A Perfect, Chronic Poison

[_harmony]

I appreciate everyone who has chimed in. A few have drawn the distinction between modern and pre-modern wheat, and, accepting for the purpose of discussion the legitimacy of the science behind the articles I've linked to, maybe this disctinction does indeed provide an out (or at least a good amount of wiggle room) for Joseph Smith's Word of Wisdom and the God who gave it. But I offer the following for your consideration and will read with interest any feedback you care to provide.

From How Agriculture Ruined Your Health (and What to Do About It):

You aren't seriously trying to take on the whole agricultural industry, are you?

[_Doctor Lars C Umlaut]

I am not buying this. I avoid fad diets such as this will kill you, no carb, cabbage soup, prepackaged things like medifast, nutrisystem or weight watchers. I lost 60 pounds just eating a well balanced diet focused on vegatables, fruits, lean protien, some dairy and complex carbs including whole grains. Then I exercised along the way. It was really a lifestyle change. I have watched so many people promote and use the latest fad and yea they lose weight. But then the put it back on.

Also, the this food will kill you comes and goes. Eggs used to be the hated food. Now they are loved. Fat was horrible but then we all ate pasty carbs and got fat. Now healthy fats are good. No carb diets work but they are unhealthy and are tough to sustain.

Just eat a healthy diet, watch your calorie intake and exercise 3-5 hours a week, at least.

As for the food supplly being so tainted , re-engineered and lethal again I think that is bunk. We can grow more food, it is more nutritious, in better shape and quality when we get is and in more abundance than ever. Humans live longer than ever as well. I just don't see it at all.

Hi, Jason. Thank you for your response.

I regret coming across as promoting or tying to convince you all of a certain way of eating; I'm much more interested in exploring this recent (or so it seems to me) identification of wheat specifically (and grains generally) as "unhealthy" and, if true, what it says about the Lord's unqualified endorsement of the same in the WoW.

I am skeptical of fad diets as well, but, at the risk of sounding like an apologist for the anti-grain movement (too late, eh?), I think they make an interesting case when pointing out that in the ~200,000 years of our species's existence, grain has become a dietary staple only in the last 10,000 (which is, according to my link above, when a host of ailments began befalling us).

Represented on a 24 hour scale, homo sapiens subsisted on a largely grain-free diet up until approximately an hour and twelve minutes ago (someone please check my math!). So, evolutionarily speaking, wouldn't a grain-based diet, after millenia of eating as hunter-gatherers, be more rightly considered the "fad"?

I don't know. I guess the idea that the foods that homo sapiens "evolved to eat" would remain the healthiest for us to continue eating makes sense to me. If grains were not among those foods (were they?), and if their introduction to our diets negatively affected health by exposing us to lectins, gluten, phylates, and other substances that were previously absent (did they?), then this would, I submit, force us to look critically at the Lord's recommendation of grains in the WoW. This is what I hope to explore in this thread.

[_Doctor Lars C Umlaut]

I appreciate everyone who has chimed in. A few have drawn the distinction between modern and pre-modern wheat, and, accepting for the purpose of discussion the legitimacy of the science behind the articles I've linked to, maybe this disctinction does indeed provide an out (or at least a good amount of wiggle room) for Joseph Smith's Word of Wisdom and the God who gave it. But I offer the following for your consideration and will read with interest any feedback you care to provide.

From How Agriculture Ruined Your Health (and What to Do About It):

You aren't seriously trying to take on the whole agricultural industry, are you?

Hey, Harmony!

No, not at all! I'm wanting to see if the claims against wheat/grains have merit and, if so, the implications of this for the Lord's unqualified endorsement of wheat/grains in the WoW. I imagine some of the links I have used and might use in the future could possibly have been prepared by those with ambitions to take on "Big Agriculture" (I have no idea if this is the case), but in that I am wholly uninterested (except where it might have bearing on the question of the health benefits (or lack thereof) of wheat/grains).

[_TrashcanMan79]

I'm thinking that all the apologists would need to say, in the event that grains are some day discovered to be totally toxic and just the worst things you could ever put in your body ever, is that at the time the Word of Wisdom was given, the ability to preserve meats and fruits and veggies was not what it is today, so grains, while maybe not an ideal source of nutrients, were nevertheless a ready source of much needed calories, and, well, that's certainly better than starving, right?

Joseph Smith saved again, while the critics are liars relying on presentism in attempts to score points.

/thread

[_Doctor Lars C Umlaut]

I am not buying this.

I didn't think to ask you this in my initial response and I should have: are you not buying that a) grains contain lectins, gluten, and phytic acid, or that b) those substances are detrimental to human health?

Or, perhaps, c) both?

[_Doctor Lars C Umlaut]

...in the ~200,000 years of our species's existence, grain has become a dietary staple only in the last 10,000 (which is, according to my link above, when a host of ailments began befalling us).

Represented on a 24 hour scale, homo sapiens subsisted on a largely grain-free diet up until approximately an hour and twelve minutes ago (someone please check my math!). So, evolutionarily speaking, wouldn't a grain-based diet, after millenia of eating as hunter-gatherers, be more rightly considered the "fad"?

I don't know. I guess the idea that the foods that homo sapiens "evolved to eat" would remain the healthiest for us to continue eating makes sense to me. If grains were not among those foods (were they?), and if their introduction to our diets negatively affected health by exposing us to lectins, gluten, phylates, and other substances that were previously absent (did they?), then this would, I submit, force us to look critically at the Lord's recommendation of grains in the WoW. This is what I hope to explore in this thread.

In the hope of attempting to make this shameless bump just a wee bit substantive, I thought I would try to add some weight to my thoughts above by quoting from a recent blog post by preventive cardiologist and author of Wheat Belly, William Davis.

While life for early Homo certainly had its challenges, such as nematode infestation from poorly-cooked fish, or traumatic injury (leg fractures were uniformly fatal), malnutrition was not generally a problem for Homo. Pre-Neolithic life was, from a nutritional viewpoint, quite good.

That is, until around 10,000 years ago when Homo sapiens first added grains.

[snip]

What happened to Homo sapiens who added grains? The anthropologists tell us that grain-consuming Homo:

-Experienced an explosion of tooth decay. While tooth decay was rare among scavenger-hunter-gatherers, it became commonplace in grain consuming humans. Tooth decay was accompanied by tooth abscess and tooth loss.

-Shrinkage of the face and jaw–The gruel or porridge that grains commonly yielded meant less dependence on vigorous mastication. As the face and jaw shrunk, teeth also shrunk but did so inadequately, commonly leading to tooth crowding (thus braces in kids today).

-Iron deficiency–Anthropologists look for porotic hyperostosis or cribra orbitalia, skull evidence of inadequate iron intake or overexposure to blockers of iron absorption (e.g., phytates in grains). (Nematode infestation can add to the effect.)

-Malnutrition–Evidenced by horizontal ridges in the incisors and canine teeth.

-Reduction in stature–Height was reduced by several centimeters. Bone diameter (e.g., femur diameter) was likewise reduced, what the anthropologists call reduced “robusticity.”

-Reduction in brain size–While the cause-effect connection is uncertain, roughly coincident with grain consumption, brain size decreased by 11%–a first in the evolution of Homo.

(Interestingly, the only exception to the above observations are southeast Asian cultures who consumed rice, arguing that rice is somehow different.)

That’s as much as can be inferred from the remains of humans dating back that far. We unfortunately cannot reconstruct soft tissue diseases like colon cancer, heart disease, or dementia. Nonetheless, one pattern is clear: When humans first incorporated grains into their diet 10,000 years ago, corresponding to less than 0.4% of the time Homo species have walked the earth, we suffered substantial downturns in health evidenced by tooth decay, deformity, and deficiencies.

(emphasis in original)

In a similar vein is Jared Diamond's (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel, which was, in my opinion, the topic of one of the most fascinating Mormon Expression episodes ever) brief paper written some years ago about the agricultural revolution that makes for, I think, a rather compelling read: "The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race."

[_KimberlyAnn]

I took a break from wrapping presents and checked the board for the first time in ages and found this interesting thread.

For the most part, I've not eaten wheat, white rice, potatoes (other than sweet potatoes), or refined sugar for several years. I refrain about 80% of the time; I'd like to do better. I don't lose that much weight on the diet, though I lost some at first. My body is probably acclimated to it, but when I fall off the wagon for a week or so, I gain several pounds and feel grotesquely swollen. Additionally, I have rheumatoid arthritis and my hands hurt much less when I abstain from wheat. The difference is substantial.

It was long after I realized Joseph Smith was no prophet that I changed my diet, but the WoW is clearly wrong. Meat is healthier than wheat. My cholesterol is not high. My blood pressure is perfect. Now if I could only get back into the swing of a regular exercise routine....

I'm not a fan of fad diets, but I see nothing redeeming about processed wheat, refined sugar or white rice. There are much better and healthier foods to eat. Unless you're Santa, that is. Santa's belly needs to jiggle like a bowl full of jelly.

Merry Christmas, All!

KA

[_Tchild]

I read about halfway through that guy's book ("Wheat Belly"). It's pretty interesting stuff. He does seem very passionate about it, but as I recall he talks mostly of case studies (anecdotes).

I got maybe 15 pages into the book before I got bored with it, so I can't speak to the arguments he makes therein or the evidence he uses to bolster them. I have, though, been acquainting myself with the whole "Paleo/Primal" movement, so I think I can probably imagine the direction in which the book goes. And I have to say, if grains do contribute harmfully to obesity, high blood sugar, increased small LDL, inflammation, IBS, etc, and if the removal of grains results in healthful improvements in these and other areas (and I am increasingly becoming convinced that this is the case), then the Lord's endorsement of grains/wheat in the Word of Widsom is... interesting.

Well, according to this guy, grains are what saved him and turned his life around.

Story here:http://deescereal.com/story/

I found this breakfast cereal about a year ago and eat it almost every morning. It is delicious.

[_Gadianton]

Diamond has some interesting stuff and turns the tables on notions that scientific progress necessarily makes things better or that we've escaped the fates of our predecessors. I have a couple friends that have gone "paleo" and tell me about the government/farmers conspiracy and the food triangle, and I can appreciate that cutting carbs may be the first step for pretty much anyone to getting healthier, but at a certain point I think the returns are diminishing. Run as fast as you can for 4 minutes a day and take a blind stab at eliminating pop/chips and the worst junk, add a couple glasses of water and 80% of the problem is solved.

Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the humanrace began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of ourfirst day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m.we adopted agriculture.

But those aliens didn't get to outer space by scurrying from bush to bush and cave to cave. They may narrowly have escaped agriculture, industrialization, nuclear power also, and galactic-scale aliens may even have bigger problems.

[_EAllusion]

we suffered substantial downturns in health evidenced by tooth decay, deformity, and deficiencies.

The advent of agriculture is one of the building-blocks of civilization that led to the average life expectancy going from sub-30 to what it is today. Health took a substantial upswing coinciding with grain-farming on a geological scale. Hunter-Gatherers don't invent antibiotics.