Four Weeks to Healthy Eating: Week Two—Adding Whole Grains to your Diet
Fact: There is almost zero nutritional value in white flour. That’s a little disheartening when you think of how pervasive white flour is in breads, cereals, pastas and restaurant food. Womenfitness.net has a great article called “Ugly Truths About White Flour,” in which the writer explains why white bread is white (bleached like your clothes!), how the benefits of the actual wheat are lost in the process of making white flour and what white flour ultimately does to the body—fattens it up and makes it struggle to work harder during digestion. My personal opinion on white flour: AVOID IT. Whole grains, like barley, brown rice, wild rice, oatmeal, millet and bulgur, haven’t had their bran and germ removed during the refining process so they are definitely better than any refined flours. Our bodies respond well to the fiber offered by bran and germ and so the less of it we get, the less our bodies are able to process and digest food. When that happens, organs like the pancreas have to work harder.
Try to cook and bake at home, using whole grains instead of white flour (oats and brown rice are best; use quinoa too, though it’s a seed, not a grain). If that’s not possible, look for labels that state the use of whole grains. Wheat bread is not the same as whole wheat bread. The more “grainy” the flour, the better.
Truth be told, even whole grains are not the best nutrition-wise, despite their increased amounts of fiber and magnesium. In The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth, author Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S., quotes Regina Wilshire, N.D.: “While grains do add the perception of variety and bulk in the diet, they’re not a superior source for essential nutrients when compared with other options.” That being said, start replacing white flour with whole grains, but keep grains, in general, to a minimum. Not to get too earthy-crunchy, but our natural diet (for the past 2.4 million years) is based on things to be “hunted, fished for, gathered or plucked.”1 That never included rice or wheat, neither of which you can eat without some sort of refining.
Coming Up Next Week: Four Weeks to Healthy Eating: Week Three—Portion Control
1. The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth. Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S. Fair Winds Press, Gloucester, MA, 2007.
Tags: diet, eating healthy, Fiber, Four Weeks to Eating Healthy, grains, health, healthy diet, healthy eating, magnesium, white flour, whole grains
