Your Thoughts On A Starch Diet. Dr McDougall

I haven't seen the TED Talk, but people get obese on all kinds of diets, and people lose weight on all kinds of diets. If eating a high starch diet is satisfying to you, go for it. It wouldn't work for me and I don't like restricting any thing from my diet.

Dr. McDougall is not very highly regarded by anyone outside of the vegan community due to the accuracy and veracity of his science and claims.

I'm a lifelong Vegan and I would definitely not point you to McDougall for any scientifically sound advice.

The Ketoers say the opposite, that it is the evil carb that has made everyone get obese and sickly. The reality is this: weight loss is about calories in vs. calories out. Whether that is a high starch, high meat, high whatever diet, you will lose weight if you eat less calories than your body burns, and gain weight if you eat more than your body burns.

The truth is that society has gotten more obese as food as gotten less scarce so people eat more (more calories in), and technology has enabled us to move less (less calories out). It is a shift in the mathematical equation, not a choice of specific foods, that has caused this.

As far as being more "sickly", I'm really not sure that is true. The truth is we are now much better at diagnosing diseases, so it's not always that more people have these diseases, but that in the past we weren't able to identify them as easily. And to the extent that people get more sickly, it's largely due to the fact that we are aging as a population more. We've eradicated many of the diseases that killed people at a young age that were prevalent back in the day. Because of that, people are living longer, and as people age, they become more likely to get whole host of "sickly" conditions. Ultimately though, American life spans are the longest they've ever been.

If you want to eat a high starch diet, you certainly can. The one legitimate benefit of a diet like that is that it is likely environmentally friendly. But like any exclusionary diet, from a health perspective you would want to take care to make sure you are getting enough of the macro and micro nutrients that are not typically common in the foods on the diet. So just like Ketoers need to make sure that they get enough fiber and vitamins, someone on a starch based diet would need to make sure to get enough protein and iron in their diet.

Ultimately your weight loss will come down to taking in less calories than you burn, regardless of what you take in.