March 14th, 2010 -

    In the course of wandering around the internet, reading all the boring nutrition articles I could find, I came across something by Dr. Sears called "Good Grains".  That's William, not Barry, by the way.  In this article he extols the virtues of whole grains.  He talks about what a great source of protein they are, their fiber content, the vitamins they provide in abundance... on and on.

    Anyone who reads these little nutrition rants, or who has made the mistake of asking me about food and health, probably already knows that I advise the total avoidance of gluten grains, and a strict limiting of other grains.  I won't bore everyone with the details, I will just say that it seems foolish to call anything other than meat "a good source of protein", or amino acids, for that matter.  I will also mention that the health benefits of fiber are being debated.  Most of all, the Dr. seems to be either unaware or unconcerned with the growing body of evidence that gluten (a protein in wheat and some other grains) is essentially poisonous to humans, leading to chronic inflammation and the host of problems that causes.  In fact, this doctor seems to be a big fan of gluten!

    Ignoring all that, what I want to talk about today is the commonly held belief that we need to eat carbohydrates in order to get our full compliment of vitamins and minerals, and Dr. Sears' claims that whole grains are a "good source" for some of them. 

    First, a quick look around the internet reveals many sites containing vitamin and mineral charts.  Take a peak at a few of them and see if you can find some indication that whole grains are a better source than meats, cheeses, vegetables and fruits.  Keep in mind that "enriched" means the grains had nutrients artificially added to them.  It seems pretty clear that one could easily replace every grain in his diet with fruits and vegetables, thereby avoiding the hazards of gluten and the effect that processed flours have on insulin levels, while still getting just as good or even better micro-nutrient levels.

    One thing that I rarely hear mentioned is that meats are chock-full of micro-nutrients.  The misconception, I think, is that we eat meat for the proteins and amino acids, and then we must eat carbs for the micro-nutrients.  The fact is that we can get all of those micro-nutrients from meats in varying degrees.  Actually, many of these nutrients are in meat in better forms (for human purposes) than in plants.  Examples are vitamin K, which is K₂ in meat and K₁ in plants, or the misnamed vitamin D (actually a hormone), which is D₂ in plants and D₃ in meats.

    Take a quick look at the nutrient profile for equal amounts of hard-boiled egg^[1] and whole wheat flour^[2].  The egg is has either nearly the same amount, or more, of calcium, riboflavin, pantothenic acid, folate, choline, B-12, A, lutein+zeaxanthin, E, D, as well as Omega-3 fatty acids.  From this it is clear that eggs are at least the micro-nutrient equal of whole wheat.  But there is a twist to this.  Those numbers are for a 100g serving.  In real terms, that is two medium hard-boiled eggs, or almost a whole loaf of bread using this recipe.  Which is the more realistic serving size?  So in order for us to get almost the same micro-nutrients, we can gorge ourselves on bread, or have a two-egg omelet for breakfast^[3]. 

    Once again we see a medical "authority" toeing the conventional wisdom line, advocating a diet heavy in a substance which has been implicated in dozens of serious diseases, provides no nutritional value which cannot be gotten elsewhere, and would end up displacing many healthier foods in our diets.  I see this all the time, and I always ask myself the question, "why?"  Why would someone who has devoted his career to helping people be healthy ever advocate something which is a best a poor nutritional choice and at worst, a destroyer of health.  I have not yet found the answer to this question.  What are your thoughts?

   

-Goat

   

[1]  Search for NDB No. 01129.

[2]  Search for NDB No. 20080.

[3] Use pastured eggs (not the same thing as pasteurized!), throw in some pastured ham and pastured cheese, fry it up in pastured butter, and you will have eaten USDA's recommended amount of most of the vitamins and minerals in one sitting.  Not that the USDA's RDA should be considered authoritative, mind you, since they are based upon people who were eating a diet which a "paleo" minded person would consider inherently unhealthy.

Comments

[Pokey]

Answer:
The same reason the government sponsored food pyramid won't get changed. Too much money in agricultural political action groups. Too much money from these lobbyists going to private studies to twist their numbers to make it appear healthy.

And finally:

Apathy.

Too many of us are satisfied believing someone else rather then taking the time and doing our own research.

Trust.
I'm supposed to be able to trust the government and a doctor.

[Dave]

As Pokey mentioned, many of us are satisfied believing someone else, the central government. There was a time when I'd start out with the assumption that the government gave us good information. That was a long time ago. I now understand that there are many forces at work in politics which are fraudulent; my best interest is almost always irrelevant. I think believing someone else, the government, is just as much a matter of ignorance as it is apathy. Once you start reading about nutrition, politics, economics, etc., and you really start thinking about it, you can see that 1) the government is not giving you good information, and 2) the government does not have your best interest in mind. The government is not your friend.

I think there are a lot of reasonable answers to Goat’s question. I believe another one is that the government does not want to admit that they were wrong. It would be difficult for them to come out and tell us that grains are not the healthiest food and fatty foods like meat are healthy foods without admitting that they were giving us bad advice for a very long time.

[Goat]

Okay, so it seems that I'm not the only one feeling like I've had a fast one pulled on me. Good to know.

[Pokey]

When something real like Paleo comes along a lot of people are tired of hearing the same old crap about another "magic" way to blah, blah, blah.

So, instead of listening they think it's the boy who cried wolf all over again.

I came across this link and actually listened to the spewage for about 15 minutes. It's nothing more then an
infomercial on the computer.

http://www.fatburningfurnace.com/index.php?hop=zthfitfb&pid=1974