Last night, someone I know pointed me at a July 2007 blog article by a Dr. William Davis, talking about why excessive consumption of processed wheat products is bad for your health. That includes breads, cakes (see, you always knew Ho-Hos were evil!), pasta, and even those breakfast cereals with the boxes plastered with logos telling you how heart-healthy they are.¹
It’s an interesting blog overall. The title of this post comes from part of Dr. Davis’ capsule “about” text: “You’ve been playing the health game by someone else’s rules with the odds stacked against you.”
Davis stresses that he’s not dispensing medical advice, just sharing information and discussing health issues frankly as he sees them. But it seems to me there’s a lot of good information here.
I’ve just syndicated his Atom feed here on LJ as heartscanblog. If you want to become a little more of an informed player in the health game, you might want to pick the feed up.
[1] Oh, wait, wait, most of them don’t actually come right out and say that they’re heart-healthy ... they usually wrap the insinuation in weasel-words like “Supa Wonda Brekky Bikkies can be part of a heart-healthy diet” and let you draw the conclusion they want you to, without ever actually making explicit claims. Well, cellulose packing peanuts can be “part of” almost any diet you care to name, too, but I still don’t recommend eating them.
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Fresh bread is an integral component of the Mediterranean diet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mediterranean_diet).
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Closer than you might like.
Yes, the pumpernickel is *better*. But we're just not built to process it. Well wait, no, we are, which is the problem. We're not built to process ground grains well, which means we absorb them far too well. Add to that our ingenuity and drive and how cheap we've made even those "expensive" carbs...
Processed is worse, yes. But both aren't good.
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Moreover, if you are correct, then one should be able to discern a difference in health between cultures which consume fresh bread but little else unhealthy (e.g., Mediterranean), and those that do not even consume that (e.g., Okinawa). When controlling for confounding factors like genetics, I am not aware of any such difference. Do you have a ref?
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