Raw starch (carbs)

[marcuspaleo]

Anyone eat raw potato or other raw starchy carbs? Im eating raw sweet potato and although it doesnt taste as good as if it were roasted, I digest it way easier (i.e. I have get no pain). Im now starting to ferment some potatos to better the digestibility and hopefully taste and texture. Anyone else do/try this? Im also going to start fermenting oats and see how they make me feel.

[PaleoPhil]

I do occasionally eat small, fresh potatoes (yellow, white, purple and red) raw.

[marcuspaleo]

I do occasionally eat small, fresh potatoes (yellow, white, purple and red) raw.

Do you find raw potatos are more digestible than cooked? Thats what im finding. I assume the same theory of "cooking destroys beneficial enzymes" applies to potatos and grains as it does meat? Sure one may need soaking, sprouting and fermenting to neutralize harmful toxins before consumption, but one also needs to neutralize the dangers of hunting and catching an animal before consuming.

[Alive]

Last year I tried fermenting raw potato pulp and ended up slightly poisoned, so that I couldn't walk straight and kept veering to one side and bumping into things! I had to stay home for the day to let my brain recover.

Now I stick to vegetables containing safe resistant starches like cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, celery, broccoli, spinach, and beans.

[marcuspaleo]

Last year I tried fermenting raw potato pulp and ended up slightly poisoned, so that I couldn't walk straight and kept veering to one side and bumping into things! I had to stay home for the day to let my brain recover.

Now I stick to vegetables containing safe resistant starches like cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, celery, broccoli, spinach, and beans.

Holy shit! Ill keep that in mind

[PaleoPhil]

Do you find raw potatos are more digestible than cooked?

Yes (and I know that contradicts the claims of Wrangham and others), though I notice that as I eat more that I get a bit of a tingling in my mouth, so I don't push it beyond that point.

[PaleoPhil]

Last year I tried fermenting raw potato pulp and ended up slightly poisoned, so that I couldn't walk straight and kept veering to one side and bumping into things! I had to stay home for the day to let my brain recover.

I haven't experienced this so far, luckily. Would you please provide more details that might help us to avoid the pitfall you experienced? How much were you eating? How did you ferment the potatoes and for how long? Thanks.

Now I stick to vegetables containing safe resistant starches like cauliflower, cabbage, carrots, celery, broccoli, spinach, and beans.

The only food that I think contains significant RS among those is beans, though the others contain other forms of prebiotics.

[Alive]

At the time I was extracting fresh potato starch by blending potatoes from my garden with water and then washing this through a sieve to separate the pulp, and then letting the starch granules settle out of the water. It seemed a waste to throw away the pulp so I fermented it, probably just a few days. Maybe the issue was that they were self growing garden potatoes harvested out of the correct season, or growing too near the surface, I would have cut any green parts off, but it could still have had higher levels of skin toxins.

I have a friend that grew up on a sheep farm and he says when he came home from school he would snack on raw potatoes with salt, and he said they were fine.

I also tried this starch granule extraction process on other plants - fat hen weed, beetroot,carrot, etc and they all had these starch granules that looked and tasted the same as the potato starch granules. From wikipedia "In photosynthesis, plants use light energy to produce glucose from carbon dioxide. The glucose is stored mainly in the form of starch granules, in plastids such as chloroplasts and especially amyloplasts."

So every plant contains resistant starch granules.

[PaleoPhil]

Were there skins in the pulp too, or just the pulp?

[PaleoPhil]

So every plant contains resistant starch granules.

Many do not contain any significant amount of RS. They contain other resistant microbiota-accessible storage carbohydrates resistant to stomach digestion, such as inulin, beta glucans and arabinogalactans. They don't get counted as carbs in calorie counts, because they aren't digested in our stomachs, and they reportedly tend to get converted into fats (SCFAs, which are easily converted into energy by our mitochondria) by the microbes, rather than carbs, so they don't function like ordinary carbs.