Whole Grains - Are they reall that wholesome?

I’ve been reading up on whole grains the last couple of days. I happened upon The Real Truth About those “Healthy Whole Grains” by Scott Kustes over at Fitness Spotlight. The post suggests that those wholesome whole grains aren’t actually all that great for us. Despite the opinions of this post going counter to popular belief, a chord was struck within me, and I had to investigate the matter further.

The gist of what is wrong with whole grains according to Scott Kustes and the articles he cites, as understood by a very non-biology sort of person (they couldn’t even make me take Bio 10) is:

The plants that we call whole grains contain a hormones called lectins that act as a self defense mechanism for the plant. These lectins have the ability to latch on to vitamins and minerals, preventing the body from absorbing their goodness. They also seem to be able to block certain receptors, which also prevents the body from taking full advantage of the foods being consumed.

There is a correlation between lectins in the body, and leptin resistance. Leptin is a good hormone in the body that lets us know when we are hungry or full. Leptin resistance is a precursor to insulin resistance, which is a precursor to diabetes and obesity. The causality between lectins in wheat and leptin resistance is not scientifically proven. There is, however, sufficient evidence to investigate their correlation.

If this theory is correct, grains, specially wheat, messes with our ability to properly monitor our level of hunger, and our ability to absorb the goodness in the foods we eat. That is some seriously bad effects for something we consider to be wholesome!

One of the comments on Scott Kustes’ above mentioned post caught my attention. Kat Eden wholeheartedly agrees with the sentiment of the post, and the conviction behind her comment led me to her blog. The personal trainer and coach from Australia supports a new holistic approach to nutrition that she calls New Nutrition. Even though the programmer in me is cringing at the use of “New” in the name, I love what Kat has to say and her nutrition philosophy. Her approach incorporates additional factors in nutrition including hormones (this is HUGE one), sleep and our evolutionary relationship with the change of seasons.

Kat Eden proposes The Grain Challenge, in which she challenges us to cut out all grains for 2 weeks, evaluate how you feel, and slowly reintroduce grains, re-evaluate how you feel, and judge for yourself as to whether whole grains are really the bees knees as touted by conventional nutrition philosophies.

I decided that I would take on this challenge almost immediately. I found these posts on Sunday night, and on Monday morning I was routing around the kitchen to put together an omelet and fresh fruit for breakfast instead of my usual Shreddies with skim milk. I don’t know if this New Nutrition approach is correct, but what I now understand about lectins, leptins and their possible interactions having an effect on our weight and overall health makes sense to me. So I’m doing it: The Grain Challenge. I’ll be blogging about my experiences with grain elimination in the hopes the my readers might benefit from my experiences.

My motivation for taking on The Grain Challenge comes from a long lived frustration. Frustration from being sick and tired of being sick and tired. For quite sometime, in the order of years, have felt tired most of the time, and had been very prone to illness in the last 3-4 years. I have also been struggling to lose weight over the past year. I am about 20 pounds overweight, and have bee focused on loosing that weight, to no avail. I have in no means been a saint, but I have put in honest effort in keeping my eating clean, and my fitness level up, and have been rewarded with nothing but a 3 lbs gain over the year.

My evaluation factors are:

• My energy level – Will I find my long lost “get up and go”
• How I feel – Will I feel healthier and less prone to illness?
• Weight loss – Will I shed any of this excess weight with the elimination of grains?
• My skin – My sensitive, acne -prone skin is a good monitor of how healthy I am

I havn’t eaten any grains for 3 days. It is still to early to properly evaluate, but I do feel that my energy level is up since the weekend. I’ll be blogging again about my experiences with The Grain Challenge in the days and weeks to come.

I cannot get this out of my mind! I wrote last week about the bankruptcy of GM and my hopes that the governments taking over the greater portion of the massive corporation would bring back the electric car. From the recent advertisement being played in high rotation on television, I’m guessing that’s not part of the plan. “Stronger brands” is a part of the plan. Great, marketing mumbo-jumbo for us all to enjoy:

All that aside, I can’t get over the numbers: $39.5 BILLION! $30B from the American government and $9.5B from the Canadian government is going to GM. That is a ridiculous amount of money! In a very anti-capitalist move, these governments are taking over a crippled business that is $172 Billion in debt. Why? Why is it so important that GM be saved? They made poor business decisions that led them to this mess, why should the government be bailing them out?

The employees? GM employs 243,000 people. That is a lot of people! GM employees more people than all of the people who lost their jobs in Ontario since October 2008 (234,000). If all of these people lost their jobs on the same day, tough times would certainly fall for many, concentrated in particular regions of the Canada and the US. Times are already hard, GM going under would definitely make times much harder.

But, imagine this: $39.5 Billion divided by 243,000 is $162,551 per GM employee. What if all of that money was not to go to saving a dying relic from another time, but it went to programs, grants and loans for education, re-training and small businesses. What if it went to the individual employees that stand to lose their jobs, in ways that encourage these individuals to get creative, better themselves, and find something productive to do. What potentials could these individuals realize if they were given such opportunities?

It saddens me to realize, we will likely never know.

Just a quick note to let you know that I just released an update to the Kiva Wordpress Widget. Some of you may have noticed missing images. JL, helped me figure out what was going on with his contribution of the line:

curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

Thank you very much JL!!

Kiva is moving their images around, and the widget wasn’t handling it. I have incorporated JL’s suggestion and released the update of the Wordpress Plugin. In addition, I added a cache check to fix up all of the missing images that may be out there right now.

Get the Kiva Wordpress Widget Version 2.1 here.

General Motors dropped from DOW today as it filled for bankruptcy this morning. The Obama administration is to purchase the remains of the suffering company for $30 billion, with the Canadian government chipping in an additional 9.5 billion for the Canadian branch of the company. Together the two governments and the remaining GM staffers will have an arduous task of restructuring the giant company in to a leaner organization in the hopes that it can again rise to be a profitable employer to thousands.

Almost prophetically the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car? was broadcast on TV the night before GM officially filled for bankruptcy. The documentary details the story of the EV1, GM's electric car that was released in 1996. While GM did produce the EV1, they did little else to bring the innovative car to the market place. There was little or no promotion.  They didn't let people buy the EV1, leasing was the only option to procure the vehicle. They even put A-list celebrities such as Mel Gibson through lengthy questionnaires prior to letting them lease an EV1. in 1999 when GM stopped production of the EV1, they pulled all of the EV1s on the road and destroyed them, an action that was made possible by their lease only policy.

GM put an inferior battery in the first edition of the EV1, even though the owned a controlling interest in a company that had a patent for a  far superior battery invented by Stan Oshinsky . Sadly GM only released 200 second generation EV1's that included the superior battery, and later GM sold it's shares to Cheveron/Texaco who were free to suppress the innovative technology.

When GM squashed the EV1 they choose greed over innovation. This was a massive mistake. Our world is riddled with massive problems, and GM had a solution to a hand-full of them, and tossed it in the garbage, to the detriment of the company's profits,  it's some 250,000 American  employees, and most importantly the greater good. The EV1 was positioned to help with:

• The pollution problem
  

  LA Smog

• Dependence on foreign oil
  

  Desert Storm

• Rising gas prices harming industry and families
  

  Rising gas prices

Innovation should not be squandered! Google did not earn $22 billion last year because they choose to ignore innovation. Innovation brings greater wealth than clinging on to old ideas ever will. Seems to me that GM learned this the hard way... well, lets hope they have learned this!

In the documentary Wally E. Rippel, a research engineer, points out that there is still about a trillion barrels of oil in the earth. "At $100 a barrel, that's $100 trillion of business left in the ground". The fat cat oil companies have so much to gain from prohibiting new technologies from taking over our current consuption of oil and gas, and they have the power to make it happen. Their pressure on the government, and the car companies, including GM, ensured that the EV1 would not survive. Under these pressures GM chose the gas gusseling Hummer over the EV1. Ironically now, GM owes over $1 million for every Hummer on the road.

There are many lessons to be learned here. Lessons that are not new. Lessons that we all learned back in grade school from Dr. Seuss and Sesame Street. Mainly: greed does not pay in the long run.  Society and technology will continue to innovate and progress as we move into the future, because it has to.  Our population is growing, and our resources are finite. We have to come up with innovative ideas to survive in the long run. Setbacks such as the demise of the EV1 only slow progress and innovation, to the determent of our future generations. I hope the governments inheriting the remains of the once mighty American company will have the foresight and wisdom to remove this hindrance on progress and revive the Electric Vehicle project.

You can watch all of Who Killed the Electric Car? for free on youtube in 10 parts, starting with the first here: