So just how much can we blame on the adoption of the seeds of grasses into the human diet? Let’s consider that question next. Each variety of seeds of grasses poses its own unique set of challenges to nonruminants who consume them. Before we get under way in our discussion of regaining health in the absence of grains, let’s talk about just how they ruin the health of every human who allows them to adorn his or her plate.
I asked the waiter, ‘Is this milk fresh?’ He said, ‘Lady, three hours ago it was grass.’ Phyllis Diller
Grasses are everywhere.
They grow on mountains, along rivers and lakes, in valleys, vast steppes, savannahs, prairies, golf courses and your garden. And they now reign supreme in the human diet.
Grasses are wonderfully successful life forms. They are geographically diverse, inhabiting every continent, including Antarctica. They are a study in how life can adapt to extremes, from the tundra to the tropics. Grasses are prolific and hardy, and they evolve rapidly to survive. Even with the explosive growth of the human population, worldwide expansion of cities and suburbs, and tarmac spanning the US coast-to-coast, grasses still cover 20 per cent of the earth’s surface area. Just as insects are the most successful form of animal life on the planet, grasses are among the most successful of plants. Given their ubiquity, perhaps it’s not unexpected that we would try to eat them. Humans have experimented with feasting on just about every plant and creature that ever inhabited the earth. After all, we are creatures who make food out of tarantulas and poisonous puffer fish.
While grasses have served as food for many creatures (they’ve even been recovered from fossilized dinosaur faeces), they were not a food item on our dietary menu during our millions of years of adaptation to life on this planet. Pre-Homo hominids, chimpanzee-like australopithecines that date back more than 4 million years, did not consume grasses in any form or variety, nor has any species of Homo prior to sapiens. Grasses were simply not instinctively regarded as food. Much as you’d never spot an herbivorous giraffe eating the carcass of a hyena or a great white shark munching on sea kelp, humans did not consume any part of this group of plants, no matter how evolutionarily successful, until the relatively recent past.
The seeds of grasses are a form of ‘food’ added just a moment ago in archaeological time. For the first 2,390,000 years of our existence on earth, or about 8,000 generations, we consumed things that hungry humans instinctively regarded as food. Then, 10,000 years or just over 300 generations ago, in times of desperation, we turned to those darned seeds of grasses. They were something we hoped could serve as food, since they were growing from every conceivable environmental nook and cranny.
So let us consider what this stuff is, the grasses that have populated our world, as common as ants and earthworms, and been subverted into the service of the human diet. Not all grasses, of course, have come to grace your dinner plate – you don’t save and eat the clippings from cutting your lawn, do you? – so we’ll confine our discussion to the grasses and seeds that humans have chosen to include on our dinner plates. I discuss this issue at some length, because it’s important for you to understand that consumption of the seeds of grasses underlies a substantial proportion of the chronic problems of human health. Accordingly, removing them yields unexpected and often astounding relief from these issues and is therefore an absolutely necessary first step towards regaining health, the ultimate goal of this book. We will spend a lot of time talking about how recovering full health as a non-grass-consuming Homo sapiens of the 21st century – that means you – also means having to compensate for all of the destruction that has occurred in your body during your unwitting grain-consuming years. You’ve consumed what amounts to a dietary poison for 20, 30 or 50 years, a habit that your non-grain-accustomed body partially – but never completely – adapts to, endures or succumbs to. You then remove that poison and, much as a chronic alcoholic needs to recover and heal his liver, heart, brain and emotional health after the flow of alcohol ceases, so your body needs a bit of help to readjust and regain health minus the destructive seeds of grasses.
So what makes the grasses of the world a food appropriate for the ruminants of the earth, but not Homo sapiens? There is no single factor within grains responsible for its wide array of bowel-destroying effects – there is an arsenal.
Non-Wheat Grains: You Might As Well Eat Jelly Beans
There is no question that, in this barrel of rotten apples, wheat is the rottenest. But you still may not want to make cider with those other apples.
What I call ‘non-wheat grains’, such as oats, barley, rye, millet, teff, sorghum, corn and rice, are nonetheless seeds of grasses with potential for curious effects in nonruminant creatures not adapted to their consumption. I would classify non-wheat grains as less bad than the worst – modern wheat – but less bad is not necessarily good. (That extraordinarily simple insight – that less bad is not necessarily good – is one that will serve you well over and over as you learn to question conventional nutritional advice. You will realize that much of what we have been told by the dietary community, the food industry and even government agencies violates this basic principle of logic again and again.) Less bad can mean that a variety of undesirable health effects can still occur with that seed’s consumption – those effects will just not be as bad as those provoked by modern wheat.
So what’s the problem with the seeds of non-wheat grasses? While none achieve the nastiness of the seeds of modern wheat, they each have their own unique issues. For starters, they’re all high in carbohydrates. Typically, 60 to 85 per cent of the calories from the seeds of grasses are in the form of carbohydrates. This makes sense, since the carbohydrate stored in the seed was meant to provide nutrition to the sprouting plant as it germinates. But the carbohydrate in seeds, called amylopectin A, is rapidly digested by humans and raises blood sugar, gram for gram, higher than table sugar does.
For instance, a 125 g (4½ oz) serving of cooked organic, stoneground oatmeal has nearly 50 grams of net carbohydrates (total carbohydrates minus fibre, which we subtract because it has no glycaemic potential), or the equivalent of slightly more than 11 teaspoons of sugar, representing 61 per cent of the calories in oatmeal. This gives it a glycaemic index (GI, an index of blood sugar-raising potential) of 55, which is enough to send blood sugar through the roof and provoke all the phenomena of glycation, i.e., glucose modification of proteins that essentially acts as biological debris in various organs. This irreversible process leads to conditions such as cataracts, hypertension, the destruction of joint cartilage that results in arthritis, kidney disease, heart disease and dementia. (Note that a glycaemic index of 55 falls into what dietitians call the ‘low’ glycaemic index range, despite the potential to generate high blood sugars. We discuss this common fallacy in Chapter 5.) All non-wheat grasses, without exception, raise blood sugar and provoke glycation to similar degrees.
Human manipulation makes it worse. If corn is not consumed as intact kernels but instead is pulverized into fine cornflour, the surface area for digestion increases exponentially and accounts for the highest blood sugars possible from any food. This is why the glycaemic index of cornflour is 90 to 100, compared