LOSING WEIGHT WITH WHOLE GRAINS

He points out complex carbohydrates are low in calories – only 4 calories per gram while fats have 9 a gram.

To get stored as fat, carbohydrate must be broken up and re-built into a fat molecule. This uses up 23% of the calories in the carb, whereas fat goes straight to your body fat with a loss of only 3% calories.

Grains actually switch off our appetite, they signal the brain that we’ve had enough. I experience this, both in my early days with my nightly grain dish, and today with my home-made bread and crackers.

Best of all, carbs boost your metabolism. Foods rich in complex carbohydrates remove an iodine atom from a weak thyroid hormone, called T4 because it carries four iodine atoms. The resulting active hormone, T3, steps up the calorie-burning of your cells, just as a thermostat clicks on a furnace. We actually feel the difference in increased body heat.

To turn this affect on, your body is looking for complex carbohydrates, nothing else, not protein, not fat, not white bread. Your cells burn calories faster for hours after a meal of brown rice or millet.

When you try to lose weight with a high-protein diet like fish or skinless chicken, it’s actually harmful, Dr. Barnard points out. They have zero carbohydrate. They’re all saturated fat. And when your diet’s low in carbs, T4 gets turned into reverse-T3 that slows down your metabolism and sabotages your success for long-term weight loss.

GRAINS AND ALLERGIES

It’s the protein in grain, gluten, that triggers the allergy, not the starch. Yet in my experience, skeleton grains like white flour create allergies. Whole grains like brown rice are fine to eat.

I suffered horrific allergies for a decade, all through the 80's (my 30's). Working in a suburb with many trees, I’d be awake all night sneezing. If I went out hiking in nature, my eyes burned raw, and the sneezing and sniffles would last for days. Same thing if I cleaned my house. Pollen and dust were my nemesis.

Then in the early 90's I began to change my diet to save myself from excruciating and repeated toothaches. I weaned myself off dairy, the half-and-half in my coffee (that’s half cream, half milk) and gallons of ice-cream. Mainly I switched to whole grains, and slowly broke my addiction to croissants, donuts, chips and chocolate.

Some time during the 90's the allergies left me completely. I’m out in nature all the time now with never a sniffle. They departed while I was still eating whole grains.

THE DOWN-SIDE OF COOKED GRAINS

Also it's common knowledge that eating any cooked food triggers the leukocytosis response, where white blood cells multiply as if to attack an invader.

Rhio, author of the raw recipe book Hooked On Raw, e-mailed me:

“I always base my decisions for my own personal health on observing Nature and her systems. Since all the other creatures on our planet are eating raw foods, I don't believe any scientific research can justify cooking food.

It's been said that by cooking, some of the nutrients are made more bio-available.  My response to that is that we are not yet aware of the whole picture, we just know too little about how Nature works to override her wondrous system with our own flawed models.

Macrobiotics seems to help a lot of people. In my view, not by virtue of what is consumed, but by virtue of what is eliminated from the diet. A macrobiotic diet eliminates all junk and processed food. This alone can cause healing to occur in many.

It's not a matter of having the enzymes to digest the food. The pancreas will create the necessary enzymes, but as time goes by the pancreas becomes overworked – as demonstrated by the fact that the pancreas of all cooked food eaters is much larger than the pancreas of a raw food eater.”

OPPONENTS OF RAW GRAINS

Dr. Doug writes:

“Fruits and shoots (young, tender greens) have successfully made up the bulk of the human dietary for millions of years. ... since the introduction of grains, human health has declined steadily to its current, all-time low.” [we began farming grains a brief ten thousand years ago, but the bones of humans or humanoids date back to six million years]

Dr. Doug continues: ”Raw grains taste unpleasant and bitter, even when they’re sprouted.”

He’s right there. Grains gobble time, they must always be processed in some way, to eat them. Except for young grass seed which we chewed on as children, you can’t use a grain without first sprouting it, blending it, and mixing it with dried fruits to make it tasty – or cooking it.

That alone gives a hint this isn’t a natural food. But as Ann Wigmore wrote, we live in unnatural times. The concrete jungle is unnatural. We need more nutrients to deal with the density of unnaturality.

We’d all love to live on fruit and nuts out in nature, lie naked in the sun, and swim without a suit. But we don’t. We live in a shrinking world where the pollution of our air, water and food is omnipresent. Even organic farmers have no defense against acid rain and GMO’s drifting into their fields [GMO=genetically modified organism].

When healing my teeth, if I left out sprouted grain, my teeth felt worse, and when I included them, the pain eased off. I suffered excruciating pain from multiple cavities and root canals, couldn’t sleep from the pain. Today I never get a single toothache, thank you to raw foods.

If I went a few days without sprouted grain milks, my teeth were so painful. Maybe it’s a simple explanation such as Francis Moore Lappe’s Diet for a Small Planet theory, that grains are high in methionine, beans in lysine, so by eating both you’re getting the complete range of amino acids to build strong teeth.

BRAN IS WASTE NOT A FOOD

“The fiber in grains must be considered a health destroyer. Our system requires the soft, soluble fiber found in fruits and tender vegetables. Grain’s fiber is coarse and sharp, like finely ground glass ... it is non-soluble fiber that acts as an irritant .. irritation of the mucosa of the intestines is a risk factor in many diseases including ulcers, spastic colon, Crohn’s, colitis, irritable bowel, and colon cancer.”

People actually add bran – which is indigestible cellulose – to their meal, and believe it’s healthy fiber. Goes to show the power of advertizing. Bran is a waste product of the white-flour industry. It’s trash. If it makes you go, that’s because it’s sand-papering your colon, not healing it.

When you cook starch, the fiber gets melted down. So it’s no longer ground-glass. Same thing when you blend sprouted grains, especially if like me you run them through a multi-purpose Juicer first, the one here is the best value for money.

This lovely Juicer grinds every grain, so you don’t get hard rocks of un-ground grain in your dehydrated cookies.