Archives for December 2009

This post is basically for the purpose of highlighting a couple of others’ posts on grains in case you haven’t seen them.

First, Mark Sisson took on the "Better Fed" and "Feasting on Grains" nonsense I posted on the other day.

Let’s suppose that Mercader’s dating estimates are correct. Let’s also suppose that the tools Mercader tested had indeed been used to prepare food, as the presence of other food residues suggest. First off, it doesn’t necessarily follow that the sorghum was also used as food. Tools, for prehistoric humans (if not for moderns as well) needed to serve multiple purposes, supporting not just food preparation but shelter construction and other daily living tasks. As one archeologist skeptic, Curtis Marean of Arizona State University in Tempe, explains, grasses were regular parts of “bedding” and “kindling.” Another critic, Huw Barton from the University of Leicester, questions Mercader’s assumption that the sorghum had been used for food based on the curious presence of the residue on tools not associated with food preparation, including drills.

See Mark’s entire post. And I suggest also reading the article Mark links to.

Next up is the always pointed & frank Dr. Kurt Harris, MD. While he doesn’t take on this piece of nonsense garbage that I and Mark did — probably because it’s just too stupid for his tastes — he takes on grains themselves: as poison garbage. And, too, he takes on the Weston A. Price Foundation (WAPF) for their silly insistence on what should really be termed ‘proper preparation of poison.’ Now, I certainly don’t want to become and enemy of WAPF, I’ve linked to many of their articles many times, and Price, as Kurt says, was a giant in nutrition. But I do not get this insistence on "neutralizing" what’s just toxic poison.

The larger point is this – The whole exercise of finding a way to justify eating gluten grains is beyond pointless.

We have here a class of plant proteins derived from the seeds of plants that do not want to be eaten and that we did not evolve eating – cereal grains. These gliadin proteins (glutenins and gliadins) have known effects on gut permeability even in those without celiac disease via the innate immune response. These effects are in addition to those of wheat germ agglutinin (WGA), a secondary plant compound found in wheat germ that is elaborated solely to discourage consumption of seeds by animals.

The WAPF position is that, rather than simply avoiding eating things with gluten, we should soak, sprout and ferment these noxious plant seeds and eat them anyway, in hopes that our preparation has hydrolyzed enough of the gluten to make short enough peptides that the immunogenicity is diminished.

I suggest wheat advocates who worship tradition pay for access to this short report published in GUT – I did – and then explain why a celiac, or indeed anyone with a gut should expose themselves to even microgram amounts of incompletely hydrolysed gluten when 5 out of 6 people without evidence of CS (Celiac Sprue) have evidence of an abnormal innate immune response using a highly sensitive assay.

[…]

You can live fine with zero gluten grains in your diet. Wheat flour is vitamin poor, has no nutritious fat that isn’t rancid, and the proteins in it are incomplete in their amino acid complement. There is absolutely no upside to eating wheat if you are not starving

So why engineer some convoluted preparation ritual in order to eat it? Why not just avoid it?

At any rate, see Kurt’s post to get the real scoop on what’s going on with grains, gluten in particular. And the comments have to be seen to be believed. Also in the comments, Kurt demonstrates why dairy is not at all in the same category as grains from an evolutionary, Paleo diet standpoint.