Starches are not healthy!

I haven't got much time to write anything today, so I think I will just continue the theme of the last couple of posts thinking about low carb diets and what really constitutes a healthy diet.
I saw this post the other day which ties together the low carb/healthy eating threads with that about "science" and the need to think critically about what you are told.

This is Dr John Briffa talking about the dangers of promoting a starch based diet.

Well, if we’re going to recommend starch on the basis of their nutritional content, let’s perhaps look a bit more closely at this. For a start, most starchy carbs are actually really quite un-nutritious [1] when compared to other foodstuffs such as fruit and veg. While the starchy carbs advocated by the FSA are called food, they are actually better described as fodder.

If we’re going to recommend foods on the basis of nutrients such as iron and B-vitamins, then why not advocate meat, which contains these nutrients in abundance? And is it not possible to get our fibre from fruit of veg? (Of course it is).

But remember, it’s not just the lack of nutritional value of many starch carbs that gets my goat, but also their apparent capacity to cause chronic disease and probably shorten life. And yet the FSA continues to promote these foods as ‘healthy’!

Mark Sisson recently made the same points:

The Best Way to Get Diabetes: Follow the Diabetes Dietary Guidelines


If you want to understand diabetes, Sisson's post here is a great place to start.