Welcome to the Nutrition Diva Podcast, a show where we put the latest nutrition trends

and headlines into perspective so that you can make the best choices for your own health

and well-being.

I'm your host Monica Reinegel, and today I want to bring you up to date on resistant

starches, a category of nutrients that people started paying a lot more attention to back

in the AOTS, and I first talked about this on the podcast back in 2009, and since then

there's been a lot more research on them, so we have a better understanding of how they

work in the body, and they appear to offer a variety of benefits, including improved

digestion and gut health, blood sugar regulation, weight management, reduced risk of chronic

diseases, even improved nutrient absorption.

Before we go any further though, let's back up and talk for a second about regular old

non-resistant starch.

You may recall that there are three main types of carbohydrates, sugars, starches, and fiber.

We tend to talk a lot more about sugar and fiber than we do about starch.

Starches are nothing more than long chains of glucose or sugar molecules that are glued

together with a special type of chemical bond called a covalent bond.

When you eat a starchy food, such as a potato or a bowl of oatmeal, enzymes called amylases

break these covalent bonds.

When that happens, large starch molecules turn into lots of tiny sugar molecules, which

are then absorbed into the bloodstream, and that's how starches are digested.

And one day, back when I was in fifth grade, our science teacher handed out some unsalted

saltines, and he told them to chew them up, but not swallow them.

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