Nutrition Heresy No. 1: Avoid wholegrains if you care about your health

If you eat wholegrains don’t expect any health benefits. There, I said it

I’ll go even further and say that if you base your diet on wholegrains, you might experience some gut problems. You might also experience blood sugar issues along with protein, vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

Don’t expect to live longer, either, because wholegrains are said to be the stars of the Blue Zones diet. Or is it the Mediterranean diet? Because neither diet actually exists in the real world. They exist only in books and articles.

Despite this, you’ll find plenty of guidelines urging you to fill your plate with these rarely spotted wholegrains.

How did it come to this?

In March 2016, Public Health England launched its revised Eatwell Guide, the most recent incarnation of guidelines that began life as the Balance of Good Health in 1994, then became the Eatwell Plate in 2007, before settling into its current identity as the Eatwell Guide. The plate has now gone, but the message remains very much the same.

If you were to follow the Eatwell Guide, you would:

‘Base meals on potatoes, bread, rice, pasta or other starchy carbohydrates; choosing wholegrain versions where possible.’

The Eatwell Guide is virtually identical to the US food pyramid, introduced in 1992, which became MyPlate in 2011, making more or less the same suggestions but with a different representation.

The Eatwell Guide

Source: Public Health England in association with the Welsh Government, Food Standards Scotland and the Food Standards Agency in Northern Ireland. ©Crown copyright 2016

What is a wholegrain?

A grain is the seed of a cereal plant. ‘Whole’ means that it has not been milled to remove the outer fibre (bran) and the germ. The germ is the part that contains the nutrients. When refined, all that’s left is the starchy centre.

That starch, once eaten, is converted into glucose before entering blood circulation.

So what’s not to love about wholegrains, you might argue?

Plenty. I shall now set out my case in seven points.

1. The glycemic index of most wholegrains is barely any lower than that of refined grains

The glycaemic index (GI) is a system which measures the rate at which the carbohydrate component of a food item enters the bloodstream and raises blood glucose, on a scale of 0 to 100. Carbohydrates are designated either a low (55 or less) medium (56-69)  or high (70 and above)  GI score.

According to the Eatwell Guide, wholegrains:

… ‘often have a low glycaemic index (GI). This means they provide a slow release of carbohydrate into the blood which, together with fibre content, may help keep you feeling fuller for longer – aiding to control snacking and appetite.’

This statement is entirely baseless.

There is little difference in GI value between most common wholegrains and refined grains. White bread has a GI of 75; wholemeal bread has a GI of 74. White rice has a GI of 73, brown rice 68.

Even rye-based breads have a medium to high GI. You’d think that that blackish, hard bread, with its whiff of the puritanicals about it, must surely have a low GI, but no.

2. Wholegrains are high in phytates

Phytates are compounds found in grains (especially wholegrains), seeds, nuts and beans. They form complexes that bind to minerals, including iron, zinc and calcium. Because humans lack phytase, the enzyme that breaks down phytate, minerals pass largely unabsorbed through the body. And because phytate is heat stable, it is not easily degraded by cooking.

This prevention of mineral absorption means that phytate is ‘..of major concern for individuals who depend mainly on plant derivative foods’.

3. Wholegrains will make you fat, just like refined grains

Cattle are usually finished on grains to fatten them up before slaughter. Grains have the same effect on you:  all that glucose will be converted into fat and stored in your adipose tissue.

4. Wholegrains irritate the gut

The fibre in some wholegrains, namely wheat, rye, and barley is quite harsh and can seriously upset the gut, causing irritable bowel syndrome. This common condition affects up to 15% of people in the US, mainly women. Here in the UK, with our similar diets and similar lifestyles, that figure is more or less the same.

Some plant foods contain substances that are so damaging to the gut that they cause or aggravate intestinal permeability, or leaky gut.

Leaky gut means that the lining of the small intestine, the epithelium, has been damaged and has become porous. Once in the blood, undesirable elements — including toxins and undigested food particles — have access to all areas.

One of these substances is lectin. Lectins are found in all plant foods, especially cereal grains (wheat, rye, barley, oats, corn), beans, nuts and potatoes. Cereal grains and legumes are probably the most problematic. Lectins are there for a reason: they deter animals from eating the plant and they protect against insect attack. Most are resistant to heat and digestive enzymes, surviving intact as they pass through the body. Unfortunately for us, they can also bind to the digestive tract and interfere with the digestion and absorption of nutrients. They can cause diarrhoea, vomiting, digestive pain and bloating, and disrupt the healthy gut microbiome.

5. Wholegrains are low in protein

If you base your diet on wholegrains, you are basing your diet on glucose. See 1) and 3) above. To help maintain even blood sugar levels, each meal should be based on protein.

6. Wholegrains taste horrible

Wholemeal bread is just about tolerable, if you slather it with enough butter or olive oil, but have you tried wholegrain pasta? It’s cardboard. Wholemeal rice is chewy and unforgiving, unlike white rice, which is not pretending to be anything other than quite flavoursome and a good sponge for soaking up sauces. Same goes for white pasta.

7. Humans did not evolve on grains

Grains are relative newcomers to the human diet. Humans only started farming roughly 11,000 years ago; for over two million years, we were hunter gatherers who did not eat cereal grains. We are not genetically adapted to a grain-based diet.

So why are we eating this stuff?

According to political scientist, anthropologist and author of Against the Grain (Yale), James C. Scott, the cultivation of cereal crops enabled the creation of the first state, around 3,300 BCE. All early states were founded on grain-farming populations. Growing crops gave the nascent state exactly what it needed in order to be a state: control and power. To have power, a state must have people; people do all the work.

People had to be captured and forced into slavery, and that was achieved by raids and war. Grain cultivation was important to warfare, as large-scale storage enabled rationing of food to labourers, slaves and soldiers, and meant that a city under siege could be fed. And because money did not then exist, tax was paid to the state in the form of grain by the farmer.

According to Scott, cereal grains were the only crop that could be paid as tax. The growing cereal grass is above ground and therefore visible. It is much easier for officials and inspectors to assess, divide, store, transport, and ration. Being easy to store made it an ideal tax crop, easy to document - early writing in Mesopotamia was developed exclusively for the purpose of documenting and taxing grain.

Although cereal grains are newcomers to the human diet and were not part of our evolutionary pattern of eating, and have relatively low nutrient values, with low bioavailability, they are now officially the most essential of all the food groups and should provide the bulk of our diets.

I’m not suggesting that you base your diet on refined carbohydrates instead of wholegrains. God forbid. I’m suggesting that you just don’t need grains at all. And if you’re eating lots of grains, you probably aren’t eating enough protein because there’s only so much room on your plate.

I rest my case.

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