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Ancient/authentic wheat varieties taste amazing !!! I like millet, einkorn, wheat berry, rye berry, kamut, etc. I get them at the farmer's market. Totally worth it
This was a revelation in taste and health in my 40's :) I realized that all the no carb / low carb fads of the past few years could be replaced with eating what people were eating thousands of years ago, before economic optimization turned wheat into nutrient-free, calorie dense commodity.
(Similar things happened with rice and corn -- the heirloom varieties are amazing; the commodity stuff is highly processed and has fewer nutrients)
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Remember there was that trend of people eating a McDonald's hamburger without the bun? Do people still do that?
They were onto something (processed wheat makes you sick), but the sad thing is that the real solution isn't available because of economics. You could eat it with real bread from heirloom wheat, and it wouldn't cause the health problems.
But you don't have that option. (Although obviously the meat leaves something to be desired too)
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Another random anecdote: the first episode of Chef's Table: Pizza on Netflix now tells the story of an Italian guy from NYC who discovered amazing wheat in Arizona and makes acclaimed pizza there :)
Bread in the past contained stones and sand. As a result most people in the past had very poor teeth. The diet people had in the past lacked a lot of ingredients. As a result most people developed poorly.
Processed food is not necessary bad. Its probably better than its ancient alternatives.
Anecdote from NZ history - in areas where aruhe (the rhizome of the bracken fern) or shellfish were a staple food, a leading cause of death in Māori was septicaemia - blood poisoning from tooth abscesses caused by a diet high in materials that were damaging to teeth - the tough fibres in the aruhe, and the sand in the shellfish.
I'd say there was high variance in the past, like there is today
But the diet that Americans eat today is worse than that of the past, adjusted for income
i.e. we are > 1000x wealthier now, but eat poorer quality food than somebody with the same wealth 1000, 2000, or even 10,000 years ago.
This is because the entire food industry has "scaled" and become economically optimized
It's mistake to think we can't regress, or haven't regressed and forgotten valuable knowledge -- architecture is another good example
"The past" is a very long, very large place to be compared like this. Many ancient skeletons show people far healthier, with far better teeth, than those of the recent past or today.
Most of our longevity comes down to antibiotics and better childbirth.
A huge amount of today's food is basically bland, over-processed, mass produced, Round-up soaked, hormone-addled, preservative-laden, antibiotic and micro-plastic filled sludge that uses fat, salt, sugar and colorants to pass as edible.
Claiming this as superior to the local, artisanal, organic produce filled diets with a variety of meats from wildlife that hadn't been exploited to extinction is a very, very, very hot take.
> millet
Isn't wheat... It's an entirely different family of grasses (millet, teff, sorghum are all types of millets).
> processed wheat makes you sick
Does it? How? Are we assuming a diet with no other sources of fibre or vitamins?
White wheat flour has a higher glycemic index than table sugar[0]. High GI foods can lead to blood sugar spikes, potentially to ”impaired insulin sensitivity” [1], and a host of related health problems. Diabetes, obesity, etc. In a sense it’s worse than refined white sugar for many, if not most, people. Particularly those living a more sedentary lifestyle.
If you subscribe to the notion that sugar is poison[2][3], then highly refined, processed, wheat flour is also poison.
[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/diseases-and-conditions/glyce...
[1] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/22206-insulin...
[2] https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2009/06/104177/sugar-poison-says-u...
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBnniua6-oM (see 35-39min)
Okay, your first link states that potatoes and white rice also have a higher GI than sucrose, which makes sense, as they'd have a more complex set of sugars when cooked as the starch chains break down.
Meanwhile, pasta made from white flour has a lower GI than white bread, but also lower than sucrose.
Which also makes sense, as bread has sugar added to it as part of the baking process, and also to enhance consumer uptake in certain markets.
(US bread contains more added sugar than bread in my country).
So, this leads me to a clarifying question or two:
1) What is the incidence of type 2 diabetes in Italy and SE Asia? Given the prevalence of pasta in the former, and rice in the latter.
2) In your country, is white bread really the main source of daily carbohydrates?
I totally agree that eating huge amounts of refined carbohydrates is unhealthy, but I haven't seen anything here that shows that white flour as a part of a balanced diet will inherently make you sick.
I agree with you.
The glycemic index from that table just shows that a certain kind of white wheat bread is digested faster than pure sucrose, but slower than boiled potatoes.
The effect of any food that contains starch or sugar depends not only on the glycemic index, but also on the ingested amount. Moreover, the effect of eating bread depends on the other food that is ingested at the same time, which will slow down the digestion and lower the glycemic index in comparison with eating just bread alone, without anything else. Sweet food with high sugar content is much more likely to be eaten alone than bread.
While the digestion speed for any pure sugar or for boiled potatoes or rice is about the same for any kind of sugar, potatoes or rice, there is a huge number of varieties of bread, which are digested at different rates and which have different glycemic indexes.
From a table like that it is not possible to know what kind of bread has been tested.
For example, I make at home a special kind of bread with very high protein content (about 40% protein, while the commercial breads have less than 10% protein). It is made using only white wheat flour and water, but the dough is washed to remove about 75% of the starch, enriching the dough in gluten.
I can bet that such a white wheat bread has a glycemic index much lower than sucrose.
Yeah, no. That's not a real thing.
Have you any evidence for that actually being a real thing?
It’s a standard hacker news BS generalisation, presenting something with some basis in truth as universally true.
The average American eats McDonald's once a week (or so i've read, I don't know how to verify), I know a fair number of people who are well under that, so a lot of people must be eating more often. There are a number of other fast food joints.
If you get a varied diet you can have fast food once in a while, but it isn't very healthy alone.
I used to work at a financial services company that served the unbanked. You could count on seeing a Wal-Mart trip followed by MacDonalds on every account--multiple times per week.
Poor people eat garbage in the US.
Walmart is a cheap place to shop yeah? And I'm guessing Maccas is cheaper in the US than in my country?
It obviously varies ... Kids seem to love it / thrive on it -- look at a typical 2 year old with mac and cheese or Costco pizza :)
I think as adults people tend to not be able to metabolize that kind of diet. In populations, it repeatably causes a typical set of chronic diseases ("Western diet disease", obesity, diabetes, etc.).
And there is more processed wheat/corn/rice in 2020 than there was in 1980, due to economic optimization. It's just harder to avoid
So there was a trend away from carbs and bread in the last decade or 2, and those people could have also just avoided processed wheat / soft white bread of the type talked about in the original article.
Carbs can be GOOD if they come from a good source, which the original article is talking about
> I think as adults people tend to not be able to metabolize that kind of diet.
IIRC, it's like milk - if you're descended from a population where X was a staple, you're less likely to have issues digesting it, because that got selected out over the years.
> In populations, it repeatably causes a typical set of chronic diseases ("Western diet disease", obesity, diabetes, etc.).
Except a diet with excessive fat also correlates strongly to obesity and type 2 diabetes. Which makes sense, because insulin resistance is about how your body interacts with glucose, and every source of energy ultimately becomes glucose in your body.
(And there's increased risk with high levels of triglycerides in your blood and low levels of HDL)
> Carbs can be GOOD if they come from a good source, which the original article is talking about
Carbs aren't good or bad, they're just a complex sugar. Yes, it's defibitely better if your source of carbohydrates also includes vitamins and fibre, but if you're eating sufficient vegetables, white bread or traditional Jordanian durum bread, it really makes no difference.
And as our conversation has demonstrated, it's not just "white flour makes you sick".
And everything is bad for you in excess.
Try going to a Mongolian circa Chinggis Khaan diet where 40% of your inputs are protein (near the limits of protein dominant diet the human body can take) and you'll have great fun not shitting for a week, then shitting uncontrollably for a week or two.
As Joe Rogan found out...
So, I fully agree that gaining most of your energy from white bread is very bad for you, but I do not agree with the statement that "processed white flour makes you sick", as that requires so many caveats you'd need a conveyancing lawyer to sort through them all.
Yeah my original statement was overly strong -- I was really referring to the subset of people who already found that "carbs" make them sick, and contort their diets as a result.
I believe the most salient issue, the most predictive one, for a wide range of health issues is food processing, due to economics.
Comment thread from 20 days ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32979216
Especially this on why processing is the issue, and not a particular macronutrient: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32987219
But I also do think that there is a very typical "Western diet" that causes chronic diseases, and it contains a lot of processed wheat (and corn). The comment in this thread about the receipts of going to Walmart and then McDonald's is exactly what I'm talking about. (And it's just sad that people don't have more options; they live in food deserts.)
Except a diet with excessive fat also correlates strongly to obesity and type 2 diabetes.
I believe it's processed fat! i.e. there is a huge difference between
1) a pure white chicken breast with all the natural fat dried out of it, frozen and unfrozen, and then smothered in mayo (every fast food franchise sells some version of this)
2) a chicken cooked in its own fat
The latter has nutrients that the former doesn't. You have to eat more calories of the former to feel full
Commodity corn on the cob is highly processed? Was that a mistake?
I think there's a good point to be made here: selective breeding has resulted in fruits and vegetables that are nutritionally far different from their predecessors, and yet we usually consider those foods "natural" and "unprocessed". Corn is much sweeter than it was even a few decades ago.
The corn you eat off the cob is a very specific set of varieties which make up a tiny tiny tiny percentage of corn crops produced for other purposes. Bred to have sugars instead of starches at a specific development stage, and mostly to keep that for long enough to make it through the supply chain. Actual fresh properly ripe sweet corn is a kind of “loses its best characteristics in hours” situation, unfortunately.
Sweet corn traits have little to do with the rest of the corn crop.
Any corn (maize) is unrecognizable compared to its unmodified form and has been for hundreds or thousands of years.
I've never heard "processed" refering to selecrive breeding or genetic engineering. I thought it meant mechanical processing, heating/drying, and/or sometimes shelf-stabilization with chemicals. I don't think corn on the cob is considered processed, other than the harvesting and possibly shucking process if shucked.
I would think of "corn" as a very overloaded word
It wouldn't make economic sense to use the same thing for corn on the cob vs. doritos / Frito Lay vs. high fructose corn syrup, and it likely isn't
In the last case, it's mostly chemistry and it doesn't even matter what the original plant was
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that said the corn at the farmer's market is way better than supermarket corn :) And just as cheap (when it's in season), unlike some other produce
> Many countries in Europe subsidize their wheat—a soft variety better suited for white flour—before exporting it, thereby lowering its price. Jordan, on the other hand, has been restricted for years by the conditions of loans from the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, and cannot subsidize its growers’ durum. Today, in the face of cheap imports, the former breadbasket now produces only 2 percent of its own wheat.
Wow that's brutal. Not news that the IMF is used in this way but it's rare to see the specific mechanisms and their side effects so clearly.
The world bank and IMF have no concept of biosecurity or self reliance in food. Least cost and open market is all they have as guiding principle from what I see. If somebody has better info I'd love to know.
If my memory is correct both institutions and the European equivalent are overrun by Chicago school types.
Varoufakis is not brilliant but his critique of how international finance regimes treat national banks who step into another paradigm is brilliant, and worth reading. It may be self serving, but that does not (to me) undermine how duplicitous the world banking leadership can be. Regarding Greece their only concern was "save germany"
Lebanon's loss of their grain store should be a wake up call. There are domestic reasons why it happened and international consequences of why they wound up there.
To paraphrase Reagan, the most terrifying words are "I'm from the IMF and I'm here to help".
I think the same could be said of the European bank for reconstruction and development. Here, have money, but with these union busting, open market, no strategic national interest in food and other security strings.
Oh, and we're forcing a 20%+ cut across the board on pensions and welfare because you need more poor people.
> no strategic national interest in food
Strange that they ended up there given that the entire rationale of the CAP was continent-wide security in food.
I imagine they recruit similar pie-in-the-sky economic theorists.
Just sucks when it's your country we're testing our theories out on.
Why had German banks invested in Greek securities at all? They must have known that the criteria for the Euro had been only fulfilled on paper.
Or asked the other way round: Why do countries join the Euro when neither Sweden nor Great Britain do and (almost) all economists say that it doesn't work if you have a weak economy?
I class "they must have known" in the same bucket as "the Greeks lied about their economy" -both wrong, but the European banking system decided Greece must pay and Germany must not pay these consequences.
To me, that undermined the mutuality which is presumably why the EU exists.
Both Sweden and Great Britain looked at national specific economic things. GB I think in the main it was for city of London finance sector reasons and parochialism about the pound. Sweden, it was put to referendum.
Why should Germany pay for these consequences and not those German banks? And yet, there is payment happening in the form of Target2 [1], with current numbers [2] not being much different than the graph in the article.
However, who has to pay is not my point. That 'secret' €2.8 billion loan doesn't fundamentally change the analysis of the Greek economy. 'They must have known' cannot be ignored. The Greek situation fulfilled economic theories that are broadly known.
So why did banks willingly underestimate the risk? If you look at Piraeus [3], crushing Greece cannot be a long term strategic target.
*edit: The mutuality was crushed in the setup. There was no perspective for Greece to develop inside the Euro. Subsidies to compensate the strong Euro don't work because the economy aligns to those subsidies and not to market demands. The mutuality is that the richer countries keep paying subsidies and the 'lucky' individual receivers have a good life within their poor community. That's not a good outlook.
Question remains: Can something be done to allow for economic prosperity in Greece within this framework? How can the startups be selected that rebuild the Greek economy so that every citizen benefits?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TARGET2
[2] https://gm-media-library.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/image_7f...
> Why do countries join the Euro when neither Sweden nor Great Britain do and (almost) all economists say that it doesn't work if you have a weak economy?
Politics. If you have a weak economy it's perceived by the population that switching to a strong currency will instantly increase their purchasing power.
If you have a weak economy and weak currency (which you have repeatedly printed in order to pay off debt, like Greece, Italy, etc) then your borrowing cost eventually becomes high as banks get wise to your behaviour. If you switch to the Euro then your borrowing cost magically becomes low (since you cant unilaterally just print money). If your economy still doesnt reform then eventually you cant pay your euro debt… and you have the Greek situation. Can’t print, no-longer have a low-cost, low wage, low tax, low regulation economy (since you conformed to the EU/Euro area regulations). The trick for politicians is getting out of there before the public realises this.
New Zealand is, as far as I'm aware, one of the few Western countries that doesn't subsidise agriculture or protect it with tariffs on competing imports.
(We still subsidise it in other ways, like Crown funded R&D, although that's viewable as an investment, especially around methane emission reductions, but also implicitly subsidise it by not making polluting industries pay for their externalities, but these are minuscule in comparison to the market interventions present overseas).
The US, UK, and EU make heavy usage of both subsidies and tariffs. The IMF is renowned for their endorsement of "free market for thee, but not for me".
The remoteness of New Zealand is effectively already a tariff on many imported goods.
Yet when we removed tariffs, nearly all local manufacturing was immediately out-competed.
We haven't manufactured cars here since the early 80s when tariffs were dropped, although to be fair, by then it was Japanese companies manufacturing cars here, not Kiwis in particular, our automotive industry is ahem renowned for the Trekka[0], Duzgo[1], and of course, the Bob Semple "Tank"[2].
Likewise, our clothing manufacturing industry has shrunk to a few niche companies that focus on export.
When subsidies and tariffs were removed from the agricultural sector, it forced quite a few farmers into bankruptcy and there were some suicides. It caused very real pain, but it now means that our agricultural industry is strong enough to be competitive in markets where their domestic producer competitors are getting significant assistance from the government.
Our neoliberal phase did a lot of harm, but there was some good.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trekka
The IMF destroying local economies like that was one of the major plot points of Zelensky TV show, servants of the people, which was how he became president in Ukraine. (He pivoted the show into getting elected).
It was ironic to watch his character even suggesting conspiracy theories that the IMF assassinates presidents opposing them, while the real world Zelensky is now under the biggest danger of assassination.
The IMF is really fucked up.
Putting pressure on certain essential markets so they aren’t entirely lost to foreign competitors in different situations is necessary for a healthy local economy. Balancing greed and necessity is hard, but the only people advocating for totally free markets are the winners in those arrangements.
the dumping of agricultural products is bad for local farmers but good for low income folks, no one forces jordans to buy the 3x cheaper imported wheat over the local variety. this is still a win for the people. I only hope these variety will find gourmet use and/or be saved for preservation. coming from farmer family, really missing a lot of products: canapy cloth, local cereals, mulberry, local tench, local nuts, etc...
No recipe!
I really want to know the name of the sweet bread shown at the top of the article.
me too ! :) alas...the article states it is an artisinal bread - you're unlikely to find it anywhere online. But as a Palestinian/lived in Jordon for 6 years - the closest i can think of is a home-made variety of kaak (literally translates to 'cake') which is a bread stick containing syrian oregano (zataar) and sugar in the dough, dipped in a combo of white sesame seeds and nigella seds. Usually shaped thin and long.
> rises again
Good pun.