Grains - Dangerous And Fattening?

Grains are a very prominent part of the modern diet, but you may be surprised to know that they’re also potentially health-harming in a number of ways. 

Processed grains encompass foods such as breads, pasta, pies and confectionary (cake, biscuits, muffins, croissants etc.) as well as refined flours.  Whole-grains consist of rice, millet, quinoa, amarinth, cornmeal, spelt, wild rice, barley, buckwheat, oats, rye and kamut, as well as any of these grains that have been stone ground into flour.

Traditionally, humans always soaked grains in an acidic medium in order to encourage a fermentation process (we’re speaking of whole-grains here, as this was the only type of grain type we had access to, back in the day). 

Grains contain high levels of compounds in their bran, called phytates.  The medium they were soaked in was acidic (cultured milk, buttermilk, whey, lemon juice or vinegar), which activated the enzyme phytase.  This helped aid digestion by breaking down phytic acid, a gut irritant (contributing to food intolerances, celiac disease and irritable bowel syndrome, amongst other things). 

Soaking also increases the vitamin content and makes all the nutrients in grains more readily available to the body.

So, if you choose to eat grains, make sure they’re always organic whole-grains and soak them for 12-24 hours in liquid whey (contact me for sources), lemon juice or vinegar … about 2 tablespoons per 2 cups of grain. 

You’ll find they cook much faster than un-soaked grains and may leave you feeling satisfied, without any gut disturbances (bloating, gassiness, pain etc.)

A word of warning is necessary, however, since over-consumption of grains (both processed and whole) can result in high insulin.  This can lead to insulin resistance, diabetes and heart disease, as well as ‘overweight’ or obesity. 

By way of explanation, grains belong to the macronutrient group carbohydrates (the other macronutrients are proteins and fats).  Carbohydrates are the only foodstuffs able to alter blood sugar. 

This is because they break down very quickly into sugars in the body, potentially playing havoc with blood sugar levels and leading to a host of inflammatory conditions.  Please note that processed carbs are broken down more rapidly into sugar than their whole-grain counterpart, making them even more problematic.

When blood sugar rises, the pancreas produces insulin, which results in a signal being given to various cells to ‘open’ to receive this excess glucose.  Usually (unless you’ve just finished an exercise session) the muscle cells will be ‘asked’ first, but they’re invariably full from your previous meal; the liver cells are asked next, but they too tend to be full – waiting to convert their own stores of glycogen back into glucose, to feed to the muscle cells when they run out of fuel.  This means that the fat cells are free and eager to pick up and convert the excess glucose into fat! 

If the above pattern happens frequently enough, the cells can become ‘deaf’ to the insulin signal (this is called insulin resistance) and thus require more and more insulin in order to react.  Given enough time, the pancreas can fail to produce enough insulin to maintain homeostasis in the blood and so diabetes (pancreatic failure) occurs.

To achieve good health and ideal weight, you’ll want to be focussing on developing insulin sensitivity in the cells – in other words, you want cells that ‘hear’ insulin’s signal immediately and are able to take up and store as much glucose as possible. 

Once again, please bear in mind that your metabolic type (MT) will have a significant bearing on whether or not your body can tolerate (processed or whole) grains well.  In other words, certain MTs handle the blood sugar response very well, whereas others don’t at all (leading to weight gain and/or the other conditions previously mentioned, as well as a reduction in energy and well-being).