A Perfect, Chronic Poison

[_Doctor Lars C Umlaut]

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

Merry Christmas to you too, KA, and I'm glad you have found the thread interesting! Your personal experience with wheat elimination is fascinating and echoes so many of the testimonials that got me reading all the stuff that ultimately resulted in my starting this thread. Here's to your health!

[Guest]

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.

Hey, Tchild. Well, I won't lie, that cereal certainly looks tasty. But what am I to make of his health improving by eating all the stuff that I'm arguing is unhealthy? I have found all the different (and conflicting) nutritional recommendations to be confusing and nigh impossible to sort out. I mean, you mention Dee experiencing improvements in health by going heavy (I'm assuming) on grains, but then there's Mia who lost weight and said goodbye to her asthma and acne by eliminating grains all together. And then there's Merab, Doug, and Chris who all reported substantial weight loss by eating nothing but McDonald's, while John tells of the weight gain, exhaustion/fatigue, high cholesterol, and IBS on which he blames his veganism!

How do we get this all sorted? I don't know that I have the answer to that. But I do know that without obtaining much more information than the typical testimonial provides, we can't even take a good stab at it.

[_Jason Bourne]

A couple more thoughts.

I am not buyingn that wheat and grains are going to kill us, make us obese and give us all sorts of disease. Now I will qualify that with stating that I believe that when we eat grains it should be whole grains. Processed refined grains are bad. Simply put picking grains with a high glycemic value is what you want.

Next, I don't really care about what this no wheat or wheat belly ideas have on what the WoW is or isn't. I am not passionate about defending the WoW as divine.

Now yestersday I listened to a podcast on the paleo diet which is supposed to be a way of eating that our hunter gatherer ancestors are more than 10,000 years and back. Well that is fine. I understand on the evolutionary scale that humans are that way for a lot longer than they have based on an agrian model. I also note that hunter gatherers certainly had a short lifespan. Of course other factors than just what they ate or did not eat added to that.

Additionally this podcast discussed the paleo diet in light of endurance athletes of which I am one. It was intriguing what some studies on this diet has on athletic performance. It seems you can do quite well with long distance sports and a paleo diet.

Weight loss on this diet was discussed and it actuallly can lead to weight loss but not inland of itself. Like any weight loss program it ultimately is a function of how may calories you eat vs how many your burn.

So really I am back to what I started with. Eat lean protein, veggies and lots of them, healthy fats and some grains though the grains need to be whole grains.

[_Doctor Lars C Umlaut]

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.

Hey, EA. Thanks for the response. In the short amount of time I've been reading up on this sort of stuff, your points have probably been mentioned the most often as a challenge to the whole anti-grain movement. So much, in fact, that you'd a thunk I'd a had a response at the ready, but alas....

Back when I was a TBM and an avid reader of the FAIR/FARMS stuff, I remember empathizing with the apologists' lament (originally formulated by a Catholic apologist, if memory serves) that a critic, in a sentence or two, could make a charge that would require the defender to provide untold paragraphs in rebuttal to make for something approaching an adequate response. While I bristle at the comparison of faith-based apologetics with that of the discussion I'm hoping to have here (aside, of course, from its obvious religious implications for the Word of Wisdom), this is nevertheless where I find myself.

I know it is poor form to throw links at one's interlocutor in the place of actual dialogue, but that will have to do for now, I'm afraid (the constraints of time being my present excuse). If your interest in the topic is such that you would care to explore the topic further, I will be happy to do my duty and extrapolate the specific points and data I personally feel have bearing on the challenges you raise. In the meantime, though, I think the below links speak to your points in an obvious enough way, and I am interested to see how far they go in persuading you of anything or in standing up to any scrutiny you care to offer.

Note: Some of these links are explicitly advocating a low carb or "Paleo diet" way of eating. It is only where they speak directly to the points you have raised that I have an interest in discussing.

What Do We Know About the Agricultural Demographic Transition?

Why Cavemen Didn't Actually Die Young

Didn’t caveman die very young, and if so why should we eat like him?

Longevity & health in ancient Paleolithic vs Neolithic peoples

Just How Long Did understand* Live, Really? (Bone dating life span)

Just How Long Did understand* Live, Really? – Part 2 (Life Expectancy in Hunter-Gatherers)

*"understand" being the name of that particular website's mascot and archetypical representative of our paleolithic ancestors.

In addition to these, I would also add the Jared Diamond article linked to above -- I believe he addresses health and life expectancy both pre- and post- the Agricultural Revolution (but, to be honest, I've skimmed through so many articles since I last read that that I could be mistaken).

Quite a bit to sort through, I realize, but, like I said, I will be happy to unpack these in discussion-sized chunks if you'd prefer (after the holidays, most likely).

If I don't make it back to the thread in the next couple days, I wish the whole lot of you a Merry Christmas (or Happy Holidays, if that tickles your pickle), and thanks again to everyone who has followed along, and extra thanks to those who have chimed in.

PS! I illegally downloaded from The Pirate Bay a fine film last night that I would enthusiastically recommend to anyone remotely interested in anything that has been discussed in this thread. It's called In Search of the Perfect Human Diet, and its official website is here, the official trailer is here, and you can download it, legally, from iTunes here. Cheers!

PPS! Jason, I saw your post as I was submitting this one. Thanks for your reply and I will get back to you as soon as I can!

[_EAllusion]

After reading the first two links, I think you missed my point. My point is that agriculture enabled a division of labor to occur that allowed people to spend far less time per capita on food production. The Jared Diamond link you offer estimates hunger-gatherers spend about 20 hours a week on collecting food. That might not seem like a lot, but we spend a lot less time on that particular activity. We also can sustain a much higher population in the same place due to efficiency of scale. This frees up time and resources for people to do other things that are productive and advance overall health. Infant mortality didn't just magically go way, way down with civilization advances. It's a byproduct of having an infrastructure that allowed modern medicine to develop. Agriculture is a backbone of that. It's not a coincidence that hunter-gatherers don't build hospitals or develop antibiotics. People into primeval lifestyles can only function without the horrors of primeval living by being parasitic upon civilization.

Your own link estimates paleolithic lifespans at around 35 years for men and 30 for women (presumably because of childbirth), which is horrifying. There's a slight dip going into the bronze age, then a gradual climb out followed by an explosion after the industrial age. That's not "healthy." That's death around every corner.

By the way, if the argument you want to make is that modern grains are irresistible to the way our brains are wired, then we by definition evolved to eat that.

[_Chap]

After reading the first two links, I think you missed my point. My point is that agriculture enabled a division of labor to occur that allowed people to spend far less time per capita on food production. The Jared Diamond link you offer estimates hunger-gatherers spend about 20 hours a week on collecting food. That might not seem like a lot, but we spend a lot less time on that particular activity.

I think that you need to think a bit more about that part of your answer. To equate a hunter-gatherer's food collecting time with (say) the time that a modern city-dweller spends sending in an online supermarket order neglects the time that the modern person has to spend working to earn the money to pay his or her food costs - as well as all the other things a modern city dweller needs in order to survive. By contrast, hunter-gatherers well-adapted to their environment seem to have had a lot of leisure time.

We also can sustain a much higher population in the same place due to efficiency of scale. This frees up time and resources for people to do other things that are productive and advance overall health. Infant mortality didn't just magically go way, way down with civilization advances. It's a byproduct of having an infrastructure that allowed modern medicine to develop. Agriculture is a backbone of that. It's not a coincidence that hunter-gatherers don't build hospitals or develop antibiotics. People into primeval lifestyles can only function without the horrors of primeval living by being parasitic upon civilization.

For nearly all of the existence of urban civilization, large cities killed so many of their population through rampant disease that they could only maintain themselves by migration from the countryside around them. The kind of medicine we have today is a very, very recent development: the first antibiotic (penicillin) was only available in any quantity from the middle of the 20th century.

Your own link estimates paleolithic lifespans at around 35 years for men and 30 for women (presumably because of childbirth), which is horrifying. There's a slight dip going into the bronze age, then a gradual climb out followed by an explosion after the industrial age. That's not "healthy." That's death around every corner.

For most of its existence, agriculture does not appear to have made people markedly healthier, as you seem to acknowledge. And I think you need to take a less coarse-grained look at life expectancy. High infant mortality makes average life-span after birth give a misleadingly low picture of how long one can expect to live once one gets to (say) fifteen. A large number of people who survived childhood seem to have lived to middle age and beyond.

I am no romantic about pre-Neolithic life: we are where we are in any case, and we can't go back. But there is no reason to paint a rosy picture of inevitable progress post agriculture either. As for 'the horrors of primeval living', I think they might bear comparison with the experiences of many unfortunate people living in 'advanced' civilizations over the past 100 years.

[_The Dude]

Did anybody read up on this doctor's claims?

From my reading, it appears that gliadin can bind to a novel type of opioid receptor found on lymphocytes. So it might affect the immune system somehow. But this doctor is saying or implying wheat protein therefore makes us addicted like an opioid drug? That's cooky. He sounds full of crap. Some people are immuno-sensitive to gluten and gliadin and shouldn't eat it. Both gliadin and gluten are natural components of wheat, which need not be genetically modified (using 60's and 70's technology, according to the doctor) to contain them. He's just throwing in "genetically modified" because that's another buzzword to get people's attention.

He is trying to sell a diet-fad book like Atkins.

[_EAllusion]

I think that you need to think a bit more about that part of your answer. To equate a hunter-gatherer's food collecting time with (say) the time that a modern city-dweller spends sending in an online supermarket order neglects the time that the modern person has to spend working to earn the money to pay his or her food costs

That's entirely my point though. I don't spend my time doing things like foraging for food in exchange for my labor towards other ends. People benefit because I do things for them other than food production in order to get food. This division of labor is the crux of civilization and why we have things like scientists and hospitals while paleolithic peoples went tens of thousands of years without.

For most of its existence, agriculture does not appear to have made people markedly healthier, as you seem to acknowledge.

The argument I'm responding to is looking on a geological scale where this did develop in a relative blink once civilization got a foothold.

A large number of people who survived childhood seem to have lived to middle age and beyond.

I alluded to this in my first response, then noted in my second response that Lars' own link estimates lifespan for men at around 35 for paleolithic people. That's beside the point though, as hunter-gatherers suck at dealing with infant mortality and this factors into whether we describe that population as "healthier" than our own.

[_Racer]

If this wheat thing is true, expect a: "When Joseph Smith said wheat in the WOW he didn't really mean wheat. What critics of the church painstakingly fail to realize... blah blah blah..." article in the next edition of Mormon Interpreter.

[_RockSlider]

"The whiter the bread, the sooner your dead"