Why Grains ARE Important For Most People

It's been a while since I've talked about grains. Like over a year. Too long. I've written Why You Don't Need Grains, about why you don't need grains. Duh. And Whole Grain Destruction, providing some hard science on the pitfalls of whole grains. Oh, and then there was Modern Wheat, explaining the difference between the wheat of the past and the wheat we eat today. Despite the nutritional shortcomings discussed in these articles though, most nutritionists still recommend a grain-based diet like the one depicted in this here food pyramid. Yes, it's outdated, we've moved on to the Plate now. The philosophy is still the same.

As a nutrition professional, I think it's important to talk to other nutrition professionals and understand their views on things, as they often differ from mine. Sometimes you learn something new from considering someone else's perspective.

I can remember one situation when I was doing my counseling internship at Student Health Services at UConn. I was shadowing a dietitian there, and a client that day mentioned that she didn't eat bread; she had heard we didn't need it in our diets to be healthy. Being the intern, I kept my mouth shut and let the counselor handle it. Of course, her advice was that we DO need bread, as it provides important vitamins and minerals. She may have had a point; refined flour products like white bread are enriched and fortified with B-vitamins (thiamin, riboflavin, and niacin), folic acid, and sometimes iron. For people who haven't eaten vegetables or red meat in six months, maybe refined grain products actually serve a purpose.

So I started thinking... I wonder what it takes to get enough of these nutrients without grains?

Nutritionism: Food is More Than the Sum of its Nutrients

In a nutshell, "nutritionism" is the idea that the healthfulness of a food is based on the sum of the nutrients it contains.  I learned about this concept from Michael Pollan, who you may have heard of... he wrote "The Omnivore's Dilemma" and "In Defense of Food", both phenomenal books that I highly recommend.  Pollan makes the argument that this is a reductionist philosophy that assumes we know more about the composition of foods and the inner workings of the human body than we really do.  I couldn't agree more.

Take the carrot, for example... we all know carrots are good for us.  You've probably heard that they're high in beta carotene.  Well, when researchers have taken beta carotene out of the carrot and given it to people in pill form, it turns out it doesn't do jack shit.  Is beta carotene useless?  Or is it just useless outside the context of the food it comes from? Context matters.  We're not as smart as we think we are, and we don't have it all figured out.  Studying individual nutrients outside the context of a real food tells us very little about what we should eat, and sometimes it just makes things more confusing.  We don't eat nutrients, we eat food.

If we want to learn how eating a carrot affects our health, then we need to study carrots.  Yet, as obvious as that may sound, we don't often study nutrition in this way.  We study the nutrients on their own, and then decide whether a food is good or bad based on which nutrients it contains.  There are plenty of examples where this paradigm has led us astray... here are just a few.

How to Fix Cavities Naturally

If I polled 100 random people out on the street… if I asked them “Is it possible to reverse cavities?  No dentist, no fillings, do you think you can heal cavities with food and supplements?”  I’d be willing to bet 99 of out of 100 would say no.  Maybe more.  Maybe 99.5 if there was a little person around.  In fact they’d probably think I was out of my mind for asking.  Many of us haven’t even thought about the prospect of healing cavities; why would we?  It’s been jammed into our heads from birth that when you have a cavity, you get a filling.  And that’s all there is to it.  I had several cavities as a kid.  Actually, “several” may be an understatement.  It was too many to count, but I do remember one specific visit to the dentist that revealed seven cavities.  SEVEN!  And now I’ve got a mouth full of fillings made of mercury and heavy metals... definitely not something I'd prefer to have permanently situated in my mouth.  But as anyone who’s ever had a cavity knows, there’s not typically any pain associated with them.  Sure they can develop into something worse, like an infection, but there’s no pressing reason to get a filling.  I would have appreciated it if someone suggested to me that I could try a more natural approach.

So that’s why I’m writing this article, and that’s why this information is so important.  It IS possible to heal your teeth naturally.  And not only is it possible, it’s surprisingly easy.  I’m not sure exactly why this information has disappeared over time; I assume it has something to do with the fact that it would ruin the dental industry.  But this is something you need to know.  This is something everyone needs to know.  You have options.  You CAN re-mineralize your teeth, and here are the people that proved it...

Why Are Food Allergies on the Rise? Part 2: Modern Wheat

In this second installment of my food allergy series, I want to focus on wheat specifically.  As you may know, celiac disease is a destructive disease caused by an immune reaction to gluten, a protein in wheat.  In recent years, the prevalence of celiac has been rising; today it is about four times more common than it had been in the 1950s.  According to recent estimates, about 1% of the population suffers from this disease, many of which are still undiagnosed (1, 2).  But still more people suffer from something called gluten sensitivity.  While not a true allergy, gluten sensitivity can manifest in a variety of ways... chronic migraines, irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), fibromyalgia... you know, all those pesky, seemingly random conditions that you're told you have when your symptoms don't fit neatly into a real disease.  According to the Center for Celiac Research at the University of Maryland, gluten sensitivity affects 7% of Americans (3).  But some estimates have been as high as 15-20%.  Researchers and practitioners agree that gluten sensitivity is far more common today than ever before. 

Very likely about 1 in 10 Americans have some adverse, acute reaction to eating wheat.  So what gives?  Why the sudden problem?

The story of modern wheat is a fascinating one.  It's something I've never seen discussed in any mainstream media outlet, but the reasons for that will become clear later.  Quite frankly, I didn't believe it when I first read about it in "Wheat Belly", mostly because it's a horribly biased book based on scientific fairy tales.  I dislike it so much I won't even link to it.  Don't bother.  But a recent Mark's Daily Apple article has convinced me that it's true... The wheat and flour products we eat today are distinctly different than what we've eaten in the past.

AHS 2012 Part 3: Nutritionism, Denise Minger on Organ Meats, and Terry Wahls' MS

And we're back for part 3 of the AHS talk.  Again, that's the Ancestral Health Symposium, not the American Hemerocallis Society, the American Helicopter Society, nor the American Headache Society, all of which come up ahead of Ancestral Health Symposium in a Google search.  That needs to change.  On to the discussion...


Two Ways of Looking at a Food: Nutritionism vs. A Whole Foods Perspective
This wasn't a topic that was covered specifically at the symposium, but some of the presentations touched on it, and that made it a frequent topic of discussion with my friends and I (Amanda at Inspired. and Matthew at whatever-he-will-call-his-new-blog.com).  First there was Mat Lalonde's talk about his new system for measuring nutrient density, in which he made bacon look pretty darn nutritious.  Cool with me.  I liked it far more than the ANDI score system used at Whole Foods, or the NuVal system used at conventional grocery stores, but it was very apparent by the end of his talk that there is no perfect system to quantify the nutrient density of food.  Then there was Peter Ballerstedt's talk about grass-fed meat, his main point being that the nutritional differences between grass-fed and grain-fed meat are negligible.

So these two talks generated some discussion about this reductionist perspective of nutrition.  Or "nutritionism", if you will.  You can measure the nutrients in a food and try to rank its healthiness, but what ultimately matters is the effect this food has on your body as a whole.

A couple of examples... Firstly, I appreciated Dr. Ballerstedt's point, that the nutritional difference between grass-fed and grain-fed meat is insignificant.  He mainly focused on the difference in omega-3 fatty acids.  And he may be right, there isn't that much more omega-3 in grass-fed meat.  But does it matter?  A 2011 study, for example, found that eating grass-fed beef significantly increases the composition of omega-3 fatty acids in plasma and platelet, while eating grain-fed beef actually reduced their omega-3 content (1).

Then there's the whole grain thing, which I blogged about recently.  Despite being high in antioxidant nutrients (vitamin B6, folate, selenium, zinc, magnesium, and cysteine), whole grains have zero effect on your body's total antioxidant capacity (2). 

So, you can talk all day about a food being more nutritious or less nutritious than another, but at the end of the day you're guessing.  Okay, that's not quite fair.  It's an educated guess.  But nutrient composition isn't everything.  We don't really know how food acts in our bodies until we study it.  Nutrient density can be a great guide, but it's not the end-all-be-all.

Whole Grain Destruction

Bread... destroyed

Aaand back to the sciencey posts.  I do like the more philosophical rant posts, but truthfully, I get my jollies off in two ways... reading about scientific research and drinking endless coffee (take note ladies).  Consider both covered.  Big nerd?  Probably.  Bored because the weather is shitty and everyone I know is at work?  Absolutely.

Today’s topic is grains.  More specifically, whole grains.  Many of you may know my stance on grains; I think they’re nutritionally useless, potentially harmful, and they often displace the more nutritious foods we could be eating (ie. fruits, vegetables, meats, seafood).   But today, I offer more convincing evidence against grains in the form of randomized, controlled scientific research.  Yup, the gold standard.

Let’s go over the levels of scientific evidence, just briefly so no one's confused.  For my purposes today, I’ll be talking about two types of study designs: epidemiological research and randomized, controlled trials.  The weaker of the two is epidemiological research.  In this type of study, participants are recruited, asked about their dietary patterns, and followed for a period of time to see who lives and who gets sick and/or dies.  It's observational in nature, and you can't infer cause and effect.  Blah, blah, blah, etc, etc, etc... the best you can do is to find a connection between two variables.  For instance, you might see that people who eat more whole grains tend to have less incidence of cardiovascular disease (1,2).  That doesn’t mean eating whole grains caused a reduction in heart disease; it just means the two happened at the same time.  It could be, instead, that people who consume more whole grains are typically more health conscious.  So in addition to eating whole grains, they exercise more, eat more fruits and vegetables, and choose not to smoke.  Maybe the grains were just along for the ride, while the other variables were what really mattered.  There's no way to know for sure.  

What you can do, though, is use this information to set up a randomized, controlled trial. In this type of study, you can isolate one variable that you think is important, like whole grains, so that you can determine cause and effect.  You need a control group, which would eat refined grains (or no grains), and an experimental group, which would eat whole grains.  Then, you can measure the difference in health outcomes; maybe vitamin/mineral status, blood sugar control, or risk of heart disease.  The key, in this case, is that you have a much clearer idea of causality. 

The point is, randomized, controlled trials trump epidemiological research.  Which is why I'm so glad I found this article by Anthony Colpo, in which he discusses all of this randomized, controlled research on grains.  There's a reason why the only research you hear to support whole grains is observational... because the controlled trials destroy them.  In fact, whole grains may be even worse than the refined variety.  Feast your eyes on this here research...

Why You Don't Need Grains

Alright folks, it's time for another rant.  Something's gotten me really fired up lately.  Now I don't want to mention any names... but let's just say that there are a lot of people out there who are really attached to grains.  I mean, grains do make up over 1/4 of My Plate.  They're a major part of nearly everyone's diet: pasta, rice, bread, corn... there's no question that these foods make up the bulk of the American diet.  But does that mean they're good for us?  No.  Just because everyone eats them doesn't make them healthy.  If you look at the history of the human diet, and read this Jared Diamond article, you'll learn that adopting agriculture and grains as a major part of the human diet may have been "the worst mistake in the history of the human race."  That's a pretty grand statement, but there's no debating the huge decline in human health that followed the agricultural revolution.  It's very clear that when we as a species decided to adopt agriculture and make grains a part of our diet, we traded health for the ability to support a larger population.  So I ask you again... just because everyone eats grains, does that make them good for us?  NO!