 ※
Buy only emmer, einkorn, kamut khorasan and spelt wheat. Non-wheat
grains such as rice, corn, barley, rye, oats and millet are also good.
Get grains that have not grown with artificial fertilizers and chemical
pesticides.
※ Use a long fermentation stage when making dough or batter so that the grains can soak to make them more digestible.
※ Eat
grains with extra minerals, either as part of the soak water, mixed
into the bread or food, from contact with the ashes and charcoal of a
cooking fire or stove or as a supplement to the diet.
 ※ Mix grains with other foodstuffs so that grain is not the main ingredient when cooking grains. Root vegetables are best.
※ Cook in or with real (animal) fat.
※ Eat
grains with a fermented, cultured or probiotic food, such as ale, or
kvass, or a probiotic supplement, to help with digestion and restore
some of the nutrients lost in cooking.
Grains are the seeds of grass plants. Most modern,
commercial wheats available today are descendants of a dwarf mutant
wheat called "triticum aestivum" or common wheat that was invented
during the 1960's and 70's. It may be called multi-grain, sprouted,
"oat bread”, organic, "non-GMO,” pumpernickel, brown bread or
white. It doesn't really matter if the alteration was through
artificial genetic manipulation or natural selection. The end product
is still a pseudo-food that is designed to make a profit for its
manufacturers by appealing to people's love of a white, fluffy loaf of
bread rather than a food that is designed to nourish. Almost
all the grains you see on the grocer's shelf are these physically
beautiful but nutrient-defective grains, no matter what they are
called.
To get a heritage wheat grain that is not this mutant wheat, you have
to get emmer, einkorn or khoresan. Other members of the grass family
that have not been so manipulated are rice, corn, barley, rye, oats and
millet. Kamut is a brand name for a type of khoresan wheat. Avoid any
wheat, bread or flour that doesn't have any of these names on them.
This will be 99% of all bread or flour sold commercially in the West,
and probably all wheat food products sold unless they specifically have
a label or sign saying they are not made with common wheat or
indicating which heritage grain they are made from.
After finding a grain that is not the dwarf mutant triticum aestivum,
the next big problem in dealing with grains is that they are highly
acidic -- acids being the forces of life -- and, as such, will chelate
with minerals. This is good if you have enough minerals in the diet,
because the process of chelation will make the dietary minerals more
available to the body, but bad if you don't have enough minerals in the
diet, because the acids in the grains will then leach the minerals out
of the body. Among primitive people, the need for minerals to be mixed
in with the grain was usually solved by the fact that grain products
were cooked directly on wood fires and the ashes that stuck to the
bread were eaten along with the bread. Primtive people
recognized that the ashes conferred some nutrition along with the
grain, and so, in some cases, like nixtamylization of corn by Aztecs,
they continued to mix or add ashes to the grain even when they didn't
cook it directly on the burning fire.
Hull-on
or hull-removed?
Heritage
wheats can not be separated from their hull by any non-industrial
method and should be eaten as whole grain. It has to be eaten in the
whole-grain form because
heritage wheats and are not free-threshing. Rice, which is
free-threshing, should be eaten white, with the hull removed. The hulls
contain fiber and other anti-nutrients, but not in quantities that are
harmful if you eat them in moderate amounts. In particular, remember
that whole grains such as heritage wheat were not the main ingredient
in bread used in traditional cultures. Mix your wheat flour with potato
flour or other ground foods. Flours made from roots from vegetables are
especially good. Soak some dried peas, for example, and add to a bread
dough to dilute the fiber and anti-nutrients and add to the texture and
taste of the bread.
Grind your own berries or buy flour?
No
primitive society stored ground flour for later use. They stored grains
and ground them when they needed them. So, any question about method of
preparing store-bought or already ground flour, other than what you
ground yourself and put in the freezer immediately after grinding, is
asking how to restore nutrients as best you can with what you've got,
with the aspiration being to not have to buy and/or store ground flour.
Among
nomadic peoples of the past, people ground their grains into flour for travelling. When
they came to water, they would stop and make "unleavened
bread"
by mixing the
flour with water and baking it directly on the fire, and then eating it
bread, charcoal, sand grit and all.
How to store?
Storing
whole grains in the freezer will probably help keep them as fresh as
possible, but Pharoah stored grains in the hot Egyptian heat for seven
years, so storage temperature is probably not extremely vital. However,
keeping out mice and mold would be an issue in storage at room
temperature so, if a freezer is available, that would probably be a
good storage choice for those reasons rather than any need to freeze
the grains themselves.
You can add minerals to your diet by adding
powdered minerals such as dolomite, plant ashes or edible clay directly to the
flour or grain meal before cooking, grinding or working with the grains
on a soft stone, soaking the grains in a mixture of powdered minerals
and water (often
called "lime water" after the dolomite lime powder that is used) or taking
powdered minerals as a supplement when eating grains. This can
be clay or even dirt or mud. (See Minerals
for ways to make your own minerals supplements.) If the particular
grain or seed that you are eating has a hull that cannot be removed,
such as spelt or beans, you have to consider the abrasiveness of the
fiber as well as the anti-nutrients in it. This requires long soaking
and often fermentations. Aborigines put beans in net bags and left them
in a running stream for 9 days to wash out the anti-nutrients.
If you feel you have
an allergy to eating grains, but not to grains
that you
put onto your skin, eat more minerals to make the enzymes that your
body needs to digest your food and take enzymes such as papaya,
bromelain and betaine HCl. Eat enzyme-rich foods like sauerkraut and
lacto-fermented ale. Sometimes magnesium chloride is good to take
because the chloride can be used by the body to make hyrochloric acid
which helps digest food. I would wait awhile (at least a year) to build
up a store of enzymes before trying to eat grain or gluten, though, if
you had a bad reaction to it. Also, if you ran out of enzymes to digest
grain, your enzymes to digest other foods are probably running low,
too. The best source for the microbes needed to digest any food is in
the
end products of digestion of someone or some species that eats that
food. In the days when body waste was not seen as extremely repugnant
as we see it, this may have been done. American pioneers made sheep
dung tea as a cure-all remedy. After direct ingestion, the next best
source would be to use the manure to grow food, and eat some of that
food raw. If that is also impractical, look for commercial sources of
digestive bacteria such as Biokult,
Primal Defense or other soil-based organisms.
Grains are for growth. Every single grain seed is a
complete
cell. Every grain can be viewed as a complete kit of the almost all the
tools you need to build one cell. If you want cellular growth, feeding
children for example, grains can provide much of the nutrients needed.
If you have unwanted growth in the form of warts, cancer or obesity
seriously limit or eliminate your grain consumption. If you need to
gain weight or are or want to get pregnant, you may want to add grains
to your diet providing you adhere to all the other aspects of healthy
grain eating.
Gluten
allergies.
Humans
do not have the ability to digest gluten by themselves. Our digestive
tracts are lined with a biolfilm that is populated by microbe
colonies. These symbionts digest gluten for us and send it on
for
us to use. In the wild, animal babies who
cannot digest their food seek out the feces of their species and eat it
to get the microbes needed to eat their food. I don't/can't recommend
eating feces (health and safety) but I can say that the American
pioneers made sheep dung tea as a remedy for digestive problems and
other ills. Real ale or sourdough beer, which has in it the live yeast
that eats grains and produces alcohol, may be of some help also. See Indigestion
for more information on dealing with an inability to eat our food, or
try any of the following:
Even
with the right microbiotica, gluten still takes energy to digest.
It is like glue that holds the bread together. Modern grains are
modified to have as much gluten as possible because it makes the bread
light and fluffy by holding it together. Even if you are able to digest
it, you would be better off getting a heritage wheat with normal
amounts of gluten rather than the modern commercial strains which have
far more gluten in them than we should be consuming.
Add more
full-array minerals
to your diet.
Don't eat a lot of grain
or seeds.
Eat no more than a hunter-gather
would be able to gather. For most people, that is no more than a
handful a day.
If you cannot digest it,
you need to
get the microbes (probiotics) we need to digest our food. See Indigestion
If you need bulk (fiber,
whole
grains) for ease of defecation, eat the
fiber but consider it a medicine rather than a food. Add microbes
(probiotics) to your diet by eating more raw and lacto-fermented foods
like sauerkraut
and cultured
dairy
(yogurt, kefir etc.). Bacteria from cultured foods should provide the
bulk in our stools so that you do not need fiber if the digestion
system is working properly.
Phytic acid
Phytic acid is an acid found in grains that is
made around the mineral phosphorus. Like any acid, it chelates minerals
and, because of the structure of phytic acid, it does a particularly
good job of it. It bonds with minerals like iron, zinc, magnesium,
calcium and copper. When these bonds occur the minerals become
bio-unavailable, unless there is adequate phytase to "unlock" the bond.
Phytase is produced in the body by the process of digestion carried out
by the probiotic bacteria in the gut. Phytic acid is a source of
inositol and phosphorus and helps prevent stone formation in the body.
There is a lot that is not known about phytic acid, and there is a lot
of argument about it in the alternative health community, but until we
fully understand what phytic acid is and what it does in the body, you
can prevent any harm it may do by draining the body of minerals by
taking a lot of extra minerals whenever you eat grains and maintaining
good gut flora by eating fermented or cultured foods with every meal.
Iit has been scientifically proven that a very strong, pure form of phytic acid (IP6) is very good at chelating minerals. However, the form of phytic acid used in the experiment is not the kind of phytic acid you are likely to get in your cereal, especially if it is from grains that were grown on soil that was not whacked up on artificially high phosphorus fertilizer. Nature (the soil) only has so much phosphate to pass around and she distributes it equally to all the inositol in the plant, so most of the inositol rings get 3, 4 or 5 phosphorus atoms (IP3, IP4 and IP5). Of these, only IP5 is considered a strong acid (though not as strong as IP6) and the others are just acids like any other acid.
Other
points to consider:
If you have cancer, warts, sties, excess weight or any other type of
unwanted cellular growth, don't eat grains or seeds.
If you are a full-grown and mainly sedentary person, limit grains to no
more than a handful a day.
If you are a growing child or a hard-working person needing more
energy, consider adding more grains to your diet and using your own
biofeedback to determine how much is good for you.
Eat the middle of
the grain if you can remove the outer layers (such as with rice or corn).
Put the outer layers (fiber, hull) of whole grain into compost or
garden if possible.
If you can't remove the outer shell of whole grains (or don't want to
for taste or other reasons), soak or ferment them. Make sourdough
bread if
making bread with whole grains.
For every tablespoon of grain you eat, add a quarter-teaspoon of
full-array, naturally-sourced, soil-based minerals to your diet.
If you cannot digest grains or gluten, forage for or buy full-array,
soil-based microbes or E.M. and keep taking
it/them until you find the particular product that contains the
probiotics you are missing.
 by Bruce
Fife For those who believe they
are allergic to gluten, or who want to avoid grains
Food
Enzymes for Health & Longevity by Dr.Edward
Howell
The
Yoga of Eating
by Charles Eisenstein
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