Recently I read yet another health influencer post claiming that bread and beans are “inflammatory” and should be avoided by all who wants health.
This is one of the most stubborn health myths around, as everyone and their grandma has gone glutenfree these days.
And unfortunately many do indeed keep pushing this bad science. The majority of the people pushing this have zero education in nutrition though. They may be great medical doctors, good chiropractors or just savvy businessmen, who now make a living off selling health gadgets after their own history of burn-out. However, this does not make their insight into nutritional biochemistry great - just like I shouldn’t go around offering surgery on everyone and sundry just cause I saw a youtube video about it. That would be pretty crazy, quite frankly. And I also think it is pretty crazy for everyone to wake up and write books and blogs about nutrition with zero educational background or in-clinic training.
There are a lot of issues with this type of bad science being promoted.
1) Today everyone and their grandma is a nutrition expert.
2) Most people talking about nutrition have zero training or education - sometimes a weekend-course as a “health coach” of some sort.
3) You are not a representation of most people. What works for us may be quite unique for just us, and thus presenting it as, “this is the way everyone should eat” based on our own experience is bad science.
4) There is a big difference between symptom management and treating the cause. I.e. cutting out all difficult to digest foods will make the symptoms lessen - and that can be necessary temporarily, absolutely. But - and this is a big but - the reason for the sensitive digestion remains. What you’ve done is, you have limited yourself to a bunch of “easy to digest” foods, which for many becomes even more restrictive as time passes, because the reason for their digestive discomfort remains.
The cure for digestive disorders is to figure out the reason rather than to adhere to strict keto, carnivore, veganism, fruitarianism etc. Yes, if you have SIBO you will in fact react strongly to a host of carbs, but the solution is not to cut out carbs for good, it is to renormalise the gut-bacteria, so you can eat freely again and have a resilient digestive capacity.
Foods that contain gluten and lectins which are often touted as inflammatory DO indeed create inflammation - but this is actually a good thing (in moderation).
Our body and our digestive health needs some challenge to keep strong.
This is exactly similar to exercise. When we strength-train or run, we create inflammation. This inflammation in turn makes us stronger, more resilient. But if we are VERY sick, we don’t want to engage in heavy exercise til we are back in balance, because our body simply cannot recover from the stress.
However, if we avoided exercising out of fear from inflammation, we would become weak sicklings.
And this same logic holds true for food as well: if we only eat babyfood and mash, our digestion becomes weak and anything aside from babyfood will create pain, as our body and digestion is not geared to handle stressors. This is not an ideal way to create lasting health.
Health is the ability to be resilient during stress - not avoiding it.
And we can only make ourselves resilient by exposing our mind and body to levels of stressors - not constantly, and not overdoing it, but not avoiding it either.
Grains, beans and small amounts of fermented dairy have historically been consumed by some of the longest livings people on earth. What we should be concerned about is, WHY many modern people find it difficult to digest these foods (treat and identify the cause) and also be aware of eating as unprocessed and unrefined as possible.
A lot of our indigestion has to do with chemicals in our food, as well as modern modification of our food.
Especially bread can be quite a maze to navigate through. Bread in the supermarket is typically filled with preservatives which aside from prolonging the shelf-life of the bread, also disable our own gut bacteria from digesting it properly. Add to that, all the pesticides and glyphosate which is typically found in non-organic grain products. Pesticides - and especially glyphosate - wreck havoc on our gut health.
However, this issue is a processing issue, not the food itself. Get hold of older original grains like spelt, emmer, rye, barley and Ezekiel breads and stuff like that, and make sure it’s organic and preferably sourdough. This bread is reasonable easy to digest, and if you cannot digest it, it says more about your weak digestive capacity (which you should focus on fixing), rather than the food being “bad” itself.
As an example: we know the many benefits of beta-glucans - and where do we find them? In grains! Same people who promote a grainfree diet will promote supplements containing beta-glucans. The issue here is, that we always want to eat the whole rather than just parts of it. There are so many still-to-be-discovered synergetic factors in food and nature, which we just don’t get, when we cut it in pieces and separate it. In addition researchers have found higher heavy-metal load in people who are glutenfree vs. people who eat gluten. Now part of this may be due to issues with a lot of the glutenfree foods, so this is a tricky subject to conclude anything out of. We can’t conclude at this point that grains and gluten protect from heavy metals per se - but we know for a fact that many glutenfree products are unusually high in metals, which is super bad.
We are not meant to live off babyfood and mash. We are meant to have healthy, strong and resilient bodies. If we don’t have that at the moment, then we should focus on identifying what is causing our dis-ease and treat that. We should do this, rather than focus on all the things and foods which a sick body reacts to, because that list tends to grow in time, and it is not the cause of our imbalance! We don’t want to make our lives fit for a sick body - we want our body to get fit and healthy and to cater for better resilience. Strategies can include both symptom- and cause-oriented management. But if we only focus on our symptoms, we are missing the boat.
References:
Nutr Today. 2017 Sep; 52(5): 208–222
Annu Rev Food Sci Technol. 2010;1:19-40
Using Cereal Science and Technology for the Benefit of Consumers, 2005