Since I read some articles on the deleterious effects of grains on http://wholehealthsource.blogspot.com/, I’ve been wandering around in a daze, feeling like my dietary world has been turned upside down. I became so confused about what was good for me and what was not that I ate less and less and felt more and more guilty.

It sucked. I lost weight.

But I’m recentered now. As I was trying to explain my confusion with grains, a friend reminded me, “Well, every food is going to be unhealthy by someone’s standards.” Oh yea. I had completely forgotten that.

I think the same goes for grains: some people – followers of the paleo diet – have recently acknowledged (based on archeological data and on dental studies from the early to mid 1900s) that the consumption of grains is associated with poor dental health, attributable to the high amounts of phytic acid in grains (particularly wheat). The proposed solution is to cut out grains from your diet.

Ok. There’s also strong evidence linking the consumption of red meat to obesity, heart disease, and colon cancer. Does that mean we should cut out red meat? No. It still contains a lot of nutritional value (protein, iron, fat), but its overconsumption is detrimental. So we simply need to modify how we eat it. (Trans fats and cigarettes are similarly linked to tons of bad stuff, but we *should* cut those out because the only benefits they provide are tantalizing tastes and addiction, respectively)

I think the same thing applies to grains, with a slight caveat. In some people/cultures, wheat products have to be treated as all-or-nothing because they can result in celiac disease (an allergic reaction to wheat proteins). In fact, it seems that most people have a mild reaction to wheat (with IgA being detected in the blood after a wheat-containing meal). But this is clearly tolerable for most of us. The bread-inventing French and Italians aren’t dying off at age 30, and they aren’t the biggest market for dentists and false teeth either.

Beans, nuts, and lentils also contain phytic acid, and, thus, may be contributing to our cavities. Fine, maybe they are. But they also contain tons of fiber and protein with no fat or cholesterol. So I’m not going to live off of them, but they’re sure as hell gonna be in my diet.

Part of the problem I see with the paleo-type diet is that it seems to limit you to a “meat and 2 veggies” kind of meal. All the time. If I try to cut out all the sources of phytic acid from my diet, then I end up relying solely upon meat for protein, which – with all the fat and cholesterol – calls for a phenomenal amount of exercise… which is more than I do, more than I care to do, and more than I think is necessary.

If you look at a typical American meal (which I do every day in the cafeteria), the problem is that the bread or wheat product plays a central role. Pizza, pasta, sandwiches – typical lunch fare, all heavy on the bread. But if you think about what bread provides you – just look at the nutritional info on the package – it’s close to zilch. A bunch of starch, a bit of fiber, and cavities. In fact, it just looks like a filler. And maybe that’s how bread evolved anyway: to fill our bellies with cheap grains so we wouldn’t eat so much costly meat and vegetables.

I agree that we should cut down on wheat products, seeing as they don’t provide us much and seem to be detrimental to our health (diabetes, obesity, celiac sprue, cavities). But we don’t need to cut them out. We just need to modify how we eat them.