Dr. Brett Hill - Eat Think Move Chiropractic

Whenever I speak to people about the excessive amounts of processed carbs, breads, grains and cereals in our modern diets, I invariably get the question, ‘What about wholegrains? They're good for you, aren't they?' Well, the answer is a little complicated, but worth going through here.

What you need to remember is that until around 5-10,000 years ago we didn't have the mechanical capabilities to process grains on a large scale. If you wanted to process grain you had to do it by hand, and it was a very labour intensive practice. As such it was a difficult way to get nutrients and to get sustenance, and so it wasn't done very much. As it turns out, this was a good thing. Processed grains and cereals are essentially sugars that are released into our blood stream very quickly. They cause a spike and then a crash in our blood sugar levels, and as a result have been linked to many of our chronic diseases - including, most recently, heart disease according to The Archives of Internal Medicine.

So why are there so many studies showing the benefits of wholegrains? Well, quite simply, they are better than more processed varieties. For example, wholegrain bread is much better for you than white bread. So if the majority of the population are eating white bread and you do a study that gets a group of them to eat wholegrain bread, their health would improve. But what about if you did another study where the people ate no bread at all - where in fact they ate only what our hunter-gatherer ancestors ate? Well, then they would be healthier again! You see, it all depends on the question the study asks, and ‘healthier' does not equal ‘healthiest'.

And not all wholegrains are created equal, either. The entire point of a wholegrain should be that is a whole grain (sounds simple doesn't it). But what that means is that it is the whole grain, unprocessed, un-milled: in other words it still looks like a grain. This means that it contains lots of coarse fibre that is good for your digestion, and the sugars get released much slower into your blood stream. If, however, you get that whole grain and mill it to a pulp where it is so fine that you don't even recognise the bread as whole grain, then you are losing most of the benefits.

So eat a small amount of wholegrain in your diet, but make sure that they are actual ‘whole grains'. Something like a handful of brown rice in a dish is not going to throw out your sugar metabolism, whereas a slice of ‘wholegrain' bread probably will.