When ground into flours, most grains act like
sugar in the body, triggering weight gain, inflammation and blood-sugar
imbalances. Here’s why whole kernels are a better option.
Flour is hard to sidestep come mealtime. Breakfast brims with
toast, bagels, cereal, pancakes. Lunch is built around sandwiches,
wraps, pasta, pizza. And dinner may come with its very own breadbasket.
Flours are produced by crushing grains into fine powders. And those
powders form the basis not just for breads and buns, but for a huge
variety of processed foods, from cereals, crackers and pizza dough to
cookies, cakes and ice cream cones. As a result, the average American
now eats 10 servings of refined grains each day.
As our national appetite for flour has inched up, so has the
incidence of diet-related ills, such as obesity, heart disease and
diabetes. Coincidence? Many nutrition experts don’t think so. When they
weigh the evidence linking food choices and disease, they see the white,
dusty fingerprints of flour everywhere.
“Now that trans fats are largely out of the food supply,” says David
Ludwig, MD, PhD, director of the New Balance Foundation Obesity
Prevention Center at Children’s Hospital Boston, “refined carbohydrates, including refined grain products, are the single most harmful influence in the American diet today.”
Flour started out as an ingenious fix to a vexing problem. Grass
seeds were plentiful, but the tough outer shell (the husk) made the
seeds difficult to chew and digest. Early humans outsmarted the seeds by
grinding them between stones, crushing the outer layers to get at the
goodness inside. The result — a coarse powder — was the first
whole-grain flour.
The downside was spoilage. Crushing the germ released its oils, which
quickly turned rancid when exposed to air. With the advent of
industrial milling in the late 1800s, machines began filtering out the
germ and pulverized the remaining endosperm into a fine, white powder
that lasted on the shelf for months. And so all-purpose white flour was
born — along with a host of health problems.
Beneath their rigid architecture, whole-kernel grains conceal an
array of vitamins, minerals, phytonutrients and fiber. But when machines
pulverize kernels into flour, even whole-grain flour, what’s left
behind is a starchy powder capable of wreaking havoc on the body.
The White Menace
Flour, as opposed to whole-kernel grains, is easy to overconsume
because most flour-based foods require little chewing and go down rather
quickly. “It is so much easier to overconsume any food where the work
of chewing or digesting or separating fiber from starch has been done
for us,” says functional nutritionist Julie Starkel, MS, MBA, RD.
Overconsuming flour can lead to a number of problems in the body, including:
Blood-Sugar Blues. Smashing a whole-kernel grain to
smithereens means it digests faster. Rapid-fire digestion causes blood
sugar to spike, which causes a rise in insulin. The result? Not only are
you hungry two hours later, but you are also paving the way for insulin
resistance and diabetes. “The difference between a whole-kernel grain
and a processed grain all boils down to the glycemic index, which is how
quickly the body turns food into fuel, or glucose,” says Gerard Mullin,
MD, FACN, director of integrative gastroenterology nutrition at Johns
Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Md., and coauthor of The Inside Tract: Your Good Gut Guide to Great Digestive Health
(Rodale, 2011). Foods made with wheat flour are particularly damaging. A
carbohydrate in wheat, called amylopectin A, is more easily converted
to blood sugar than just about any other carbohydrate. Two slices of
bread made with whole-wheat flour raise blood sugar higher than six
teaspoons of table sugar and higher than many candy bars.
“If we were evil scientists and we said, ‘Let’s make the most perfect
poison,’ it would be wheat,” says preventive cardiologist William
Davis, MD. (For more on why Davis advises against eating any kind of
wheat — including even whole-kernel grains
Food Cravings. Over the past 50 years, the amber
waves of grain our grandparents enjoyed have been replaced with modern,
high-yield dwarf strains of wheat that produce more seeds and grow
faster. The result is a dietary wild card, says Davis: “Agricultural
geneticists never asked if these new strains of wheat were suitable for
human consumption. Their safety has never been tested.” One of the
biggest changes in modern wheat is that it contains a modified form of
gliadin, a protein found in wheat gluten. Gliadin unleashes a feel-good
effect in the brain by morphing into a substance that crosses the
blood-brain barrier and binds onto the brain’s opiate receptors.
“Gliadin is a very mind-active compound that increases people’s
appetites,” says Davis. “People on average eat 400 more calories a day
when eating wheat, thanks to the appetite-stimulating effects of gliadin.”
ined grain packs more calories than a whole-kernel grain because it
is more concentrated. And foods that are high in grains also tend to be
high in sugar and industrialized fats. These are the foods, say many
experts, that are causing our obesity and diabetes epidemic.
Metabolic Slowdown. Research shows that the body may
shift nutrients into fat storage and away from muscle burning in the
presence of high-glycemic-index foods. In 2004, Ludwig and his
colleagues at Harvard conducted a study, published in the journal Lancet,
in which they fed rats diets with identical nutrients, except for the
type of starch. By the end of the study, rats in both groups weighed
roughly the same, but those eating a high-glycemic diet had 71 percent
more fat than the low-glycemic-index group.
Inflammation. A diet high in grains stokes inflammation.
When blood sugar spikes, glucose builds up in the blood like so many
standby passengers on a flight. When glucose loiters in the blood, it
gets into trouble by attaching itself to nearby proteins. The result is a
chemical reaction called glycation, a pro-inflammatory process that
plays a role in a host of inflammatory diseases — everything from
cataracts to arthritis to heart disease.
GI Disorders. Studies show that the lectins in
grains inflame the lining of the gut and create fissures between cells.
Also, when whole-kernel grains are refined, 80 percent of the fiber is
lost, and gut health suffers. “Without the fiber, you end up with
rapid-release carbs in these grains, which is a bad thing for the gut,”
says Kathie Swift, MS, RD, coauthor (with Mullin) of The Inside Tract.
Plus, fiber helps sweep the gut of debris and supports the body’s
critically important elimination and detoxification processes, which
also play a role in keeping high cholesterol and inflammation at bay.
Food Allergies/Intolerances. Wheat, in particular,
is one of the biggest dietary triggers of food allergies and
intolerances. While the exact reason is unclear, many experts blame the
higher gluten content of modern wheat varieties. A type of protein found
in many grains, including wheat, gluten gives dough elasticity,
trapping air bubbles and creating a soft texture. Because soft is
considered desirable, wheat today is bred to have more gluten than ever
before.
Acid-Alkaline Imbalance. The body has an elaborate
system of checks and balances to keep its pH level at a steady 7.4. A
diet high in acidic foods, such as grains, forces the body to pull
calcium from the bones to keep things on an even keel. When researchers
looked at how the diets of more than 500 women affected their bone
density, they found that a diet high in refined grains, among other
nutrient-poor foods, was linked to bone loss. A highly acidic diet also
chips away at our cellular vitality and immunity in ways that can make
us vulnerable to chronic disease. “Grains are the only plant foods that
generate acidic byproducts,” says Davis. “Wheat, in particular, is among
the most potent sources of sulfuric acid, a powerful substance that
quickly overcomes the neutralizing effects of alkaline bases.”
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