Your Favourite starch - and are you eating enough starch?

What is your favourite starchy food - rice, noodles, pasta, potatoes, cereals? Do they make up over a third of your diet?

All of the above (with the possible exception of cereal).
 
It's been wholegrains here pretty much all my life. The only real exception has been even my Grannie have us sandwiches. She'd even cut the crusts off for my brother if it got him to eat without issues. But my mother took the fibre fad thing very seriously because at the same time a close friend died of bowel cancer (back in the 80's). It meant fibre fibre fibre constantly for us as children. Almost every book in the house had the word fibre in the title. So at a time when skins on veg, wholegrain this, that and the other, wholemeal this, that and yet more, hadn't really been heard of, it was the norm for us. White toast became a real treat! Tie that in with her no-salt craze and you can well imagine the fun we had at meal times. Oh and the low fat, skimmed milk craze... thank you for semi skimmed milk, breakfast became vaguely edible. Better off having yogurt and a banana.

Do I eat enough of them? Probably but I really don't know. I'm conscious of eating too much bread but that's calorie watching. Lunch is limited to 75g of bread (wholemeal or whole grain or ancient grain sourdough is the norm). I'm about to sin and have a vegan cottage pie for tea. Unusual but hubby is away from home. We've even stopped eating bread with evening meal. That's apparently a hangover from the older harder days and times after WWII. Fill up on bread. Until recently, it wasn't uncommon to get through a loaf a day between 2 of us.

As for other carbs. Rice almost always is wholegrain, pasta is usually something based around pea flour for extra protein. Potatoes always have skins on, best you can do with those. Yeh, we used to eat large quantities of carbohydrates in this household, it's considerably less now.
 
According to the NHS:

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/starchy-foods-and-carbohydrates/

What is your favourite starchy food - rice, noodles, pasta, potatoes, cereals? Do they make up over a third of your diet?

Actually, I disagree, and eat well under a third of my diet as starches.

For a few years I was pretty much on the Paleo food plan - not religiously (when out I ate what I was served, and sometimes there were pizza splurges, and I did eat black beans and legumes as frequently as I did before the Paleo thing - which wasn't all that often, maybe once or so a month.

I did discover my digestive tract did and does not thrive on a semi-strict Paleo plan. So I added back in potatoes (about when the Paleo crowd decided they were fine, too), rice and quinoa. And a bit more black bean.

If a third of my diet is starchy, I rapidly gain weight. (I'm even not eating much of anything in the "dessert" category, then and now.)

However, I have no plans whatsoever to go "keto", or on that ketosis food plan.

I get the majority of my starches these days from sweet potatoes, regular Yukon gold potatoes, rice, quinoa, tapioca/cassava, buckwheat and the like. In no particular order. It's probably about 20% of my diet, perhaps somewhat less.

***

I think, and hope that this NHS advice is out of date. Current guidelines are to limit consumption of processed white starch (white bread, rice and pasta) because it breaks down into sugar very quickly, and is one of the drivers behind Western obesity. Whole grain carbs are recommended instead.

Agreed that processed white starch is (usually) not recommended.

BUT.

Most "whole wheat" products as sold on supermarket shelves is marginally better than "white wheat" products. I won't buy whole wheat bread over white bread for that reason - instead when I do buy wheat bread, I go to a dedicated bakery. Otherwise there's really no health bennies. Same with pasta - everything is stripped out whether white or brown. I am trying to move to emmer and farro wheats, and will be learning to make breads from them myself.

Rice I consider an exception - I pick up white rice for Indian or most meals, brown for Thai dishes. You just have to source for possible arsenic contaminates.
 
That's interesting - most Thai dishes I know of use white rice. Why brown for Thai but not Indian?

White rice is the most prevalent here but brown is becoming more popular. Not with the rice farmers though.
 
Is that a 'health' trend, do you think?

I don't know. It smacks of snobbery to me - brown (or black) rice is more expensive. I only eat white and yellow rice. And the yellow rice is only coloured white rice.
 
I only thought there was white and brown rice??

I understand that brown rice and black rice are the same. Just different names for this.

brown rice-s.jpg


However, there is also red rice (designer rice) which we used to grow. Only for one year though. The same year that the bottom fell out of the market!
 
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