet” induced obesity and diabetes by restricting just BCAAs, and even just isoleucine & valine, 2 of the 3 BCAAs, with the major effect coming from isoleucine restriction.

It’s just really hard to restrict specific amino acids in real-world diets for humans, because most foods contain amino acids in very similar ratios. They largely vary only by maybe 10-20% is my understanding, so you can’t go high-protein but low-methionine by e.g. eating only a certain type of meat, or plant.

Lamming Lab manipulates the mice’s amino acid intake by taking out all protein and adding back a custom amino acid mix. To do this in humans, you could eat almost no real food and would have to make up the bulk of your food, or at least protein intake, from protein powder supplements.

I’ve tried this, and it was nasty as heck. I didn’t even make it 2 weeks. The amino acids all have very different smells and flavors. Glycine is sweet, but some of them are the most nasty flavor I’ve ever tasted. Truly gag-inducing. I suppose that’s why many protein powders are sweetened and flavored beyond all belief: you couldn’t get them down otherwise.

Of course you could make your custom amino acid mix and dump a bunch of sweeteners & flavors in there, and then run that experiment - at this point, I haven’t done that. Eating a “real food” diet low in protein, like ex150, is easy & enjoyable enough for me.

Trying to validate the methionine theory, like the BCAA theory, is tricky. The amino acids are not at all equally represented in most real foods, and there is also the total protein vs. relative protein issue.

For example, white rice has more methionine PER PROTEIN than beef, but beef obviously has much more protein PER CAROLIES. Which one is it? Or should we compare by weight?

To give you an idea, white rice has 0.2%kcal from methionine but 2.4% of its protein, and ground beef has 0.8% of its kcals but only 1.8% of its protein.

If total methionine intake is the problem, we should prefer the rice, which has 1/4th the methionine. If it’s the ratio of methionine to some other amino acids, maybe beef is better?

But then again this would technically only apply directly to a 100% beef carnivore diet vs. a 100% rice vegan diet. Most people aren’t doing either, certainly the SAD is not near either. What does that mean for a diet of say 1 portion of beef a day, or every other day, with the majority of the diet made of something else? Because that’s much closer to the SAD than either of these extremes.

All in all, I’m pretty open to the methionine hypothesis, but I think we need a lot more studies and experiments to figure out what exactly is happening. Is it the total amount of methionine, or its ratio to another amino acid? I would argue that we can’t even answer that in mouse studies at this point, and certainly not in humans.

In addition, is McDougall’s Starch Solution diet really the best way to avoid methionine?

For example, on a 100% rice diet of 3,000kcal, you’d get 1.3g of methionine (0.2% of kcals), whereas a 100% heavy cream diet of 3,000kcal would only give you .5g (0.1% of kcals). So is ex150.. twice as good at avoiding methionine as his starch diet is?

Out of all of McDougall’s claims, the protein/methionine one is the one I find most believable.

Fat

The next claim is that fat is bad, per se. There are lots of pretty absurd comments about fat as a nutrient. If you believe McDougall, humans were never eating fat, should never eat fat, and fat is literally not a human food.

All animal foods cause illness when consumed in amounts typically found in the Western diet. Why? Primarily because they are the wrong foods for humans.

-Starch Solution, p. 38

This is clearly bonkers. Before and during the rise of the modern diabesity epidemic, many Western people ate lots of fat, even if it wasn’t pure keto. Our grandparents kept dairy cows and ate tallow and lard and butter and milk and cheese. The “Standard American Diet” was mixed macro as far back as America has existed as a country, and before that it was just the Standard European Diet. It might have been lean when times were bad, because meat & dairy were somewhat of a luxury at times after the agricultural revolution.

But even directionally it doesn’t make sense: our obesity rate has just about doubled in the 25 years since 2000, and we now consider the America of 1970 to be comically lean. Yet our total fat intake hasn’t gone up considerably since then, and certainly, not equally: if anything, the only fat that has gone up in our consumption was polyunsaturated fat from seed oils, sometimes mediated by us feeding it to chickens & pigs and getting it from their meat.

Beef consumption has remained constant or slightly declined since we’ve tracked. Pork has been stable. The only meat that has gone up is poultry, which is extremely lean:

This idea that people were only healthy on low-fat diets & fat is inherently unhealthy is the same “time frame compression” fallacy as the “thrifty gene” nonsense-hypothesis, which claims that humans evolved to gorge and overeat because hunter gatherers experienced famine.

Cool story bro, but then how come my grandparents always had a stocked fridge & were lean their whole lives? How come obesity has doubled since 2000? I don’t recall the Great Famine of the late 1990s and early 2000s, and I was around.

And I don’t recall the low-fat days back then either: my grandparents would eat lots of starch, yes. Typically in the form of bread or pasta and yes even legumes. But every single slice of bread was slathered in butter, and typically it was topped with cold cuts or cheese, often both. Cream cheese was extremely common, as was drinking milk, gallons a week. They surely weren’t doing keto, but they also weren’t doing low-fat. I’d estimate that they ate nearly the exact macro distribution that the modern SAD has of about 37% kcals from fat, 47% from carbs, and the rest (16%) protein. Maybe it was a little less protein, because the big macro difference I would estimate is that my grandparents almost never ate big pieces of meat like steak. Maybe protein was down to 12%. Going much lower is difficult on a starch diet, because even some bread flours have 13%, and most starches, like rice, are about 10%.

Clearly, “fat” didn’t do it.

But I do have to give credit to McDougall for pointing out PUFAs and specifically “vegetable oils” which he hates just as much as he hates those “rich” animal fats:

Meat, dairy, animal fats, and vegetable oils lead to excess weight gain and illness.

-Starch Solution, page 21

We all know that vegetable oils, like olive oil, protect us from heart disease… right? That may not be the case. [..] In fact, the Mediterranean diet promotes health in spite of olive oil, not because of it.

-Starch Solution, p. 135

Fun fact: unsurprisingly, he also hates omega-3 oils, claiming that the alleged health benefits of supplementing them are non-existent at best, and they probably have a negative effect.

Cholesterol

He says that we don’t need to eat any cholesterol, as the body can just produce it when needed. It’s true that the body can synthesize cholesterol, but biological pathways have rate limits, and I’m not convinced there is no situation in which you could be in a sub-optimal cholesterol state if you eat near-zero of it.

Maybe it’s fine, maybe it’s genetic, maybe you should eat some. Given that long-term vegans rarely look healthy, I’d err on the side of caution here. But it might not be the cholesterol making the vegans unhealthy.

But then McDougall claims that “excess” cholesterol “accumulates” in the skin, tendons, and arteries, giving us heart disease, cancer and other diseases.

I would posit that there is zero evidence for any of this; normal, physiological amounts of cholesterol intake (aka from food, not injected) are clearly inherently harmless in almost all humans.

The whole idea that foods containing cholesterol are unhealthy has been dropped even by most vegans/mainstream low-saturated-fat people a long time ago.

Even the modern “nutrition experts” ranting for PUFAs and against saturated fat no longer claim that eating cholesterol raises your blood cholesterol, exactly because your body can manufacture its own, and therefore simply adjusts endogenous production when cholesterol from food intake changes.

I think McDougall is just sticking to an old paradigm here, and he needed to come up with 5 factors.

Dietary acids

This theory posits that animal foods are too acidic on the pH scale, forcing the body to counter-act this by leeching valuable minerals from e.g. the bones to make up for it and keep the pH constant.

I have heard this hypothesis, but nobody I know takes it very seriously. There are just too many examples of people doing very well on incredibly high-animal food diets like keto and carnivore.

Specifically, McDougall claims that this will cause your body to leech calcium from your bones and causes osteoporosis, which is why milk is bad for your bones akshually.

But I’ve tested above-average bone density every single DEXA after a decade of keto, including years of 90% animal fat ex150. And I don’t lift weights or exercise regularly, and haven’t for the vast majority of that time. Shouldn’t the trend show up at some point?

I think the whole pH thing is probably just wrong, or at least not a major factor. Or, possibly, it’s another one of those genetic variance things: maybe if you’re a beefy Yamnaya genetically, drinking lots of dairy is great for your bones. Maybe it’s not if you come from a line of ten thousand years of soybean farmers.

How do McDougall’s 5 horsemen hold up?

1. Protein: probably true for ~30% of people

2. Methionine: might well be the reason for 1., he’s not the only one making this claim. For all I know it’s true. But not very actionable unless you want to live off custom protein powders for the rest of your life.

3. Fat: false for SFAs and MUFAs, probably true for PUFAs (mostly linoleic acid)

4. Cholesterol: probably completely wrong

5. Dietary acids/pH level: probably completely wrong

McDougall has a good idea of “satiety”

I’m honestly struggling a bit to not disagree with the guy on everything, but I’ll say I was impressed with his take on satiety, “full” vs “satisfied, and ideas like “eating less” to lose fat.

I didn’t see any specific hypothesis as to why our internal satiety signals or body fat signals wouldn’t work or how his diet fixes them, but he has lots of small comments all over the place clarifying that this isn’t about eating less or restricting the amount of food you eat, but instead fixing WHAT you eat, which in turn will fix your satiety and appetite.

Here are some of my favorite quotes to illustrate this point:

The hunger drive keeps us alive. You cannot fool hunger by pushing yourself away from the table, putting down your fork between bites, eating from a smaller plate, or counting calories.

-Starch Solution, p. 21

“Enjoy your food, but eat less.” That may work well as a sound bite, but is it advice people can and will follow? If we were all so easily able to control the quantity of food we put into our mouths, would we see food continually being supersized into jumbo and colossal portions? Would so many people be overweight?

-Starch Solution, p. 65

100% agreed. Maybe THE mystery of obesity in my opinion: how can fat people even exist? We clearly have a built-in sense of satiety, and it used to work much better in 2000, in 1970, and so on. “Muh hunter gatherers had famine” doesn’t explain this fact away, and McDougall recognizes the reality that SOMETHING is breaking our metabolism and satiety signals this way.

I just disagree with him on who exactly the culprit is.

The specifics of the Starch Solution Diet

If you’ve read so far, or you know about HCLF from e.g. the r/SaturatedFat subreddit, you probably have a very good idea what the Starch Solution diet is.

Heck, it’s in the name, isn’t it.

The cardinal rule of the Starch Solution is that you must center the food on your plate around starches, adding color and flavor with nonstarchy vegetables and fruits.

-Starch solution, p. 189

You largely eat ad-lib starches, preferably from “whole grain” ones that are the least processed. Colorful non-starchy vegetables are also fine in unlimited quantities, given that they are (nearly) fat-free. I.e. no avocados.

Not just “vegan”

Overall I’d have to congratulate McDougall for not falling into the “mostly vegan” trope. While he is a vegan and clearly thinks it’s superior, he explicitly states that a vegan diet is NOT enough to stay healthy:

Yet, like the vast majority of Americans [..] who follow a Western diet, most vegans continue to get the bulk of their calories from fat and protein.

-Starch Solution, p. 145

He recognizes that there are plenty of plant foods not fit for regular human consumption.

In one anecdote he describes a vegan intern back in his hospital days, who ate a diet of mostly Coca Cola and potato chips while working long shifts. This intern was overweight and unhealthy, and had very bad skin, despite being quite young.

No seed oils!

[Avoid meticulously] Vegetable oils, including olive, corn, flaxseed, canola, and safflower

-Starch Solution, p. 189

You heard the man.

No nuts & seeds

There’s an entire subchapter called “Nuts and Seeds are too rich for every day” (p. 137).

..eat rich foods like nuts, seeds, minimally processed soy products [..] in moderation, if at all.

-Starch Solution, p. 212

Careful with fake soy foods

Natto ok, impossible burgers not. Don’t eat “processed junk food” just cause it’s vegan.

Stay away from supplements

McDougall is inherently skeptical of supplements, and I agree. “Just in case” might just as well be doing harm, as you don’t know if any of these chemicals (yes, vitamins & minerals are chemicals too) don’t have negative effects on you above certain levels.

Salt & sugar are ok as condiments

Salting & sweetening your food with sugar to make it more palatable is perfectly ok with McDougall. He is not a Peater, and doesn’t even seem to consider the idea of getting the majority of your carolies from sugar. He states that you couldn’t possibly eat enough fruit to live off sustainably, and I suspect his “whole foods first” paradigm prevents him from even considering refined sugar as a staple food source.

He does warn you not to overdo the refined sugar, e.g. in fruit juices or dried fruit, if you can’t seem to lose weight, or if you have elevated triglycerides despite being on the Starch Solution.

In short, it’s a starch diet, not a sugar diet, hence the name.

Eat ad-lib

This is my favorite part of his entire diet; the acknowledgement that starving yourself is not a long-term strategy. If you can’t eat ad-lib, you haven’t fixed it.

I also love the distinction of full AND satisfied. You’ll certainly feel full on a starch-based diet from all the volume and fiber, but being painfully bloated yet starving is a very common experience of mine in the past.

The people who use “full” as a synonym for “satiated” often literally cannot understand this distinction, but if you’ve experienced it, it’s a world of difference.

Being able to tell the difference and even explicitly mentioning and explaining it is a huge sign in favor of any diet guru, if you ask me.

Fat-free sauces/seasonings are great

Use fat-free seasonings and sauces generously to add variety to your meals and make them more interesting.

-Starch Solution, p. 189

Foods to eat sparingly

McDougall has a list of foods that aren’t exactly forbidden, but they could hold up your progress due to being too refined, or too fatty:

• Avocados

• Dried fruit

• Flours (even whole grain)

• Fruit & vegetable juices

• Nuts & nut butters

• Seeds

• Simple sugars (Peaters hardest hit!)

If we go by this, my current ex150hclf diet is pretty suboptimal: I eat most of my starches in the form of white/whole grain flour bread, white rice, and pasta (made from flour). Pretty much the only starch I eat not on this list are the rice (but it’s refined white rice!) and oats?

That’s it, that’s the diet. The name Starch Solution really does sum it up well: is it a starch or nonstarchy, nonfatty vegetable? Have at it. If not, danger Will Robinson!

How does the diet hold up?

Now I’m not currently doing the exact Starch Solution diet. And, frankly, I likely never will. Although you could argue that my ex_rice and ex_plainrice diets would fit exactly into the Starch Solution pattern. But I’ve only done these for 30 days at a time, partly because they were so extreme and monotonous.

But it seems pretty fair to judge the diet by 1. the causal hypotheses, 2. the plan as outlined, and 3. directional trends.

By directional trends I mean: if I go from e.g. ex150 closer towards the Starch Solution diet, what trends do I see? If McDougall was right about everything, I should see at least partial improvements as I reduce fat and protein, and move towards starch.

Frankly, I think that McDougall largely misses the point because of ideological blinders, but his diet is strict enough and distinct enough from other movement-vegan diets that it can still work quite well for a lot of people when coming from the SAD or other high-PUFA, high-protein, swampy diets.

Does the plan lead to success?

The Starch Solution diet plan likely works pretty well for many people, and I think it’s because of this:

1. Very strict & explicit avoidance of polyunsaturated fats, due to strictly avoiding ALL fats

2. Exiting the metabolic swamp and ending up nearly fat-free, or in “carbosis”

3. A relatively low (vs. SAD) protein content ensures you’re restricting protein to a degree, even if not super aggressively

Coming from the SAD, this is “getting off the X” and will work for most people. And that’s probably why we do see quite a number of success stories from his followers.

Of course, all of this is completely orthogonal to “animal foods.”

Now for some extreme cases, like myself, the level of protein restriction probably is not enough. You’d have to lean heavy into sugar to achieve this with carbs, or you go the keto route with heavy cream, like I did on ex150.

In addition, if you were to do a “dirty” version of the Starch Solution and cheat regularly or “go easy” on some of the strict rules, you could go easy on the wrong ones and miss all the good parts.

For example, I think all the “avoid animal foods” parts are wrong, while the “avoid PUFA” and “restrict protein” are load bearing. So if you do a 100% vegan version of this but allow yourself some seed oil sauces and some higher-protein plant foods like tofu or even just legumes, this diet might not work for you - as is doesn’t seem to work for me.

Directional trends

The Starch Solution likely won’t do much for someone already seeing success on a super strict esoteric internet diet like carnivore, or ex150. Compared to the SAD, many diets are an improvement. But the Starch Solution is significantly higher in protein and methionine than ex150.

That’s why it’s helpful to see the directional trends.

My classic example is that both “going low-carb” and “going low-fat” is a common success pattern when coming off the SAD, as Denise Minger observed when she coined the “metabolic swamp.”

But that doesn’t mean that carbs or fat were the problem - it was the mixture.

If McDougall was right, I should’ve gained even more fat when I was nearly 300lbs and went on the 90% animal fat, heavy cream-based ex150 diet. Yet I lost about 85lbs in total.

Going from heavy cream to a low-fat beef, no-cream, starch-based diet like I’m currently doing, I should see massive improvements, despite still eating some animal foods in the form of about 150g of lean beef per day.

Yet the opposite is true: this diet seems worse in literally every respect compared to ex150, including subjective well-being, digestion, glucose levels, satiety, and body fat.

A McDougall True Scotsman might say that “duh, you’re still eating animal flesh!” Ok bro, cool story. But surely removing the NINETY PERCENT ANIMAL FAT and replacing it with starch should at least move me in the right, not the wrong, direction?

It’s similar with carnivore, by the way. Doing “Standard American Beef Carnivore” I do significantly worse than on heavy-cream based, low-PUFA keto. The carnivores claim this is because I’m not strict enough.. but shouldn’t I at least move in the right, not the wrong, direction?

Unfortunate Proof-By-Made-Up-Anecdotes

One very unfortunate trend that many normie diet books do is what I’d consider clearly made-up anecdotes and casual references to pseudo-scientific assertions to “backfill” the hypothesis being made.

The last “real, normie” diet books I’ve read were all keto & carnivore books 5-15 years ago, and they were also full of this nonsense. I’m talking throwing out casual things like “my grandma always said..”

In the case of low-carbers, grandma would always say “Don’t eat so much bread, it’ll make you fat!” thereby bolstering the low-carb hypothesis.

Of course, McDougall’s anecdotes are the opposite: everyone always knew instinctively that “rich” animal foods were making you fat and sick, dontcha know it! If only we listened to the wisdom of the elders… THESE elders, that is, not those dumb elders from the low-carb books!

There are also many absurd and bizarre claims that I can hardly explain by squinting, going clearly against common scientific or historic knowledge.

For example, McDougall claims that hunter gatherers eat/ate a diet largely plant-based, and largely starch-based. Yet we know of many modern hunter gatherer groups eating moderate to high-fat diets, high-protein diets, and generally high animal-fat diets. The Massai are thriving on a diet of meat, dairy, and blood. The Eskimos thrived on a high-fat, mostly animal diet.

And historic records of fossilized human hunter-gatherer remains are obvious: the percentage of protein coming from animal sources was absurdly high, putting us clear into the “hypercarnivore” category.

You’d have to put on a set of very comprehensive ideological blinders to miss all this if you dedicate your life to diet & nutrition.

Here are some more choices quotes that I consider absurd:

We humans, on the other hand, are very inefficient at converting carbohydrate to fat;
we don’t do it under normal conditions.

-Starch Solution, p. 24

This is something Peaters also like to claim. Maybe it’s true under “normal conditions,” but in a country of 45% obesity and 75% overweight, where an estimated 94% of people are metabolically unwell, it’s irrelevant. CLEARLY modern Americans are very capable of wrecking themselves using DNL (de-novo lipogenesis) from crabohydrates in their diet.

This is easy to try yourself, I’ve gained a bunch of fat very rapidly on a near-zero fat diet of starch + sugar/fruit.

I am currently gaining weight on a HCLF diet containing <15g of fat per day! (Yes, I’m up about 25-30lbs in 2 months of doing this lol.)

Maybe he is right “under normal conditions,” but in a country with a 75% overweight and 45% obesity rate, it’s fair to say that “normal conditions” don’t apply. What makes the circumstances “not normal?”

Anyway, more gems from the book:

..which causes a state of illness (with the common outcome of ketosis).

-Starch Solution, p. 26

Lol GTFO.

To the careful observer, people following low-carbohydrate diets look and act sick, too.

-Starch Solution, p. 26

Oh yea? Ask normal people what they think vegans look like. I’ll refrain from commenting on McDougall’s own appearance because I don’t want to speak ill of the dead.

All animal foods provide essentially the same nutrition
and have roughly the same impact on your health.

-Starch Solution, p. 38

What in the heck?! “Animal foods” range from lean turkey breast to butter, which are nearly 100% protein vs. 100% fat. I suppose you could argue that there are nearly no crabohydrates in animal foods, with the exception of milk, which has some lactose. But the "nutrition” of “animal foods” clearly covers a wide variety, and making a broad statement likes this is total nonsense.

A diet dominated by meat, dairy, fat, and processed food.

-Starch Solution, p. 45

One of these is not like the others…

..the key beneficiaries of these policies [subsidies] are the beef, poultry, egg, and dairy industries..

-Starch Solution, p. 61

The low-carb people of course claim the opposite: government subsidies unduly benefit the corn, soy, wheat, and sugar industry. Big Ag is out to get you!

I suppose both sides are right here, both big carb and big animal food like their subsidies.

On low-salt diets:

First, almost no one has been able to follow this advice [to avoid salt]
because a low-salt diet is simply not palatable.

-Starch Solution, p. 172

Speak for yourself. I’ve not added salt for about 5 years now, and have been actively avoiding it even in sauces and diet sodas for 6-12 months, yet I see no lack of palatability. This seems a common issue in the short-term, but it resolves after a handful of weeks. Surely if you can adopt a vegan diet, you can wean yourself off sodium in 2-4 weeks?

Type 2 diabetes is a direct result of obesity.

-Starch Solution p. 179

This is a somewhat common mainstream view that’s always been clearly false. There is overlap between obese and diabetic people, but the overlap is much smaller than you’d imagine. There exist large populations of both obese people with perfectly normal blood glucose regulation, and type 2 diabetics that are not obese, sometimes not even overweight.

This seems to largely be dictated by genetics, with Asian and Indian people having the “ability” to get diabetic without being visibly obese much more often. But even among other people, the overlap is nowhere near 100%.

Some have speculated that obesity is an adaptive trait, allowing you to avoid the toxic blood glucose levels of diabetes by converting the glucose into fat and storing it away “safely” for later.

I don’t know if this is true, but it’s clearly more complicated than “obesity → diabetes.” Personally, I believe that obesity and diabetes are simply 2 different potential outcomes of the same root cause, and which one you’re more prone to is largely dictated by your genetics.

Some people try to mask the obvious fallacy of “obesity → diabetes” by using the “personal fat threshold,” which says that obesity causes diabetes, but at which levels depends on the person. This is just another way of saying “the correlation is very weak” and not to be treated with any seriousness, similar to the Thrifty Gene Hypothesis or “Protein Leverage did Obesity.” Doesn’t hold up to real world data.

Cleaning up after a plant-based, low-fat meal is relatively easy and cheap. What takes the most soap and elbow grease to scrub? Fats and oils.

-Starch Solution, p. 206

As someone who just did a decade of keto, including over 3 years of 90% animal fat, this is just simply not true. I’m currently spending WAY more time (and soap) cleaning up after all the starches on ex150hclf.

If you cook with a lot of fat, nothing sticks. You might have to rinse out the fat, but hot water will do the trick.. or you just leave your pan fatty & greasy for the next meal, a time-honored tradition with cast iron cookware.

Drinking heavy cream, of course, requires no clean-up at all.

The Recipes: Not Impressed

I hadn’t read a “normal” diet book in forever, so I was somewhat surprised to find the real book ended about 60% through, and the remainder of the thick (rich!) book was padded with recipes.

Now I’m not one for mainstream recipes in general, but even so, I skimmed the ~130 pages of recipes and I was.. not impressed, to say the least.

There is definitely an art & science to cooking starches, and to cooking low-fat. I learned & mentioned some previously for my HCLF experiment. One skill that comes to mind is browning lean beef without the use of added fat, which is significantly more difficult.

You’ll just generally have to boil and steam more, and fry less. I wrote about this a while ago in Cook like an Engineer.

But this ain’t that. This is just largely reproducing common foods with vegan products, many of them processed crap ingredients.

A large number of the recipes call for oat milk, almond milk, soy milk, cashew milk, rice milk, or some variety of tofu.

In addition, like most mainstream recipe books, nearly all of them have excessive amounts of ingredients and steps. I’m not keeping track & managing the freshness of 10 different vegetables just for flavor & colors in my food. I certainly won’t keep 5 different types of faux nut milks on hand just to create a shitty facsimile of heavy cream.

If you’re going to eat a low-fat, plant-based diet, and you can’t make it palatable without imitating the real thing, maybe rethink your diet.

Conclusion: Don’t bother reading

I think that McDougall’s hypotheses about what causes metabolic disease are largely wrong, and largely because of his ideology blinding him to reality.

But as a strategy, you could really do worse. The simple fact that he advocates against ALL FATS in their entirety will make the Starch Solution one of the lowest-PUFA diets you can imagine.

It also advocates mild protein restriction vs. the SAD, which will benefit some percentage of people (I would guess 30%). But it’s not easy or even possible to restrict protein to the degree I do it on ex150, so I doubt it will ever work for me, even in the complete vegan version. Most starches just have too much protein; you’d have to rely exclusively on refined cassava flour or similar.

But you’re also cutting out a TON of foods that aren’t just healthy & delicious, but maybe even vital.

Again, I don’t know what it is about long-term veganism, but I’ve yet to see a healthy one. The long-term vegans I knew all looked like skeletons, and not in a good way. I wouldn’t have traded health status with them even when I was 300lbs, and certainly not now after discovering ex150.

Maybe there’s a way to do healthy veganism, but why bother? If you stick to beef and dairy, you’re saving far more lives instead of starches or vegetables. By my calculation, my beef consumption kills 1 cow every 7 years. Every loaf of bread I bake probably kills hundreds of birds, thousands of rodents, and millions of insects in the field. A pound of flour requires several square feet of wheat. Do you know how many creatures live in every square foot of a field? And these are not “accidental crop deaths,” farmers have perfected methods of killing rodents and insects in their fields for millennia. This is targeted species-cide inherent in the growing of crops.

I therefore continue my recommendation: if you’ve always been enjoying & feeling well on starches, eating a mostly-starch, low-linoleic acid diet is great. I’d recommend you eat SOME beef and dairy to evade the Vegan Skeletor Curse, but I couldn’t tell you what exactly causes it.

If you’ve always felt drawn to low-carb and feel much better/have an easier time keeping the body fat off doing low-carb or keto, it might be worth playing around with HCLF, but there might just be a reason you prefer low-carb.

I’m personally relieved that I can apparently function very well on a starch based diet, which was NOT the case on a sugar-based diet or a mix of the two.

Yes, I do gain fat, but otherwise it’s just not that terrible. Adding sugar was WAY worse, as were high-protein or high-PUFA diets.

So: play around with it, see if you enjoy it, especially if you’ve spent a significant time doing low-carb. It might not be that all carbs are equally bad for you.

On the other hand, you might just have subconsciously stuck to low-carb/keto/carnivore for a reason.

If the idea of rice & beans doesn’t excite you massively, you’re probably not missing out either.