The Problem with Grains in Our Diet - Part I

Another big problem with vegetarian diets is that they rely heavily on grains. Grains are not essential human food.

Think about it. Humans were human for at least 10 or 12 thousand years before we invented farming. Original humans had no need for daily doses of grain. We did eat those few ripe seed heads we walked by in the late summer, when the grass was tall and bending with these plump, inviting nuggets. We plucked those and chewed a few and shared the rest around.

This is a very different biochemical experience than toast for breakfast, bagel for lunch and spaghetti for dinner, decade after decade! We can eat grains, but we don’t have to, and the way we have come to eat them turns out to be not good for us. Not good at all.

Recently there has been a lot of research attention to the role of whole grains in the diet. Fresh, organically grown, unrefined grains like brown rice, oats and wheat can have a positive effect on cholesterol levels (by escorting it out of your body via your bowels) and thus heart disease.

There is also a protective effect for the bowel; people who eat whole grains have less bowel cancer. This is great news and shows how grains might be useful in our diet.

However, these studies looked at whole grains, which is not what most people eat. Most people eat breads, cereals, crackers, cookies, pasta and the like made from refined flour products.

Refined grains provide the food industry cheap, belly-filling, easy to store and ship material for value-added products. These are very profitable products as well. We have turned grains into amazing things- seitan, baguettes, cheez-doodles, ramen noodles and apple pie.

Tell people oatmeal will bring down their cholesterol (it will, science proves it) and we’ll go out and buy it. We’ll buy individual servings, little packets of the add-water-and-stir, chocolate-chip-and-cinnamon version and wonder why we keep getting fatter, our cholesterol is still threatening and we feel like – cold oatmeal.

These studies do not account for the fact that while the fiber in grains helps escort excess cholesterol out of the body, the starch in the grains actually increases how much cholesterol we make!

So, oats may bring your cholesterol down, but it wouldn’t have gone up as high in the first place it you were eating less starchy food! And it is adding calories we don’t burn up in muscles we don’t have.

We like cheap, we like easy and we may not be aware of the complex connection between those kinds of food choices and the inevitable health consequences.

A grain-based diet can be a very poor choice for women with PCOS. We explain in our PCOS diet book in detail why grains are not a good idea and why we don't include grains in our recommended diet.

In the next article, we'll finish our discussion of why grains may not be good for you.

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