The Staff of Life
The quick answer: Enjoy your grains whole (more fiber than sugar) and baked only to a golden brown.
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A Brief History of Eating Like Kings
Over the last century (actually 135 years) the Industrial Revolution rolled through our food supply looking for ways to apply the “factory system” to the most traditional of human activities: cooking meals.
The first big change was replacing millstones with steel rollers for grinding grains. The roller mills, it was discovered, could grind the grain much finer and in stages, allowing the separation of bran, fiber, and germ from the starchy endosperm. The result was a fine, white (due to chemical bleaching) flour and this revolutionized cooking. Think of the angel food cake, or Wonder bread.
In times past the tedious process called “bolting,” in which flour was sifted through cloth to separate out the finest grains, could make such fine flour. This was done for kings. But now the common man could eat the king’s flour.
This became a repeating theme in the industrialization of food—making available to ordinary people the food of kings. In fact this had already started—the precursor to the Industrial Revolution had been the steady mechanization of the sugar industry in the 1800s. Sugar was becoming cheaper and more available and people who wanted to eat as kings could eat all the sugar they wanted.
Doesn’t eating the king’s food bring to mind the Old Testament story of Daniel? Unfortunately modern man didn’t have the wisdom of Daniel.
Dr. Denis Burkitt
Dr. Burtkitt (1911-1993) was a British surgeon and devout Christian who served in Africa. He found the indigenous people to be surprisingly healthy and free of the modern diseases. Burkitt was an intensely curious person and he determined that the removal of fiber from the modern diet was a contributing factor to the modern pandemic of diabetes, heart disease, and certain cancers. He wrote a book in 1979 titled, Don’t Forget Fibre in Your Diet. Of course, being English, he spelled “fiber” differently, but you get the idea. The natural fiber in food is part of what makes it healthy.
More Fiber Than Sugar
There are so many grain-based processed foods it makes your head spin. In the supermarket there is the breakfast cereal aisle but also the cookie, cracker, pastry, and pasta aisles. The processing, better-said “adulteration”, of food has turned the grocery into a modern house of horrors. Am I being too dramatic? If you have seen a loved one suffer from the modern diseases you might not think so.
Word of Wisdom Living, and every advocate of better diet and health that I’ve seen, recommends eating grains intact—what we call “whole grains.” It’s hard to sort this out with packaged foods like breakfast cereal so we introduced the “more fiber than sugar rule.” There’s some science behind this rule, reflected in government encouragement to eat more fiber and also less sugar. If you must buy packaged foods, the “fiber>sugar rule” is the best guide.
The Acrylamide Issue
The beautiful wife cautions me against making these post too long so I shoot for 500 words as a reasonable test of your attention span. I’m there now so I’ll talk about the acrylamide issue in the next post. Briefly, when you cook grains and other proteins to a dark brown, you generate a toxic byproduct called acrylamide.
Briefly, the protection against this is to avoid all deep fat fried foods , all charred foods, and to follow a new Golden Rule. This Golden Rule says to cook or bake proteins until they are just “golden” in color, not brown, or especially dark brown. We’ll come back to this in the next post.
Healthy Change
Comment: Whole grains are one of the best food values but we think it best to enjoy a variety. Please comment on how you include whole grains in the diet of your family, or share a favorite recipe.
Wednesday, March 13, 2013 at 7:44AM | by Skip Hellewell | 8 Comments | 1 Reference | Share Article | Email Article
Reader Comments (8)
While I believe that whole grains are very healthy, there are theories out there stating we should avoid any grain with gluten. Do they have any valid arguments?
Also I've recently been reading about soaking flour before using it in baking because it helps us digest the wheat better. I am going to try this the next time I bake wheat bread, but wanted to know if anyone has any opinions on this.
Seems like the science on soaking/sourdough-ing grains is pretty valid as far as making the grains more digestible. I strive to avoid processed grains (ground) and try to eat them in their whole state as often as possible. I'm having a delicious cold grain & veggie salad for lunch! But the more fiber than sugar rule does come in handy for those times that you just really want a cracker!
If anyone else has struggled with cooking brown rice, I can recommend this recipe:
http://simplifried.com/2011/01/02/oven-baked-brown-rice/
I cook it in a heavy cast iron casserole dish with foil beneath the lid and it turns out perfect every time. I use olive oil instead of canola, but it is also fine without any oil at all.
This produces nutty and well separated grains and was a hit with my kids.
What about soaking in a acidic medium to reduce the phytic acid and for better digestion? How important is this?
I use a natural yeast starter (just flour + water) for my pancakes, and it's great. It took over a month to get it bubbling and active, but it finally came to life! Still haven't mastered the bread from a natural starter yet...soon, hopefully!
I got my dry starter in the mail from naturalleavening.com
More fiber than sugar...great rule! And I love the history lesson. Enlightening.
If you make things simple, people are more likely to do it. I like the basic rule of more fiber than sugar.
But you also recommend a "higher rule" of keeping food as much as possible in its natural state. So I have a few questions.
1. Have there been any studies on how much more nutrition is there is in cracking the grain just before cooking as opposed to eating the boxed cut oats, cracked wheat or rolled oats which may be months or a year or more old? Is the amount of benefit worth the added bother?
2. What is the difference between "cracked" (wheat) and "steel cut" (oats) grains. Is it just a marketing term but the same thing?
3. Is there a difference on the shelf life of wheat vs. oats? It seems my cut oats go rancid on me a lot quicker than rolled oats.
4. Which grain for breakfast is healthier, wheat or oats or corn or rice? I guess it may be oats.
Whole Wheat Blender Pancakes - Healthy and Yummy!!!
1 cup whole wheat
1 cup milk
1/2 cup milk
2 eggs
1/3 cup oil
1 tsp salt
1 TBSP honey
1 TBSP baking powder
Combine 1 cup wheat and 1 cup milk in blender and mix on high for 2 minutes. Add 1/2 cup more milk and blend 2 more minutes. Add eggs, oil, salt and honey and blend well. Just before cooking, add baking powder and mix until just blended.