ANCESTRAL EATING: GRAINS II

Let's examine the claims of a provocative paper you may be familiar with from Mike Ma's book Harassment Architecture

In the previous entry of this multi-part examination of grain consumption and ancestral eating, I established three important points:

1. Humans, or rather some humans, have a deep history of consuming grains, in wild form, that may stretch back at least 100,000 years.

2. The vast majority of people throughout history have probably consumed few if any grains in their diet.

3. You can display what Weston Price called “perfect health” by eating grains or by not eating grains.

My basic point about grains is that you can eat them to maintain perfect health, but you don’t have to. At the end of the day, I think it comes down to your individual preferences, including the availability of high-quality heirloom or “ancient” varieties of grain and your ability to process them in suitable ways to neutralise the anti-nutrients within them (more on anti-nutrients and plant-foods later) and minimise the negative effects of gluten if it is present, and your personal tolerance for grains and especially gluten-containing grains. You’re only likely to discover your tolerance with experimentation, including a period of say eight or 12 weeks without gluten.

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In this entry I want to talk about some of the most worrying evidence in favour of the harmful effects of grains, and wheat in particular. If you’ve read Mike Ma’s debut… book, you’ll be familiar with the wonderfully titled scientific paper, “Bread and Other Edible Agents of Mental Disease”. The title kind of gives away what the paper is about: the relationship between bread consumption and mental diseases. This is a controversial subject, but there is a wide variety of compelling historical and scientific evidence that suggests “grain brain” really is a thing. Let’s have a look at the paper in detail.

According to the paper’s abstract, the two main theses of the paper are as follows:

bread (1) makes the gut more permeable and can thus encourage the migration of food particles to sites where they are not expected, prompting the immune system to attack both these particles and brain-relevant substances that resemble them; and (2) releases opioid-like compounds, capable of causing mental derangement if they make it to the brain.

The conclusion the authors draw, then, is that

A grain-free diet, although difficult to maintain (especially for those that need it the most), could improve the mental health of many and be a complete cure for others.

This is a conclusion that I agree with, broadly; although, as I said above, I think it comes down to personal circumstances and physiology. Some people react very badly to grains, and almost immediately upon giving them up experience near-miraculous recovery from symptoms they thought were just part and parcel of being human. Brain fog and bloating are not part and parcel of being human, though. Others tolerate grains very well, and there probably is a genetic component to this, just as there’s a genetic component to milk consumption — widespread persistence into adulthood of the enzyme lactase — in people of European ancestry more than any other.

The first three paragraphs of the paper serve as a very nice introduction to the topic of grain consumption (but remember what I said about wild-grain consumption possibly dating back 100,000 years in some populations):

About 12,000 years ago, when the last ice age came to an end, the rapid change in climate decimated our traditional food sources, especially large game. Possibly in response to that, in the fertile crescent of the Middle East (roughly the areas comprising the Levant and the Tigris and Euphrates valleys) we began to practice agriculture and animal domestication. Within a few thousand years both had independently started on at least four different continents (Murphy, 2007), stabilizing and increasing our food supply to such an extent that the human population exploded. Yet the agricultural revolution not only increased the availability of food, but also radically changed its nature: cereal grain products, to which we were largely unaccustomed, quickly took center stage. This article illustrates the surprising relevance of this diet change to neuroscientists, psychologists, and psychiatrists.

That the association between humans and grains paid off nicely for both is beyond dispute. Each partner helped the other reproduce, multiply, and ultimately conquer vast patches of the earth. Each partner coevolved with the other, adapting to it. For example, wheat progressively became shorter in response to our own preference for crops easier to harvest and less vulnerable to wind. At the same time, our faces, jaws, and teeth progressively became smaller in response to the soft texture of bread (Larsen, 1995). Thus we domesticated grain, and in return grain domesticated us (Murphy, 2007).

Yet the agricultural revolution may have spelled trouble. Tellingly, whenever diets based on grain replaced the traditional diets of hunter-gatherers, lifespan and stature decreased—while infant mortality, infectious diseases, bone mineral disorders, and the frequency of dental caries increased (Cohen, 1987). Some of these problems were never totally overcome. For example, despite a gradual increase in stature beginning 4,000 years ago, when diets became more varied again, on average we are still about 3 cm shorter than our pre-agriculture ancestors (Murphy, 2007). The coevolution between humans and grain brought on genetic changes in both parties, but did not render grain a more suitable food for us than it originally was.

The paper then drops a couple of pretty substantial redpills: statistics that show how 1) hospitalisation rates for shizophrenia during World War II dropped in direct proportion to wheat shortages, and rose with increased wheat consumption in the US; and 2) how schizophrenia rose dramatically (from about 1 in 30,000 to 1 in 100) when Western grain products were introduced to the South Pacific Islands, an area with no history of grain consumption.