Fruitarian diets have been a passing fancy. (Apple’s co-founder, Steve Jobs, ate only fruits for a short period of his life.) Fruits are plentiful in calories because of their simple sugars, like glucose and fructose. Unfortunately, because simple sugars digest rapidly, they provide little long-term, between-meal, appetite satisfaction. This is the reason apples are never referred to as “comfort foods.”

High-fat plant foods, like nuts, seeds, olives, and avocados, are loaded with calories. Unfortunately, these calories are almost exclusively from fat.  Our appetite is insensitive to fats consumed because of the lack of regulatory feedback mechanisms. From fats we receive no reliable signals that we have eaten enough and now it is time to stop. As a result, nuts and seeds consumed at one’s pleasure translate into excess weight gain.

The appetite is highly sensitive to sugars, especially sugars found in the complex forms, called starches. A precise feedback mechanism between the appetite and sugars insures satisfaction without overconsumption. This is why rice, corn, beans, potatoes, breads, and pastas are known as “comfort foods” and the reason why historically people who have followed starch-based diets have always been trim and hardy. (Remember: rice and Asians, corn and Mayans, potatoes and Incans, wheat and Egyptians.)

To Move Forward, Think Starch

The third and most important category of calorie-sufficient foods from the plant kingdom is starch. Scientists freely use the word “starch,” and the scientific journal Starch is where articles about the food and commercial uses of this basic foodstuff are published. So why do lay people shun this proper verbiage when describing their diets?

In an effort to sanitize and separate this noun from the laundry room, “starch” became known as a “complex carbohydrate” in 1977 during the writing of “The Dietary Goals of the US.” That was a big mistake. When was the last time you ate a plateful of complex carbohydrate? The effect of this name change was that the proper word for the primary source for calories consumed throughout all of human history—starch—vanished from our dietary vocabulary. The confusion that followed contributed to the doubling of obesity and diabetes over the past half-century.

For more than 35 years I have referred to the McDougall Diet as “starch-based with the addition of green and yellow vegetables and fruits.” Based on my extensive medical experience, your goal when asked, “What do you call yourself,” should be to answer: a “starchivore,” or a “starchitarian.”