“So I was reading up on resistant starches today…”
This was not the sentence I expected to hear from my boyfriend as I was putting on my makeup for the day. He had heard the term used to describe one of the keys to the weight loss system I had started a couple days before and was curious to know exactly why that was such an important thing. The information he found, then subsequently shared with me during our morning routine, was some pretty cool stuff.
Cool Factor #1Resistant Starch has an Identity Crisis
Typically, when we eat starches (carbs), they hang out in our small intestine where they are digested and absored as glucose (sugar). However, Resistant Starch (RS) seems to have missed the memo that it was a starch and so it passes right on through to the large intestine, where our body treats it like a fiber. This is pretty cool because it can help us reach our daily fiber intake without having to resort to chewing on the cereal box after we finish our bran flakes.
Cool Factor #2Resistant Starch Mixes Things Up
Typically, your body has a particular way it likes to burn fuel to give you energy. Sugars and carbs are used up first, then, if you happen to need more, that’s when your body taps into your fat stores. This is why we don’t always see the results we want to see from dieting alone. Changing what we eat is always a good thing, but our day to day activities aren’t always active enough for our body to use up the sugar and get to burning the fat – hence the recommendation to exercise while on a weight loss program.
Then RS comes along and decides to shake things up a bit. While it’s hanging in your large intestine, it starts fermenting which then creates beneficial fatty acids. One in particular, butyrate, actually forces your body to hold off on burning carbs and instead uses fat for energy first. In fact, Prevention.com reported that “One study found that replacing just 5.4% of total carbohydrate intake with resistant starch created a 20 to 30% increase in fat burning after a meal.”
Cool Factor #3Resistant Starch Gets Full of It
If you’re like me, you’ll eat a big, yummy meal and feel absolutely stuffed. But then, 30 minutes later, you’re hankering for a snack. Why can’t we seem to get satisfied from food? Well, the answer may lie not in how much we eat, but in what we eat. RS is much denser than other fibers, so it is able to last longer in our system. Because of this, studies are being done to see just how RS has an effect on our satiety (fullness and satisfaction following a meal). In one study, participants felt significantly less hungry for the baseline of 120 minutes and more full and satisfied for the entire 180 minute test period. That’s 3 hours of not feeling hungry! No wonder they’re putting this in my weight loss system!
Resistant Starch = SuperStar(ch)!The best part about Resistant Starch is the fact that it’s readily available in foods you probably already consume. Beans, bananas, corn, brown rice… You probably don’t even have to significantly change your diet in order to start taking advantage of this fiber-boosting, fat-burning powerhouse starch.
That reminds me, I’ve got some potatoes to boil.
To your health!
Sources:http://www.prevention.com/cda/article/nature-s-fat-burning-breakthrough/296ca6b509787110VgnVCM20000012281eac____/news.voices/in.the.magazine/march.2008.issue/0/0/1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resistant_starch http://www.prweb.com/releases/2009/03/prweb2282134.htm
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