According to the food pyramid, most of our diet should come from grains. Is the food pyramid correct or are grains actually unhealthy for us? If so, what makes grains bad?
Did you know that grains are not edible in nature without human processing? This means that if you walked through a wheat field and started nibbling on the wheat plant, your body wouldn’t be able to do much with it. Grains are only edible to humans if they are fermented, soaked or sprouted.
Humans have only been consuming grains since the start of agriculture. In fact, the Egyptians were the first culture to harvest grains and were the first culture to document heart attacks.
The problems with grains are that they breakdown rapidly into sugar. For example, if you were to take a piece of bread and crush it into a ball in your hands, you are eating that amount of refined sugar. That amount of sugar spikes your blood sugar and insulin levels beyond the levels that humans are designed to handle regularly.
Eventually, you will tire out many organs in your body and can cause insulin resistance, hypoglycemia or diabetes II. Your immune system will also crash when your blood sugar reaches such high levels! It can take hours before your immune systems fully recovers. Do you want to avoid the flu? Stay away from anything that will spike your blood sugar!
Another problem with refined grains is that the processing processes the nutrients right out of the grains. So, each time you eat a slice of bread your body has to take nutrients from its own stores to breakdown that slice of bread. This will make you nutritionally deficient and can cause many other problems.
As you can see, grains, although they taste good, will negatively impact your health if eaten frequently. Stayed tuned for future posts on how to soak, sprout and ferment grains to make them edible and easy to digest.
In the meantime, this is my absolute favorite grain free bread recipe! Give it a try, you might even like it more than wonder bread.