Read It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways Online
Authors: Melissa Hartwig,Dallas Hartwig
It Starts With Food: Discover the Whole30 and Change Your Life in Unexpected Ways (15 page)
Even though seed oils violate only one of our four Good Food standards, that’s a good enough reason for you to clean out your cupboard and throw them all away. Besides, with all the healthy alternatives we’re going to give you in the next section, there’s not going to be room for them—in your diet or in your pantry.
GRAINS AND LEGUMES
“I was diagnosed with celiac sprue in 1992, so I’ve been gluten-free since then. Because of the trauma to my gut, I developed other food sensitivities and environmental sensitivities as well. I learned to deal with them and be reasonably active, but I had reoccurring bouts of months of intestinal bloating and debilitating fatigue. I was trying all sorts of probiotics, digestive enzymes—nothing was helping. Then I stumbled across the Whole30. The bloating was gone in a few days and has not returned. I noticed improved energy/stamina and clearer thinking. My environmental reactions aren’t as severe. For someone with celiac, this way of eating provides optimal wellness.”
—Sandy H., Middleport, New York
We suspect that this is one topic quite likely to spur controversy. See, our general nutritional recommendations don’t include grains of any kind—no breads, cereals, pasta, rice, not even gluten-free grains or pseudo-cereals like quinoa.
No, not even
whole grains
.
We are well aware that this information may swim upstream against everything you’ve
ever
been told by your parents, doctors and personal trainers, by the government, and by TV advertisements. We make no apologies, however, because all the people who have been selling you whole grains for health all these years have just been plain wrong.
We understand if this makes you kind of angry—or at the very least skeptical. We want you to be skeptical! We were too. But the science, our education, and our experience have completely altered our perspective—and we believe that by the time you get to the end of this chapter, you’ll be thinking about grains differently too.
Let’s talk about the trouble with grains—refined, whole, and everything in between.
Most agricultural societies eat a diet that includes locally-produced grains (or legumes) as a source of cheap energy, which leads many people to say, “How can grains be so bad, if these healthy cultures have been eating them for thousands of years?” First, there are a lot of factors that play into a population’s health. Sunshine, other dietary choices, exercise, and environment all contribute—so it’s silly to say, for example, that traditional Asian cultures are healthy simply because they eat rice. In addition, the fact that some societies have eaten grains for thousands of years says nothing about whether grains are actually healthy. Their eating habits reflect what was available to them for
survival
in that particular place and time
.
But s
urviving
and
thriving
are not the same thing. In today’s modern world, we are interested in truly thriving, not just providing enough energy to avoid starvation—and in our culture, we can do that with optimally healthy foods that don’t contain any of the downsides of grains.
Grains are seeds of plants in the grass family. This includes wheat, oats, barley, rye, millet, corn (maize), rice (including wild rice), sorghum, teff, triticale, spelt, kamut, buckwheat, amaranth, chia, and quinoa.
*
The sole purpose of the seed is for reproduction of the plant. (Plants do not grow their babies just for us to eat.) When that seed matures and falls onto the ground, it needs some stored energy to get started—to germinate and grow until it produces its first leaves and can photosynthesize energy from sunlight. Grains store most of that preliminary energy in their seeds as carbohydrate.
Depending on what we do with those grains (and how we consume—or overconsume—them), all that carbohydrate
may
violate our first and second Good Food standards.
Let’s talk about the various components of a grain seed.
The bran is the grain’s outer layer, its suit of armor. Its job is to protect the seed against outside threats, like bacteria and insects. The part of the seed that actually grows into another plant is the germ—that’s where the plant’s reproductive information is stored. Finally, there is the endosperm—mostly starch and some protein—which provides fuel for the seed’s growth.
Refined grains bear little resemblance to the natural structure described above. During the refining process, the bran and the germ are removed, and so are the fiber, vitamins, and minerals present in those two layers. (Some vitamins and minerals may be added back into the product, which is then labeled “enriched,” but the added nutrients don’t make up for what the refining process has removed.) Milling grains in this fashion leaves us with just the endosperm.
These refined grains are then made into products like white bread, instant oatmeal, snack foods, and desserts. To further increase their palatability, the water is sucked out of these products (further concentrating the calories), and then sugar, fat, and salt are added. Since there is little fiber left, these calories are also easier and quicker for us to absorb. In addition, refined grains contain no complete protein—a critical satiation factor—and little micronutrition because they are so heavily processed.
In other words, they’re junk food.
The flours from refined grains form the foundation of most of the supernormally stimulating, nutrient-poor, carbohydrate-dense foods-with-no-brakes. (Remember, we don’t eat these foods by themselves—they’re
ingredients
.) These junk foods promote chronic overconsumption, elevated blood sugar levels, reliance on glucose for fuel, accumulation of body fat, and an increase in free fatty acids and triglycerides in the blood. And, if you
continue
to overconsume them (as is so easy to do), you can say hello to leptin resistance, insulin resistance, and all the negative downstream consequences to your health.
Which is how refined grains fail our first
and
second Good Food standards.
This should come as no surprise, as practically everyone agrees that refined grains, and the products made from white flour, do not make you healthier. But what about “heart healthy” whole grains? As you’re about to see, those come with their own set of problems.
For the record, whole-grain products often violate our first Good Food standard too. The words “whole grain” on a product label don’t mean the product was made with 100 percent whole grain. In fact, the
U.S. government
has very few regulations for whole-grain labeling, and the
Whole Grains Council
allows the use of their Whole Grain Stamp on products containing eight grams or more of whole-grain ingredients per serving—
even if the product contains more refined grain than whole grain.
Don’t let the fact that your waffles, muffins, or cookies were made with whole grains fool you. Whole-grain foods can easily qualify as foods-with-no-brakes.
In whole grains
, often touted as the healthy alternative to refined grains, all the natural anatomical components—the bran, germ, and starchy endosperm—are present in the same relative proportions as in the intact seed.
Because whole grains still contain fiber, they are often referred to as having a “lower glycemic index” (GI) than their refined counterparts—which is often erroneously thought of as synonymous with “healthier.”
The glycemic index (GI) is a numerical scale used to quantify how fast fifty grams of carbohydrate from a particular food can raise blood glucose level. Carbohydrates that break down quickly during digestion and release glucose rapidly into the bloodstream have a higher GI; carbohydrates that break down more slowly, releasing glucose more gradually into the bloodstream, have a lower GI. The “standard” used for the GI scale—the food to which other foods are compared—is either glucose (with a score of 100) or white bread (with a score of 70 to 73).
White bread raises blood sugar very rapidly (high GI), while the starch in 100 percent whole-grain bread takes longer to break down into glucose (moderate GI). The lower GI score is largely a result of the additional fiber content of whole-grain flour, but eating a high GI food alongside other foods rich in fiber and fat will also lower the total GI of the meal.
However, the GI does not give any indication of, well,
anything else
relating to the health of these foods! It doesn’t mention whether the food contains any problematic proteins, or what kind of sugars or fats it contains, or the bioavailability of the nutrients. It also doesn’t tell you how much carbohydrate is contained in the food or how much insulin will be needed to manage blood glucose.
In addition, GI doesn’t take into account how much of that food is typically eaten in a serving. The GI of watermelon is very high (72), but how much watermelon do you normally eat—a slice or two? The GI of peanut M&Ms® is much lower (33), but because they are supernormally stimulating and nutrient-poor, it’s very easy to eat an entire bag. Which food do you think promotes better health?
But the glycemic index isn’t the only thing cited in support of whole grains—proponents will point out their higher micronutrition content, too. And we’d agree—
when compared with refined grains
, whole grains are certainly more nutritious. But refined grains and whole grains aren’t your only choices when it comes to carbohydrate, vitamins, minerals, and phytonutrients.
What about vegetables and fruit?
The marketing from big cereal companies would have you think that cereal grains are highly nutritious—and that if you
don’t
eat them, you’ll miss out on all sorts of vitamins, minerals, and fiber that you can get only from grains.
That’s simply not true.
Grains are not (we repeat,
not
) nutrient-dense
when compared with vegetables and fruit
.
Remember back to our prototypical healthy-hormones “good day” and our not-so-healthy-hormones “bad day” in Chapter 5? Our good day described a diet based on our Good Food standards. Our bad day represented a typical Western “healthy” diet based on whole grains and low-fat foods.
When we ran each day’s meals through a
nutritional-analysis system
, we discovered that a diet built around “healthy” whole grains provided more than
three times
the sugar and sodium as a diet featuring vegetables and fruit.
Even better, our Good Day diet provides more dietary fiber, potassium, and magnesium, and
way
more iron, zinc, and vitamins A, B
6
, B
12
,C, D, E, and K (often in far more bioavailable forms).
