Richard at Free the Animal is a colorful guy, to say the least. His blog started as a documentation of his paleo journey from fat to fit, but accumulated thousands of followers. Now, "he's a voice" in the low carb/paleo world. He's posted about "wheat belly" and brings a great perspective:
And who remembers my Nutrition Density Challenge: Fruit vs. Beef Liver, where it took a full 5 pounds of fruit to roughly equal the nutrition in 4 ounces of liver? How about we do one real quick like, beef liver vs. bread?
So, he did the research for what is exactly inside of a 1400 kcal loaf of bread, and ran the numbers on a comparable amount of liver and salmon. What did he find?
Now of course, nobody's going to eat the roughly 30 ounces of liver or salmon needed to get to 1,400 calories, but you could eat a 4th of either of them and still break bread and leave it on its ass. And we also aren't even touching on the aspect that most of the "nutrition" in the grains are in the minerals, and grains have high levels of phytic acid that bind to minerals, preventing their absorption.
Cut back on the liver and salmon, add in some leafy greens, maybe some starchy veggies, add some fruit in there, maybe some nuts and eggs and you will always, always blow grains out of the water, and you'll do it every time. No exceptions. It's not even close. Grains are poverty food, plain and simple. Are you that poor? [underline/bold is mine]
http://freetheanimal.com/2011/09/wheat-how-about-against-the-grain-and-zero-servings-per-day.html
Although Richard's attacks on the hapless advocates for grains are not to my taste, the charts he posted detail clearly the nutrient/calorie picture for bread, liver and salmon. That of course is why most bread is sold "enriched", because wheat is actually a great example of a nutrient poor, calorie dense food - which is exactly the role it played in the human diet. If you need to get 1500 kcal/day to a bunch of impoverished folks (subsistence farmers, serfs, the unwashed masses), bread will do it. But the price in health and wellbeing is high.
How a low cost, high calorie, nutrient poor food product can be trumpeted by "health experts" in an age characterized by undernourished, obese, sick humans is virtually impossible to understand.
And who remembers my Nutrition Density Challenge: Fruit vs. Beef Liver, where it took a full 5 pounds of fruit to roughly equal the nutrition in 4 ounces of liver? How about we do one real quick like, beef liver vs. bread?
So, he did the research for what is exactly inside of a 1400 kcal loaf of bread, and ran the numbers on a comparable amount of liver and salmon. What did he find?
Now of course, nobody's going to eat the roughly 30 ounces of liver or salmon needed to get to 1,400 calories, but you could eat a 4th of either of them and still break bread and leave it on its ass. And we also aren't even touching on the aspect that most of the "nutrition" in the grains are in the minerals, and grains have high levels of phytic acid that bind to minerals, preventing their absorption.
Cut back on the liver and salmon, add in some leafy greens, maybe some starchy veggies, add some fruit in there, maybe some nuts and eggs and you will always, always blow grains out of the water, and you'll do it every time. No exceptions. It's not even close. Grains are poverty food, plain and simple. Are you that poor? [underline/bold is mine]
http://freetheanimal.com/2011/09/wheat-how-about-against-the-grain-and-zero-servings-per-day.html
Although Richard's attacks on the hapless advocates for grains are not to my taste, the charts he posted detail clearly the nutrient/calorie picture for bread, liver and salmon. That of course is why most bread is sold "enriched", because wheat is actually a great example of a nutrient poor, calorie dense food - which is exactly the role it played in the human diet. If you need to get 1500 kcal/day to a bunch of impoverished folks (subsistence farmers, serfs, the unwashed masses), bread will do it. But the price in health and wellbeing is high.
How a low cost, high calorie, nutrient poor food product can be trumpeted by "health experts" in an age characterized by undernourished, obese, sick humans is virtually impossible to understand.
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