The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan

Resistant starch, the last novelty on that list of ingredients, has the corn refiners particularly excited today. They’ve figured out how to tease a new starch from corn that is virtually indigestible. You would not think this is a particularly good thing for a food to be, unless of course your goal is to somehow get around the biological limit on how much each of us can eat in a year. Since the body can’t break down resistant starch, it slips through the digestive track without ever turning into calories of glucose—a particular boon, we’re told, for diabetics. When fake sugars and fake fats are joined by fake starches, the food industry will at long last have overcome the dilemma of the fixed stomach: whole meals you can eat as often or as much of as you like, since this food will leave no trace. Meet the ultimate—the utterly elastic!—industrial eater.