To not understand why my healthy (I think) way of eating isn't making me feel energetic and fabulous

I'm not worried about recent additions to diet. I'm saying that the reason grains cause problems is that is we aren't well adapted to cope with them and that their modern availability and quantity are significantly more different from any changes in modern proteins and fats.

Why shouldn't I eat it, nutritionally speaking? (I know people don't, but I've not looked into why. I'm not giving it up, though!)

Well of course its AI, no one talks like that and I put it in italics so its clear its not me saying it

You're veering from extreme to extreme

Eating the odd bit of rice and pearl barley is not the same as 'mainlining carbs' all night.

I love carbs. They just make me feel like crap. And I'll admit to being a carb nerd. I should write a book and get paid for it. I can call it 'Against the GRAIN!'! 😂

That looks like AI - AI is a great tool. But it doesn't weight answers by source, just volume. So I don't know its from a reputable source. But let's take it as fact, because it's like the case. People ate what there was, so they'd have eaten grain if they could. They are referring to wild grains. I know they weren't sitting down to Kit Kats and cornflakes, but the difference in nutritional content would have been vast. Processing grains is SO MUCH WORK. (I've done it). To get the modern equivalent of a cup of brown rice, takes all bloody day, and that's with some help from modern tools and I grew them in a patch in the garden, all together. I didn't have to gather it wild - Those folks were nomadic. They weren't gardening. They were picking (and probably eating) as they walked. And they likely walked all the time.

However they got their grain, it would have been autumn only. They weren't storing and carrying them before they settled down to agriculture. It would have been such a small part - Cordain et al (2000) estimates 25% of modern day hunter gather diets are made up of ALL plant carbohydrates, fruits vegetables and grains, and that would vary seasonally. Most of the time there would be no grain! 50% of their calories came from fat, the rest from various proteins, which would also have varied seasonally.

That's a low carb diet

Otzi the iceman (who got preserved in glacier) had a meal shortly before he died. It did contain grain, completely unmilled. Rollo et al (2002) found Ibex and deer meat, bracken, fungal matter and unmilled einkorn wheat. And stomach contained 46% fat. The carbohydrate content isn't determinable, but his stomach also contains dried meat, so there will be a significant protein content. It's not definitely known if Otzi was from farming background or not - the presence of wheat suggests so, and agriculture is thought to be have developing in the area around that time. He also had quite a variety of different species of animal represented in his artefacts, so if his people did farm, they extensively hunted as well. And his diet that day was nearly fifty percent fat from multiple animal sources, (so significant) protein and what can only have been minimal carbohydrates.

That's a low carb diet

We don't vary diets seasonally. We mainline carbs all year round. We don't walk all the time and eat as we gather - so we don't use those carbs as the glucose hits our systems. And we don't stop eating at night. Or at all, in lean periods. We are saturating our systems with glucose in a way that it copes with. Just.

Are you for real? I've listed your claims already. Just properly sourcing any one of them would be a start.

As for the body's uses of glucose:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK545201/
https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/diabetes/overview/preventing-problems/low-blood-glucose-hypoglycemia

And the carbs in milk are entirely in the form of simple sugar.

If we're worried about not being adapted to 'recent' additions to the diet, all that dairy should go long before the grains do.

I know what carbs are and how they work. I eat slightly lower carb myself. But I wouldnt describe myself as 'not eating carbs' which is what you did and what Im being pernickity over

I disagree entirely with your position that grains are bad for humans.

I have said again and again I'm talking about the carbs in grains. Carbs in vegetables are not all the same, and not present in anything like the same quantity when they are the same.

Carbs in grain are 'starch", and however complex they start out, they are long chains of sugar. Your body digests them back into sugar. The sugar is then used for energy, processed and stored in the liver or converted to stored fat. your blood gets 50g of sugar to deal with for every cup of brown rice. However slowly, however much it flattens the peak, it's 50g of sugar in a cup of food.

Some of the carbs in vegetables are starchy, especially in squash etc, but some they are wrapped up in cellulose in the form of insoluble fibre. We can't digest cellulose. No animal can. (animals that eat grass have bacteria that do it for them in their guts. We don't). It there to be measured but your body can't actually get at it. It passes right on through, undiegested. So although you have to count it in MFP, it's not getting into your body. Your bloodstream doesn't get sugar.

Of those 66g of carbs, you can take off the 15g of fibre to get actual digestible carbs. It's still very low carb. (MFP suggests a daily goal of 175g) Not enough to give your blood a hit of sugar. And not all in one go. (And a lot mine of are from milk. I love a latte and it makes my life worth living). The rest are from vegetable starches and sugars. So yes vegetables are carbs. A cup of onions has 12g of net carbs (sugar) and 34 calories. But a cup of brown rice has 47g of net carbs (sugar) and 248 calories. You just can't GET that without farmed grains. Because they aren't designed to deal with it. That's the difference here.

Well apparently we are all doing fairly poorly for fibre and should eat 30g a day for good bowel health.

Bowel cancer is increasign particularly in the younger generations.

Yes, Neanderthals ate grains, along with various other plant foods, demonstrating a much more diverse and sophisticated diet than previously thought. Evidence from fossilized teeth and dental plaque shows they consumed, cooked, and processed starchy plants, including wild barley, legumes, and roots, challenging the idea that they were purely carnivores.

• Evidence of Cooking: Microscopic analysis of dental plaque from Neanderthal remains found in sites like Shanidar Cave (Iraq) and in Belgium revealed cooked starch granules, indicating they likely cooked plants and grains.
• Variety of Foods: Besides meat, Neanderthals ate tubers, nuts, mushrooms, seeds, and fruits, depending on the season and environment.
• Preparation: Findings suggest they didn't just eat raw plants; they likely ground and heated grains to make them palatable.
• Regional Diet Variations: While some populations relied heavily on meat (e.g., mammoths), others had a more plant-heavy diet based on regional availability.
• Starch Adaptation: Study findings suggest that Neanderthals adapted to eating starch-rich foods as far back as 100,000 years ago

I mean, no doubt you will dismiss this as unnatural but I mean, how far back do you want to go with this?

Have you been upset in your life by a bag of oats falling on your head or something? Has it left you with an unreasonable hatred for the dreaded 'grain' or GRAIN!!!!

What would you like me to cite a source for?

What does the body need glucose for?

I said 'It's not massive slabS of meat'

It's ONE AVERAGE STEAK!!!! And that's the only meat all day. With a whole plate of vegetables! That is not excessive by any measure!

I'm quite surprised at the fibre myself. How much do you eat? And how would you add more? Because the brown rice everyone says is so high in fibre would have added 2.4g. That's not exactly a game changer. And if I swapped it for the broccoli (which is the only practical way, I think. I couldn't eat both.) I'd gain exactly 0.1g of fibre and about 5g of protein I don't need. And nothing else but 200 calories I also don't need. I'd lose a lot of vitamin c as well. I can't see how that's helping here AT ALL?!

@guestsareinvited You're failing because you're tying yourself up in knots trying to justify a series of outlandish claims. Pages and pages of waffle don't make your points any stronger. You haven't yet cited one single reputable source for your claims, to which we can now add the claim that the body doesn't need glucose, which is again untrue.

What is the difference, nationally, between carbohydrates in grains and carbohydrates in vegetables?

Again, grains are not a naturally occurring food. There is nothing even remotely similar nutritionally to grain as you know them that grows without human agriculture. NOTHING. I don't mean 'natural' as in grown in a field not made in a lab. I mean natural as in has existed in a way that could have shaped our digestive system via evolutionary force. Yes I KNOW cooked meals as we have them aren't 'natural' either. But the CONTENT - the protein, fat and vegetables are comparable to what we evolved to eat. The grains are not.

This is a really, really crucial point. And I feel it's where I'm failing. I wish I could put it better.

ok, Im curious because its flying in the face of you saying you dont eat slabs of meat, I personally think thats a large chunk of meat but horses for courses

Its not quite as much protein as you said by the way (ball park figure)

Your fibre is likely storing up trouble for the future.

Sorry. MFP has turned into a REALLY horrible app since I was using it. I can't get them all less than about five screens.

I feel like I've dealt with that, but it IS a very key point. And it relies on the misconception that humans are always evolving, domesticating, and so on. Yes, they are. But not in the time frame you're considering for something so basic and complex as glucose metabolsim. In recent evolutionary history, humans evolve by changing our environment with our brains and our technology. We don't change our bodies. And where we do, we haven't had long enough to change something this big. This isn't my take on evolution and biology. It isn't a strange or wacky theory. This IS how it is. Your pancreas and liver are the same as they were in stone age people. You need the same food. Your brain is different. But your body isn't. Take, say, skin colour. That's pretty simple. It's just a pigment, and it's visible, so it's a quick and dirty fix in evolutionary terms. But it's thought that has only diversified in response to people moving away from the equator in the last ten thousand years or so. Something like digestion simply isn't going to change in that time frame.

We feel very different to pre-agricultural people, and we have lives that look very different. But our BODIES are not very different. Farming is evolutionary VERY recent. Only 12000 yers ago to begin, and only as we really know it in the last few hundred. You are right that other plants have been modified and selected and they yield, look and taste different, and that animals have been bred to be bigger and meatier. Thats why I have said vegetables are only sort of the same as pre-agriculture, because they do look different. But it isn't the same as they way grains have been radically changed to form huge parts of our diets. If you eat a modern pig or a stoneage boar, the protein and fat is nutritionally the same, and is processed the same way. If you eat a plate of pasta, it's not. And there is no stoneage equivalent nutrionally. Literally none. It's what agriculture revolutionised. That's why it's not a 'natural' food group. It literally does not occur in a nutritionally comparable form or quantity without human agriculture. It seems so small and insignificant to eat grains. But it's a real sea change.

Vegetables and animals have only changed superficially. We need marginally less of them to get the same nutrients. But they are the same nutrients they have always been and we process them the same way as we always have. There IS A Way Humans Have Evolved To Eat. And it's without grains as we know them. That's not a moral assertion or a bonkers cult. It's a physiological one.

Carbohydrates are a naturally occurring food. They occur naturally in fruit and vegetables as well as grains. Most people throughout the last millennium ate loads of bread, rice, maize, cous cous, millet etc. as well as fruit and vegetables. They didn’t all have diabetes.

No she isn't and no, brown rice will not do that.

Wheres the cheese and the meat and the nuts

You actually said 'but I wasnt eating carbs'

But I wasn't eating carbs. That changes your metabolism. It fundamentally changes how your body processes calories and what it does with them.

You were eating carbs, so how did that change your metabolism.

here you go

I wasn't eating GRAINS. If you read what I've written (and I wouldn't blame you if you hadn't. I've written reams) grains are fundamentally different from vegetables. That is my entire point. And I don't think it makes sense if I don't explain why grains are fundamentally different and I don't know how to convey it more simply and quickly, because it is complex and in depth. Sorry. I didn't design bodies to work like this!

Yes. But as you can see, there is not a bloody lot of fibre added by those complex carbs, is there? In the random day of food I posted, was it 15g of carbs from vegetables? And a cup of brown rice added 2g!!!!

And what causes all of those problems? What causes the cancer, the cholesterol, the inflammation, the DIABETES??? How much of that is coming from carbs? In the case of diabetes, ALL OF IT. In the case of inflammation? Cancer? I don't know. You tell me - I've had to explain how all these things work to back up my assertions. Shouldn't everyone follow those principles?

I think (and this is my personal theory. It's not physiological fact which, mostly I have stuck to so far and I want to make it clear this is distinct from that) We don't eat enough vegetables. And we don't eat them because eat carbs as filler. Eating more vegetables has a protective effect. But what it mostly does is mean you eat less carbs. Carbs REALLY stress your body. And I think that's what's causing the cancer et al. Not necessarily that simply - but the long term physiological strain is resulting in more of all these things.

This is factual - your body is fighting to get sugar out of your blood all the time. It's just not equipped to BE deluged with carbs all day everyday. It can, and it does. But that's not how it functions optimally. The reason people with diabetes lose nerves, have amputations, get kidney failure and don't heal is because they cannot manage carb metabolism and keep their blood sugar normal. In very basic terms, sugar makes your blood acidic and affects every chemical process in it badly. And I just don't think people get this and what it means. I didn't get here easily.

Have a look at the protein leverage hypothesis.