ALL ABOUT WHEAT
Wheat is a pilar of any child's diet.
Any parent can tell you flour's vital role in their children's diet. We feed our children countless items with flour as the primary ingredient, such as sandwich bread, crackers, desserts, pancakes, muffins, and so on. To further illustrate this point, it has been shown that wheat and other grains account for 51% of the total worldwide caloric intake.
My approach to health is to begin with habits or routines we use most frequently, so examining the importance of flour quality in our children's diet is a no-brainer. After careful research, it turned out that not only is the flour quality essential, but the freshness of the ground flour and the type of preparation are also critical.
FRESHLY
GROUND
FLOUR
Within 72 hours of grinding flour over 90 percent of available nutrients are destroyed by oxygen.
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Additionally, over 25 nutrients are found in fresh flour that are not in white flour at grocery stores. One particularly eye-catching example is Tocopherol, or natural Vitamin E, which comes from the Greek root words Tokos, meaning offspring, and Pherin, meaning to bear. This vitamin, as the name implies, is directly related to reproductive health, and its absence from commercial wheat products does not bode well for the reproductive efficiency of our children.
It should be noted that even though synthetic vitamins are often added to store-bought wheat products, synthetic vitamins are never a substitute for naturally occurring nutrients and can even hinder or block the absorption of the natural counterpart.
Modern commerce has deliberately robbed some of nature's foods of much of their bodybuilding material while retaining the hunger satisfying energy factors. For example, in the production of refined white flour approximately eighty per cent or four-fifths of the phosphorus and calcium content are usually removed, together with the vitamins and minerals provided in the embryo or germ. The evidence indicates that a very important factor in the lowering of reproductive efficiency of womanhood is directly related to the removal of vitamin E in the processing of wheat. The germ of wheat is our most readily available source of that vitamin. Its role as a nutritive factor for the pituitary gland in the base of the brain, which largely controls growth and organ function, apparently is important in determining the production of mental types. Similarly, the removal of vitamin B with the embryo of the wheat, together with its oxidation after processing, results in depletion of bodybuilding activators.
- Weston Price, DDS
When confronted with such an apparent disconnect between modern and ancient food quality, it is essential to reflect on the traditions of old. When it comes to flour, each community used to be anchored by a local flour mill that would mill enough flour to supply the townspeople with freshly baked daily bread. In this way, the burden of procuring wheat and grinding it, which would have been a very labor-intensive process, was transferred to the local mill, which would have had massive grinding stones propelled by livestock, a water wheel, and people. The importance of freshly ground flour came intuitively because flour that sat out for more than a couple of days would turn rancid and emit an offensive odor due to the flour's natural oils that would spoil.
QUALITY
OF WHEAT
When it comes to the quality of flour, there are two critical considerations. Firstly, ensure the flour comes from organic wheat that has never been treated with glyphosate, a weed killer and crop desiccant often used to dry out crops before harvest in hopes of increasing the yield. Third-party labs have shown a long list of commonly used wheat and grain products in the United States that contain alarming levels of glyphosate residue. Organic certification does not necessarily guarantee the product is free of all trace residues, but it certainly goes a long way in preventing exposure.
Secondly, we must consider gluten. Much of the gluten in modern wheat comes from combining grains to maximize yields with modern farming practices. This makes the protein strands more complex and more challenging to digest. Ancient grains preceded modern hybridization and contained much shorter and simpler protein strands, thus making them much easier to digest.
A few examples of ancient grains are einkorn, emmer, spelt, and kamut.
The best sources for ancient grains I have found are einkorn wheat from Jovial Foods and most other grains from either Amazon or a site called Azure Standard, a bulk foods style ordering site with local drop points all over the county.
METHOD OF
PREPARATION
Finally, we must consider how our final products are prepared. Modern wheat-based products are either made with dried baker's yeast to force rise or without yeast and prepared immediately with plain flour.
The problem with these methods is that the nutrients in wheat need to undergo some natural process to unlock them and make them more bioavailable or digestible. All modern wheat-based products do not prepare the grains properly, exacerbating the problem of gluten intolerance or the general intolerance of wheat-based products.
Without going into too much of the science, there are three main ways to prepare grains properly:
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Sourdough / Natural Leavening
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Sprouting
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Soaking
SOURDOUGH / Natural Leavening uses natural yeast from the environment to make a sourdough starter. This "starter" is then used to infuse natural yeast into your dough, where the yeast begins to eat the starches in the flour and release gases that make the dough rise.
SPROUTING is the process of soaking and sprouting the wheat berry seeds. This process activates all the nutrients within the seed that are necessary for the seed to grow into a plant. Generally, when cooking or baking with sprouted grains, the grains are either ground up into a sort of dough immediately after the sprouts form, or the sprouted grains can be dehydrated at low temperatures before being ground into flour.
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SOAKING wheat is different from sprouting because you soak freshly ground flour instead of keeping the whole seeds intact. After grinding the grain into flour, an acidic medium, such as yogurt, is added. Soaking flour with yogurt helps to break down the nutrients and proteins in the flour much in the same way that sourdough yeast does. This application is excellent for recipes that do not require rising, such as pancakes, waffles, cakes, and muffins.
All three of these methods perform a sort of "pre-digestion" of the wheat, specifically the starches and proteins within the grain. "Pre-digested," or fermented food, makes it easier for our bodies to break down food and assimilate the energy and nutrients. It is essential to reflect on the historical importance of traditionally prepared foods because nearly all historically healthy societies have incorporated large amounts of fermented condiments, grains, vegetables, and even fermented meats into their diets. This practice has been largely forgotten and moved on from the modern Western-style diet.