Resistant Starch

[Odin]

Recently I've come across the topic of resistant starch often.
While paleo in general eschews starchy foods like potatoes resistant starch seems to be very beneficial, especially for the intestines if I remember correctly. Also many hunter/gatherer tribes seem to grow tubers like sweet potatoes and yam.
Apparently - besides supplements- one can get resistant starch by cooking potatoes for example and then letting them cool down again (the cooling down seems to produce the resistant starch).
What do you think of this and how could one get resistant starch through raw food?
Is anyone familiar with yamaimo from Japan? I think it is very similar to yam. It is eaten grated and often with raw tuna. Very delicious. Quite slimy like natto.

[Sorentus]

"incoming PaleoPhil"

[Projectile Vomit]

Odin, have you read through other resistant starch threads on this forum? There are a few. Not sure many will post to this one as they'd just be beating a dead horse.

[PaleoPhil]

lol  Yeah, my guess too is that most folks have already seen enough on the topic for a while (except maybe breaking news/studies, I suppose). There's also a huge thread on RS over at Mark's Daily Apple forum and Tatertot there is hugely patient and answers most of the many questions about RS, prebiotics and other related stuff directed to him.

[Odin]

Alright.
I couldn't remember RS being discussed here in a context of raw food, that's why I asked. But I'll search again.
I've come across the topic the first time on FreeTheAnimal.

[PaleoPhil]

Yup, I've linked to FreetheAnimal on the topic in one of the butyrate/RS/VLC threads somewhere I think.

[zaidi]

I think it would be better if we could have a separate child thread about RS (under HOT Topics), and collect all the threads and information shared by PP at that place.
All people (especially new comers) will always wonder what to think about RS from Paleo point of view.

[eveheart]

Resistant starch is definitely a paleo topic. In fact, raw paleo is the perfect platform when it comes to resistant starch, since RS "bursts" when foods are cooked or heated. RS already exists in foods, and people in the paleolithic period would definitely have ingested it in common hunter-gatherer foods.

[PaleoPhil]

Yup, and RS even predates humans. It goes back millions of years in primate diets (including H. sapiens neanderthalensis, H. sapiens sapiens, H. erectus, australopithecus, etc.) and was consumed throughout the entire history of humans, with much less being consumed in Western diets in recent years.

[Alive]

This study is interesting - in summary it says we need an acidic colon to maintain a healthy microbe colony and prevent undesirable overgrowths. The way to do this is by providing resistant starch in the diet for the microbes to convert to short chain fatty acids (making the colon acidic) and by maintaining a rapid transit of wastes through the colon so they are expelled before too much of the SCFAs can be absorbed (thereby maintaining the desired acidity).

I expect that these two aspects end up one and the same, as an acidic colon seems to encourage defecation, 'fatty acids' sound like they would be slippery, and the microbe mass creates faecal softening.

"Increasing butyrate concentration in the distal colon by accelerating intestinal transit"
http://gut.bmj.com/content/41/2/245.full.pdf