Are wholegrains healthy?

[foreverondiet]

I always thought yes, as that's what we've all been taught.

I've just read wheat belly and now I am angry / confused / enlightened ......

In a crux - modern (dwarf) wheat is differs from ancient wheat, it highly addictive, not actually good for us or particularly nutritious and even wholegrain wheat has similar GI to white grain and sugar.

www.amazon.co.uk/Wheat-Belly-Davis-William-MD/dp/1609611543/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329748000&sr=8-1

Has anyone else read this book?

I really dont think its that simple. In India rooughly 70% of the diet is carbs then veg (some of which are carbs of course). Rice and chappattis with pulses and veg. Little or no meat.
But people are slim. Until they become affluent and start consuming the typical western diet of fast fod and sugar.

Pork again tonight at Mums pp :( I might mention the pork thing to her though as she too is O type. Doubt she'll take any notice though. We do eat quite a lot of pork as a family. I only buy meat when it's cheap or reduced, but we generally do eat meat every day.

I do seem good on eggs and I now have little milk, but eat natural Greek style yoghurt on my cereal these days. Hmmm, may have to look into the blood type eating a bit more.

No such thing as a food that is intrinsically "healthy".

I suspect it's more that wheat/carb-heavy foods are the kinds of foods that people tend to overeat on. So things like bread and pasta which are soft and bland and easy to munch your way through vast amounts without really thinking about it (and many people have a hugely exaggerated idea of what a portion of pasta should be, especially when cooking from dried). Also includes sweet comforting foods like biscuits and cakes which are convenient for a snack, tempting to eat too much of, and often used for 'emotional eating'. It's rare that anyone has the temptation to binge/comfort-eat on fish or eggs or tofu (as far as I know).

During the war (and in poorer countries) people couldn't (can't) overeat on these foods because they just wouldn't be available in the quantities needed to get fat.

I do think there's a lot to be said for watching portion size and total intake with these foods, especially if you're overweight, because many people are taking in a lot more calories than they need by overeating on such things. And some people may have a genuine intolerance for wheat, so cutting it out may fix bloating or digestive problems for them. If you feel better without wheat, then great. I really don't see the harm in it in moderate portions for most people though.

Lots of bollocks being said on this thread.

The Robb Wolf 'The Paleo Solution' is very interesting on this. He says that since farming was only introduced in the Neolithic era about 5-10,000 years ago, our bodies have not evolved to cope with the modern grain-heavy diet.

DS1 has just been diagnosed coeliac so we have cut out gluten from family meals and I am feeling a lot better too (I am not coeliac). According to Wolf, we should cut out all grains and eat a diet rich in vegetables, salad, nuts, meat and fish and a moderate amount of fruit. He is surprisingly convincing.

What I'm trying to say really is that for most people, especially overweight people, the problem is not so much what they eat, but how much.

Obviously it's different if you have a medical condition that's affected by diet, or an allergy/intolerance to certain foods. I'm not convinced that half the people who self-diagnose with 'intolerances' really have them though. A lot of so-called 'bloating' is likely caused by plain old-fashioned overeating IMO. Though admittedly certain food groups may be more likely candidates for overeating than others.

(not you Ephiny)

well it seems quite logical to me, eat the diet our ancestors would have eaten, that's how we have evolved. For North Europeans, it probably is meat, dairy, eggs and seasonal fruit and veg & nuts, maybe small amounts of whole grains

Other ethnic goups would have evolved to eat entirely different diets

As I said previously, avoid anything processed and you can't go wrong.

Broad statement there Trills. I mean, how do you know b@llxx is being said. If it works for some, then it works. And each to their own.

The bollocks is in the broad statements like "people with this blood group shouldn't eat this" rather than "I feel better if I avoid this food".

I know that the author of those posts has done a great deal a research on the subject and is very knowledgeable.

You don't have to take any notice of it if you don't want to though.

That was just an example, nothing personal. Didn't see the point in quoting every example on the thread.

I was responding to you telling me to not generalise and to accept that some things work for some people, which felt strange since that's what I was complaining about.

I think I'm confused!!

The Robb Wolf 'The Paleo Solution' is very interesting on this. He says that since farming was only introduced in the Neolithic era about 5-10,000 years ago, our bodies have not evolved to cope with the modern grain-heavy diet.

So I think a problem with this is that evolution in diet changes have been shown in numerous populations more rapidly than this - the indigenous populations of the arctic have typically only been there for half that time at most, but have significant adaptations to their very different diets (very meat based etc.)

And of course the gene for lactose digestion in adults has been identified and been around for thousands of years, that also goes back to the same 5-10,000 for grain. So if dairy and grain happened at the same time, and the vast majority of Europeans have adapted to dairy - why would it be different for grains?

Also remember that processed seed consumption almost certainly predates modern farming as you suggest (the 5-10,000 years) there's plenty of stone age suggestions of such processing going on, just on wild grasses rather than tilled fields.

Of course all that really shows is that the rationalisation of why something works is almost certainly wrong, it doesn't necessarily change the fact that it may work. However personally I'd like a real explanation and genuine science journals, and not pop-science books.

But fredfred there is lactose in human breastmilk so our ancestors would always have been digesting that, wouldn't they? A much longer evolutionary path than grains.

The seed consumption processing you mention - does that involve producing new varieties of seeds? (as farming would have done with grains) or just bashing/milling the ones they found?

Well this thread has taken off hasn't it !

Trills shall we all try and keep an open mind? I said it works for me If the Blood type Diet was such Boxxoxks I wouldn't be the only 60 yr old I know with no health problems; check out Dr. Peter D'Adamo's website. Also the wheat thing is a well known problem and the fact SOME people are alright with a bit of it is down to blood type (IMO & E).

Skirata In W.W.2 hardly anyone had a car or washing machine or central heating etc. The rich were fat then though weren't they? it was considered the thing to be 'cos the majority were thin, now it's the opposite .

Solo I wuv you !!!

fred the dairy adaption is not right through the population though is it? why are there so many sinus\hay fever symptoms, runny noses, asthma type diseases? according to the Blood type the B types and some A.Bs are good with dairy and not the others .

It's the particular modern wheat species that is being shown to be hard to digest (see the O.P,s book Wheat belly) I'm fine with rye,spelt and Kamut etc.

Yes red and the lactose in B.M. is nothing like cows milk anyway.

redridingwolf With the ability to digest lactose, like all other mammals non dairy eating humans don't have the genetic modification that keeps the ability to digest it after weaning (basically babies produce lactase an enzyme which enables digestion, in all mammals other than humans this enzyme stops being produced after weaning, In western europeans 80%+ of people have the adaptation that lets them do it after weaning. In other populations (asian, indigenous north american) it's a much lower percentage. From grave DNA european adaptations had happened 2000 years ago for sure. The change is absolutely a modern genetic adaptation to diet.

All collection and processing of food by humans would have created a selection pressure on that food, because a human collects the grains they perform distribution of the plant as they collect and mill etc. The humans will therefore increase the chances of grains they want will reproduce - exactly the sort of evolution that happens by the farmer. The selection would certainly be stronger once you become farmers.

The problem doesn't go back to the Neolithic Era at all and is unlikely to have much to do with blood-groups. The health problems we see today are a far more recent development of the last 60 - 100 years. Pre 1900 people would have eaten around 12 grammes of sugar per day on average. Today we typically eat around six or seven times that amount... some people eating much, much more. Pre 1900 meat would have been a relatively rare treat rather than an everyday staple. Lifestyles and occupations would have been much more physical - think of the effort to wash a family's clothes.

The problems we see today that are lifestyle-related ... obesity, Type II Diabetes, certain cancers, heart disease, gallbladder problems.... have gone up rapidly only in the last 100 years, not the last 5000 years. The main contributory factors are a) a prevalence of cheap, heavily processed, convenience foods that are low in nutrition and b) sedentary lifestyles.

did paleo man eat that much meat? I bet it wasnt daily.
I use pulses as protein cos meat is once a month here now.

probably hit the wotsit there Cogito. Processed foods and idleness. Not 'blood group diets' etc

Paleo man and generations of other hominids didn't usually make it to middle-age when so many of our lifestyle-related conditions become a problem. But no, they didn't get meat every day and there would have been long periods of enforced fasting, interspersed with eating all kinds of horrible things out of desperation. Don't see too many people who peddle the Paleolithic Diet suggesting we match those conditions.

CogitoErgoSometimes I think you need to take your sugar consumption back further. Late victorian times had higher sugar consumption than today, and even in 1800 it was 24g (see The degeneracy crisis and victorian youth) by 1900 people were consuming more sugar than today.

Also, I don't think meat was particularly rare (and certainly not if you include fish) in the victorian diet, the high cost of meat is pretty much a modern thing.

Don't disagree with the conclusions, however I would also add that for northern europeans, central heating and the large increase in household and particularly sleeping area temperatures have also had a large increase. Our fat no longer needs to be brown to keep us warm, so it doesn't help burn calories and just costs us. (That only applies to the northern european genetically as groups from warmer places don't have the same genetic response)

You also shouldn't make particular assumptions about what "paleo man" ate, the one that is generally talked about by the paleo people is the endurance hunter in savannah like situations. The few surviving tribes who hunt like this were shown to be extremely successful even on the very marginal savannah that exists today (the best land has all gone to farming, so the wild land that is out there supports fewer animals than the good land would of) and it was unlikely that they would've actually ever been particularly short of meat. (see e.g. here

It's very likely that the farmers had a significantly worse diet once they settled down (however they got things like beer which meant fewer water transmitted diseases and drunken fun) and were also likely to have longer periods of starvation compared to a nomadic hunter/gatherer.