Wednesday, August 29, 2012

What is the deal with Wheat?

Wheat is one of the oldest grains to have been cultivated, along with Rice and Sorghum. There are a few facts about wheat that are not generally known.

1) No traditional populations with hundreds of years of consumption history of wheat eats unfermented wheat.

2) In India, Punjabis and Muslims are the only traditional wheat eaters. Both used fermentation. Muslims still do it sometimes, but Punjabis have converted to roti completely, with the loss of their Sanjha Chulhas.

3) Using ground flour (not just of wheat) that had been ground more than a week ago, is a fairly recent phenomenon. See mycotoxins.

4) Using quick rise yeast along with sugar for fermentation is also a recent development.

5) Wheat Bran (the so called healthy wheat fiber) causes people to burn through their Vitamin D and other vitamins at an accelerated rateWhite skin of Caucasians is probably be due to a grain based diet, but maybe the grain being wheat which actively reduces Vitamin D, also added to the problem. 

6) WGA (Wheat Germ Agglutinin) is the toxin that causes the most damage in wheat. It is known to cause damage to the small intestine. It is pretty well known to cause gut permeability.  It gets removed by the wheat mills as it has unfavorable baking properties.

7) The most reliable outcome of The China Study, was that Wheat is highly related to heart diseases. Denise Minger tried to find relationships that could absolve wheat from the blame, using the data. She couldn't. Read the article.

8) Digesting wheat requires a very good digestive system. Unfortunately our digestive systems are suffering from Anti-biotics, lack of fermented foods, hygienic habits, inadvertently consuming chemicals that are designed to kill bacteria.

9) Gluten Free and Casein Free diets are advised to Autistic people.

10) The highly productive dwarf wheat plant is very low in nutrients. This is where most of the wheat comes from today. It may be a source of problems.

11) The wheat in commercial food products undergoes some changes that cause it to become poisonous. A quote from Chris Masterjohn.
In our day, we still refine the flour, but bleach it with chlorine, chlorine dioxide, or potassium bromate instead.  Rather than trying to reconstruct the nutritional composition of the original flour, we add a small handful of nutrients based on "current science," including synthetic "folic acid," which is otherwise not found in the food supply.  We often chemically or enzymatically deamidate it, mimicking the inflammatory process within the intestines of a celiac patient.  We then combine it into foods that have been engineered to maximize their addictive qualities so food companies can maximize their profits.  Is it any wonder that "wheat products" would cause disease?

Milk and Wheat connection:
In almost all places where Wheat is eaten Milk is also consumed. I suspect that this is because Milk is effective in counteracting the damages caused by wheat. This research shows that its not entirely obvious why milk tolerance was selected. It is also interesting that milk tolerance did not get selected in Maize eating populations of America, or the Rice eating populations of the Far East Asia. The only places it was selected for were wheat eating populations. This means that probably, wheat (even in the older times) was so bad for the body, that only people who could survive for long were adapted to milk digestion. This means that drinking pastured whole milk (possibly raw as well, but definitely not UHT and Homogenized milk) is an absolute requirement for eating wheat..

Conclusion:
Wheat if eaten should be freshly ground from clean grains, then fermented, before cooking, and eaten along with pastured whole raw milk. Since this is a lot more work than people would normally want to put in, and it is very difficult to get good milk, it is best to avoid wheat. It must never be eaten by people with damaged gut. There is still a chance (IMO only a small chance) that Dr. William Davis is right about the dwarf wheat variety being evil :-).

A Note on China Study: It is one of the few studies that provided all their data openly. The good thing about this study is that there is a lot of variations in the diet. A funny thing is that the conclusions the researchers reached from their data is not supported by their data. There are several reviews of the study data that give very different conclusions.

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