The Miracle Fat-Burning Power of Resistant Starch!

I have just ordered a bag of resistant starch on the Internet. I thought I had a can of it at home—the stuff I use to spray my shirts with when I’m ironing—but it turns out resistant starch is (according to the March issue of Prevention) “the new power nutrient,” not a laundry product. It’s a carb that helps the body burn fat.

There is, of course, a website.

The nice people above look like they might be admitting you to an upscale mental institution, but they work for, or are supposed to look like they work for, a company called National Starch and Chemical, which is a very solid-sounding kind of name, isn’t it?

National Starch makes a lot of glues as well as things like starch-based packing peanuts and medical-glove dusting powders (we all know that somebody makes this kind of stuff, but we rarely know who). In the food area, National Starch makes binders, coatings, mouthfeel-improvement additives, and such. And something called Hi-maize, which is a dietary fiber milled from hi-RS corn that is grown in Australia of all places.

There is, of course, a Hi-maize website. For fun you can read it in Swedish:

So what is this “nya generationen kostfiber,” you ask. It’s a naturally occurring starch—i.e., carbohydrate—which resists digestion in the small intestine (where the devil’s own carb, sugar, is quickly digested) and is fobbed off on the large intestine, where it is broken down through fermentation. Hard-to-digest fibers (and resistant starches) that sail through to the fermentation tank have “a variety of physiological effects in (and emanating from) the large intestine.” Unfortunate word choice, that “emanating,” but it’s not news that fiber is good for your gut and may even play a role in cancer prevention.

But the “new power nutrient” fuss concerns evidence (National Starch cites one such study) that RS can “increase your body’s fat-burning ability by 20-25%.”

Now, any veteran of the low-carb wars knows that the body doesn’t like to burn its own fat for fuel until it runs out of the more easily burned sugars that are derived from dietary carbs. Atkins and related diets starve the body of carbs to force fat-burning.

But here’s a carb that may actually do the angels’ work of burning fat! That news was enough to make one dietitian tell Prevention that “resistant starch has the potential to become the next hot nutrition trend.”

Uh, good luck with that. At the very least, I think they may have to think up a better name for this stuff (which is also found in beans, cooled cooked potatoes, green bananas, and some other foods).

In the meantime I’ve got a bag of Hi-maize coming my way from the folks at King Arthur Flour. I am going to bake it into muffins and try it on the guinea pigs who work at Health.com. Resistance will be futile.

Competition Numbers:
Start date: 1/1/08
Height: 5′9½”
Start weight: 199 lbs
Latest weigh in: 2/23/08
Latest weight: 190 lbs
Weight lost: 9 lbs