Broad Criticisms That Grains Undermine Health

Despite Davis’ weak assertions, American neurologist David Perlmutter (b. 1954), introduced in Chapter 1, expressed “love” for Wheat Belly.⁵⁶ He enlarged Davis’ critique by implicating all gluten- containing grains in dementia, writing that “Modern grains are silently destroying your brain.”⁵⁷ Fundamental to his criticisms is belief that grains, having many carbohydrates, are unnatural given the supposition, challenged in Chapter 10, that ancestral diets were 75 percent fat and only 5 percent carbohydrates.⁵⁸

Perlmutter’s position depends on the premise that people eat lots of bread, breakfast cereals, pastries, and related products and that these items harm the body. Yet the claim that these foods are unhealthy contradicts his admission of a “dramatic reduction” in deaths from heart disease, stroke, and some cancers between 2000 and 2014.⁵⁹ Sickness and death should increase rather than diminish amid consumption of harmful foods. As mortality from heart disease and cancers declined, as Perlmutter conceded, people must succumb to other conditions. Despite life’s implacable limits, he appears to inhabit a counterfactual universe where humans can exist in a utopia free from all maladies. Such naivete ignores life’s finitude. Despite fervent wishes otherwise, death spares no one.

Gluten as Straw Man

At the microlevel—Chapter 2 distinguished between macrolevel and microlevel explanations—and as previous paragraphs noted, the attack against wheat targets gluten, mentioned earlier as a group of over one hundred proteins in several grains. Celiac disease sufferers cannot ingest it without harming the small intestine, though critics go beyond this fact to assert that everyone should eschew gluten in the belief that it irritates the digestive system irrespective of celiac disease. These detractors believe that the immune system retaliates by inflaming the digestive tract’s cells. This information convinced 63 percent of Americans that reducing or eliminating gluten may enhance health.⁶⁰

The rationale against gluten, however, requires that if something injures a subset of people, it must distress many others. Such reasoning is faulty because what troubles some may not affect others. For example, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia, reported that influenza killed roughly 80,000 Americans in late 2017 and early 2018.⁶¹ But this mortality does not necessitate that it will kill me. The danger exists but is unknown. Such uncertainty might lead people to think me irrational should I refuse to leave home or admit anyone for fear of influenza, particularly because I receive an annual flu vaccine. In this context, readers might question the logic that everybody should fear gluten irrespective of its risks.

Manufacturers leverage fear—a primal emotion that tends to overwhelm the capacity for deliberation—by offering gluten-free products whose ingredients include “tapioca, corn, rice flour, potato starch, and xanthan gum.”⁶² Chapter 13 defines tapioca as cassava starch, which lacks micronutrients.⁶³ Later sections discuss corn and rice’s health effects in prehistory and history. Chapter 13 amasses evidence that the potato (Solarium tuberosum) is the world’s most nourishing food. Like tapioca, however, potato starch is just carbohydrates without additional nutrients.⁶⁴ Fermented from sucrose, mentioned earlier and discussed in Chapters 2 and 11, xanthan gum lacks nutrients and may impair breathing and digestion.⁶⁵

Moreover, gluten-free items tend to have little fiber, iron, or vitamins B₂ (riboflavin) and B,. Lack of fiber promotes rapid digestion, during which the pancreas produces the hormone insulin to tell cells to absorb the sugar glucose (C₆H_l20₆) in carbohydrates. Insulin signals the liver to store excess glucose and to release it when needed. In these ways, insulin regulates glucose in blood. But the hormone surges when digestion is fast in fiber’s absence. These overloads weaken cells’ response to insulin, causing diabetes. Boston’s Celiac Center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center discouraged people from wasting money on gluten-free items absent medical necessity.⁶⁶

Rejection of Davis and Perlmutter’s assertions, and the fears they heighten, leads this chapter to caution against a priori biases against grains. Preconceptions, ahistoricism, and speculation should be alien to empirical fields like the natural sciences and medicine. This section concludes that no evidence condemns all grains because of gluten or fear of overstimulating the appetite. The rest of this chapter examines grains’ consumption worldwide and their prehistoric and historic health effects.

The Obesity Epidemic as Context

Although Wheal Belly has flaws, Davis rightly worries about obesity. Physicians and scientists express alarm that an “obesity epidemic” assails humanity.⁶⁷ In February 2018, the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva, Switzerland, announced that the number of obese children and adults had tripled worldwide since 1975.⁶⁸ Chapter 1 defined overweight and obesity as statistical designations, and Tables 11.4 and 11.5 listed global percentages of overweight and obesity by ethnicity. Being a type of excessive massiveness, obesity indicates abnormal fatness. Because muscle is denser than fat, American nutritionist and chef Monica Reinagel conceded that lean bodybuilders may satisfy obesity’s statistical definition.⁶⁹ But they are a tiny subset of the population. Almost all obese individuals are overfat.

The issue is whether wheat and other grains worsen obesity. A previous section correlated mass increases with greater motorization and consequent inactivity. At their core, overweight and obesity result from surfeit left after subtracting metabolism. Because inertness minimizes metabolism and is the norm in developed countries and increasingly in developing nations, calorie restriction is necessary to guard against mass gain. This arithmetic rejects American science writer Gary Taubes’s (b. 1956) belief that hormones, not overconsumption, cause overweight and obesity.⁷⁰ The issue therefore is the number of calories in grains and other foods. If grains are fattening, as critics contend, they must provide inordinate energy.

Calories and Nutrients in Grains

Our foci are corn, rice, and wheat, which the abstract introduced as humanity’s principal foods. This book follows convention in using 100 grams as the standard for foods and does not depart here, though the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) designates 45 grams of grain a serving.⁷¹ The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) favors an even smaller amount, 28 grams, as a serving. One hundred grams of corn (as cornmeal) have 362.2 calories. The same amount of brown rice has 367 calories. Depending on type, 100 grams of whole wheat have between 327 and 342 calories. Despite Davis’ animus, wheat has fewer calories by weight than rice or corn. Of the grains that the Whole Grains Council catalogs, 100 grams of oats (Avena saliva) have most calories at 389 and sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) least at 329.

Of course, people do not eat pure grain seeds, whose tough outer coat—known as the husk, hull, or chaff—is indigestible, but rather preparations like bread or noodles. The USDA tabulates between

141.1 and 142.2 calories in two slices of whole wheat bread.⁷² By comparison, two slices of whole rye bread have 130 calories.⁷³ Belief that toast has fewer calories than the same amount of untoasted bread is false. Bread may have ingredients such as oats, corn, millet (species in Eragrostideae tribe), or potatoes, but if leavened, wheat or rye is a constituent. Chapter 7 stated that eighteenth-century France’s poor extended bread with barley, a practice common where it was grown. Bread variants include bagels, muffins, buns, baguettes, rolls, and ciabattas. Consumers also eat wheat in noodles or pasta. Table 12.1 compares calories in bread and kindred items.⁷⁴

TABLE 12.1

Calories in Bread and Similar Products 100g

Recalling that 100 grams of whole grain surpass 300 calories irrespective of type, comparisons may be made with foods in earlier tables. For example, calories in fruits appear in Table 1.1, in vegetables, fruits, and fungi in Table 2.1, in fruits, eggs, nuts, and peanuts (Arachis hypogaea) in Table 2.2, in meat in Table 4.1, in seafood in Tables 5.1 through 5.4, in poultry and eggs in Table 6.1, in legumes including peanuts in Tables 8.1 and 8.3, in nuts in Tables 9.1, 9.3, and 9.4, and in vegetable oils in Tables 10.2 and 10.6.

These comparisons imply no criticisms because eggs, legumes, and nuts have many nutrients in addition to calories, as Chapters 6, 8, and 9 and their accompanying tables emphasized. Other chapters indicate that low-calorie foods such as vegetables, some fruits, and potatoes are nourishing. Chapter 13 argues that potatoes are the world’s most nutritious food. Dieters may count calories, but no less important is the endeavor to make calories count by selecting foods with ample nutrients per calorie just as shoppers aim to buy products that deliver value on the dollar.

None of the foregoing denies grains’ nutrients, shown in Table 12.2 ⁷⁵ Among whole cornmeal, rice, and wheat, the last has the most protein, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, zinc, copper, manganese, and vitamin B₉ (folate, folic acid, or pteroylmonoglutamic acid).⁷⁶ Among wheats, Table 12.3⁷⁷ indicates that durum has the most calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, zinc, copper, selenium, and vitamins B₂, B„ B₆ (pyridoxine), and B₉ by mass. Wheat ranges from 0 micrograms of selenium for hard white to 89.4 for durum and from 4.38 milligrams of vitamin B, for hard white to 6.74 for durum per 100 grams.

The same amount of rice has 23.3 micrograms of selenium and 6.5 milligrams of B₃, and corn has 15.6 micrograms of selenium and 3.6 milligrams of B,. Corn and wheat have similar amounts of iron and magnesium though corn’s phytic acid binds to iron, calcium, magnesium, and zinc, hindering their absorption from corn and all foods eaten with it. Corn is not alone in this defect because some legumes and nuts also have phytic acid. For this reason, Chapters 4, 5, and 6 indicated that the body better absorbs these nutrients from animal products. Rice has the least iron and the most vitamins B, (thiamine or thiamin), B₅ (pantothenic acid), and B₆. Corn has the most vitamin B₂. The Whole Grains Council calculated that corn has over ten times the carotenoids (vitamin A precursors) in other grains.⁷⁸ Yellow kernels have more carotenoids than white. Corn, rice, and wheat lack vitamins C and D. Grains are not the best sources of fat-soluble vitamins, whose functions where discussed in Chapter 2.

TABLE 12.2

Nutrients in Selected Grains 100g

Wheat around the World

TABLE 12.3

Nutrients in Wheat by Type 100g

Europe. At the other extreme, the tropics, Chapter 13 observes, situated root and tuber agriculture. Wheat has been absent or unimportant in these areas.

A later section remarks that West Africa grew rice (Oryza glaberrima). Elsewhere in Africa, sorghum, millet, and, after 1500, corn were the chief grains. Rice (Oryza sativa) was the staple in South, Southeast, and much of East Asia. Rice dominated south of China’s Yangtze River, and wheat had to compete with millet and corn north of the river. Northern India and Pakistan have long grown wheat, but even in these areas, people often ate rice and the poor subsisted on millet bread.⁸¹ In southwestern Asia, Iranians and Arabs preferred rice to wheat.⁸² The masses ate millet or wheat bread. Turks ate wheat and rice.⁸³ Between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers—in ancient Mesopotamia—barley bread was the staple.⁸⁴ Ancient Rome’s granary, Egypt—whose diets were detailed in Chapter 4—produced millet, sorghum, barley, and w'heat. Egyptians favored T. dicoc- con, or less often barley, for bread.⁸⁵ Even then, bread was a component of diets that featured lettuce (Lactuca sativa), turnips (Brassica rapa ssp. rapa), cabbage (Brassica oleracea var. capitata), beets (Beta vulgaris), radishes (Raphanus raphanistrum ssp. sativus), broad beans (Viciafaba), peas (Pisum sativum), lentils (Lens culinaris), chickpeas (Cicer arietinum), garlic (Allium sativum), onions (Allium сера), leeks (Allium ampeloprasum), cucumbers (Cucumis sativus), papyrus (Cyperus papyrus)

roots, watermelons (Citrullus lanatus), figs, dates, grapes (Vitis vinifera) and raisins, and plums (.Prunus domestica). In the seventh century CE, Arabs further broadened food choices by bringing rice from India. Wheat never monopolized Egypt’s palate. Only in Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon was preference for wheat longstanding.⁸⁶

Even where grown, wheat was too expensive for the masses, who ate barley, millet, buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum), or chestnut porridge or gruel.⁸⁷ Bread eaters consumed what was available: combinations of at least two grains, known as maslin. Shortages led bakers to augment bread with bark, soil, legumes such as peas and vetch (Vicia species), chestnuts (Castanea species), beechnuts (Fagus sylvatica), and weeds.⁸⁸ Even nobles ate maslin, though wheat formed the mixture’s majority whereas commoners’ maslin had little if any of the grain.

Wheat’s premodern scarcity may surprise Christians who assume that Jesus and his apostles ate wheat bread, thereby making it the norm. Religion aside, dearth suggests a solution to the complaint of indigestibility. From the past’s perspective, wheat is a novelty for most societies. Not having evolved from a lineage of wheat eaters, some modern people may have trouble digesting it. Rather than gluten sensitivity, therefore, some humans’ digestive tract may treat wheat as alien irrespective of gluten. The link between novelty and indigestibility may explain food allergies. For example, a 2011 study documented peanut allergy among those of African descent, an unsurprising result given peanuts’ South American origin Chapter 8 mentioned.⁸⁹ An ocean away, Africans were not exposed to them until after 1500.

Wheat’s dearth or absence may not have undermined health. The grain lacks essential amino acids lysine and isoleucine.⁹⁰ Chapter 2 noted the necessity of ingesting such amino acids because of the body’s inability to make them from other compounds. Fortunately, populations dependent on wheat often consumed dairy—discussed in Chapter 7—a source of complete proteins. Another shortcoming was wheat’s inadequate zinc where grown on soils deficient in the mineral, as happened in southwestern Asia and North Africa. Even adequate soils did not solve the problem because the grass’ phytic acid binds with zinc, inhibiting absorption. Chapter 1 mentioned zinc’s importance in growth.⁹¹ For this reason, wheat consumers without another dietary source of the mineral did not reach full stature.⁹² Consequently, southwestern Asia’s farmers were shorter than their hunter- gatherer predecessors, a development detailed in Chapter 14.⁹³

Milling

Even if wheat harms consumers because it is foreign to their digestive system and because of insufficient amino acids and zinc, milling rather than gluten causes most problems. Humans have processed kernels to increase digestibility and palatability, an operation known as milling and performed by abrading kernels with stones throughout prehistory and most of history. The earliest millstones date to roughly 18,000 BCE, though people must have removed the husk with some abrasive when they began eating grains at least 22,500years ago.⁹⁴ Millstones usually crushed seeds, mixing rather than separating their components: husk, bran, embryo (known as germ), and endosperm. Retention of all parts conserved nutrients.

By stopping short of pulverization, breadmakers could sift grain to separate endosperm from other components. Retention of only endosperm yielded white flour. This extra step increased labor and wasted grain because sifting discarded half the harvest. Labor and losses made white flour scarce and expensive. For this reason, only the affluent ate white bread, which served to differentiate elites from commoners. Although the masses wanted to emulate their superiors by consuming white bread, from a nutritional perspective they were fortunate to eat coarse, whole grains.

Enthusiasm for white flour did not corrupt everyone. In the first half of the nineteenth century, American minister Sylvester Graham (1794-1851) decried it as unnatural because God, having created the entire kernel, intended people to eat it whole.⁹⁵ Milling was therefore sinful, and sinfulness could produce nothing but illness. Instead of white flour, Graham promoted whole-wheat wafers known as Graham crackers.

Graham’s argument could not retard technology. In 1832, Swiss inventor Jakob Sulzberger revolutionized milling by building the first roller mill, which used steel rather than stone to strip away all but the starchy endosperm, yielding white flour.⁹⁶ By the 1870s, flour makers in many countries, including the United States and United Kingdom (U.K.), replaced millstones with roller mills. Churning out flour faster than was previously possible, these mills made white bread plentiful and inexpensive. Consumers liked the price, ease of chewing, and texture. In the 1880s, however, U.S. and U.K. physicians reported increases in indigestion, heart disease, and diabetes.⁹⁷

This development spurred a search for the cause. Doctors who sounded the alarm in the 1880s suspected white flour but lacked evidence to make their case. Among its most charismatic opponents, American bodybuilder and vegetarian Bernarr Adolphus Macfadden (1868-1955) in the 1920s labeled white flour the “staff of death.”⁹⁸ He asserted that dogs that fed only it died as quickly as if they ate nothing. This warning was not hyperbole. Vermin had long raided whole grains in storage, but they avoided white flour.⁹⁹ Mice perished from eating it. In the 1920s, while Macfadden condemned white flour, American chemist Benjamin Ricardo Jacobs (1879-1963) quantified its near absence of iron and vitamins B„ B₂, B„ and B₉ and linked it to pellagra and beriberi, discussed in Chapter 2 and later sections.

These shortfalls raised consternation only in 1940, when Congress reinstituted conscription while war engulfed Europe and Asia. Half the first 1 million conscripts were too undernourished for induction.¹⁰⁰ Military and civilian leaders blamed unenriched white flour, and in 1942, the U.S. Army announced that it would feed troops only bread and pasta made from fortified flour. Such flour could still be white, but in 1943, Congress required manufacturers to add iron and vitamins B,, B₂, B₅, and B₍₎.¹⁰¹ Calcium was optional, but breadmakers could not label their products “fortified” without it.

No panacea, fortification failed to ennoble white bread, which African American author James Arthur Baldwin (1924-1987) denounced as “blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber.”¹⁰² This language underscored white bread’s inherent unnaturalness, a critique that expressed unease with modernity’s artificiality. White flour’s unhealthfulness and blandness suggest that critics have wrongly attacked gluten rather than milling.