The Kitchen

I hope I've done a little bit to convince you that whole grain isn't the be-all and end-all of nutrition; and that its claims should be examined critically, with a minimum hype. You can find a summary of all the various charts you've seen in this series in this handy PDF, suitable for framing.

I thought I would wrap up this series with a bit of irony (although I'm probably not using the word properly according to those killjoys who want to wrap the English language in a straightjacket). After spending several posts bashing whole wheat, we've just launched a Whole Wheat version of our product as well!

Even a curmudgeon like me will concede this is the best of both words, since there is still some validity to the vitamins and mineral argument at least. And with the whole wheat version, we've elevated our fiber content to a record-breaking 20 grams fiber per serving, and the calories went down another healthy notch down to a mere 120 calories per serving.

You can check it out, along with the new Chocolate flavor, on our recently renovated website, which also boasts a much more flexible ordering system. I hope you like it (and use it often ;).

Once upon a time, food was scarce. When people asked each other what they'll eat tonight, they didn't mean "the Chinese take-out place, or the Mexican one?", but rather "will little Timmy go to bed hungry tonight?"

Since much of the population was subjected to a persistent state of near-starvation, especially during times of famine or drought, a number of diseases became common and well-known scourges. Most of these diseases were the result of severe deficincies of various vitamins and minerals in the diet. For example, scurvy is caused by a Vitamin C deficiency; goiter by insufficient iodine; beriberi by a lack of Vitamin B1; and the list goes on in abject misery.

In this context, it was natural that a meme should arise that "vitamins + minerals = good". After all, if you don't get enough vitamins and minerals, horrible things happen to you. And if a little is good, a lot must be even better. This vitamins=good idea stayed with us into present day, and is part of the reason mothers are so intent on pushing brussel sprouts.

However, while this vitamins=good idea is still with us, the context in which it arose is long gone (at least in the industrialized world). Thanks to companies like Monsanto, ADM, Nabisco, and Wal-Mart, we now have an incredibly efficient food production and distribution system. Food has become so plentiful and (consequently)cheap that the new problem isn't starvation, but obesity. A side-effect of this seismic shift in food availability is that those deficiency-based diseases of the past are but a sepia-toned memory. When was the last time you heard of anyone getting scurvy?

And it turns out that the human body is an incredible machine. It really doesn't take that much Vitamin C, iodine, B1 and so forth for it to stave off all those diseases. Once you meet a minimum base level, the rest of the vitamins you take really don't do that much. In fact, there's even some evidence that an excess of vitamins actually does significant harm.

So while whole wheat does have more vitamins and minerals than standard flour, the health benefits of that fact are dubious at best. I've yet to see a study which completely controls for the fiber content of whole wheat, and shows any benefit to be gained from the vitamins in and of themselves. It seems that vitamins and minerals just have a halo of "goodness" leftover from the bygone days when food was scarce. They really serve the same role as our vestigial appendix: typically useless, and occasionally dangerous.

I knew I'd have to deal with this one eventually. Personally I'm not all that impressed by "low-carb", "glycemic index", Atkins, Kimkins, or whatever terminology they've cooked up for the diet this week. That said, some people swear by it, so here we go.

How does whole wheat fare on the carb question? Whole wheat has the same number of carbohydrates as standard flour. However, more of those carbohydrates are fiber in whole wheat than in standard flour. This means that whole wheat does have fewer "net carbs" than standard flour, "net carbs" being the catchphrase for the carbohydrates which the human body will actually digest and absorb. Fiber, naturally, is indigestible.

However, there is a catch. Whole wheat just doesn't have that much fiber. When you get down to the actually numbers, standard pasta has 2 grams of fiber per serving, while whole wheat pasta has all of 5. Better, but a far cry from FiberGourmet pasta's 18. Lather, rinse, repeat of my post on calories.

And by the way, whole wheat has even less of an impact on the sugar content - certainly less than the rounding errors introduced by the labeling itself. Pasta has very little sugar to begin with. We get this question a lot, too.

In conclusion, here's another one of those charts for those of you who are more visually oriented, this time on carbs:

The next important item to consider is calories. How much do you really save by switching to whole wheat?

The only way whole wheat could possibly be lower in calories is if it had a lot of fiber. Since fiber has 0 calories, the more fiber in the product, the fewer calories. This is logical, since every gram of fiber will displace a gram of carbohydrates, protein, or fat. But as we saw last time, whole wheat just doesn't have that much fiber.

With only 2 more grams of fiber per ounce than standard flour, whole wheat can cut at most 8 calories per ounce compared to standard flour. In fact, it probably helps even less in the calorie department, since standard flour also takes out the high-fat germ, while whole wheat leaves it in (and there's a lot more germ than there is bran, as you can see in the picture). Since each gram of fat has more than twice the calories of a carbohydrate or protein, whole wheat is that much less of a calorie bargain. (Incidentally, this higher fat content is why whole wheat products go rancid faster than standard ones.)

All this explains why when so many cereals switched to whole grains, their calories didn't budge at all. Even in a product like pasta, where there are no added sugars or fats to obscure whole grain's input, switching from durum semolina to whole grain moves the pasta all the way from 210 ... to 200. A measly 10 calories in 2 ounces?

By contrast, I can think of something else which saves quite a few more calories:

The first thing people think of when you say "whole wheat" is fiber. And, in fact, increasing the fiber in your diet provides a vast range of health benefits, and accounts for the bulk (hah!) of positive health effects associated with whole grain. But exactly how much extra fiber does a whole grain product provide?

The most important thing here is how much of the product is actually whole grain. Cereal companies made an enormous ruckus bragging about how they're all whole grain now, but when you consider how many other ingredients go into a cereal - inclduing stuff like sugar, which not everyone is a fan of - the fiber content drops surprisingly fast.

Here's the actual fiber content in some popular cereals (the ones that are big headlines at their manufacturer's sites, anyway). Try to guess which ones are and aren't whole grain, just by looking at the numbers:

Only Trix, Lucky Charms, and Wheaties are whole wheat. Fruity Pebbles is decidedly not. Did that throw you? Then I made my point: In the cereal aisle there is virtually no connection between whole grain and fiber.

OK, perhaps cereal has too much other junk to be considered healthy. What about pasta? Pasta doesn't have anything but flour and water, so whole wheat pasta should have a nice fiber content. And you'd be right: whole wheat pasta is better than both standard pasta and a poke in the eye. But it's not as good as something else I can think of:

If you were trying to meet your Daily Recommended Value of fiber, which one would you choose?

Here's a question I get a lot: "Well, is it whole wheat?"

No, we're not whole wheat. We're much, much, much better than whole wheat.

I'm going to spend the next few posts showing you how the public is being misled about the value of whole wheat. First let me give you some background on what whole wheat is.

Since antiquity, whole wheat has been considered the lowest quality flour. It was the subsistence of the poor peasant, who couldn't afford the good, refined flour on which the upper-classes and nobility dined. This view persisted up until the present day, when mechanization had finally given everyone in the Western world affordable access to the flour which had previously been reserved for the aristocracy. Then suddenly it wasn't good anymore...

Someone in the cereal industry realized that they could sell people cheaper flour for a higher price if they could convince them it was "healthier" in some fashion. What followed was an extensive and all-pervasive marketing blitz, at the end of which the wealthy upper-classes were cheerfully eating the food of the proletariat. Marx should have been a marketer.

Whole wheat has some nutritional value, but it's not mythical nor unassailable - it must be quantified and put into context. But an advertising campaign doesn't give over a nuanced massage - it just keeps bleating "good for you, good for you, good for you" at the top of its lungs until every believes it. We're going to work out exactly what whole wheat does and doesn't do for you, and how it compares to other offerings. I hope you stick around!