----- Original Message -----
From: "Kathleen Theisen-Remaud" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2004 3:02 PM
Subject: Re: The Hunza


> Eva wrote:
> Did she complain about cereals or disliked them or something that
> points in
> that direction?
> -----------------
> Yes, actually she did complain about eating grains.  I never saw her
> eat pasta or rice.   She took some sort of stomach acid pills for many

The reason I asked is thar many celiac people have been complaining about
eating cereals all their lives and have been considered spoiled about food.
They have been met with very little consideration.
I like bread but it was a relief to find out that I didn't have to eat a lot
to eat well. In the 60's the Swedish department of Health had a slogan
saying: Eat 6-8 slices of bread every day. When you say that in Swedish it
sounds like: Eat sixty-eight slices of bread every day, something that
everyone found very funny. The campaign for eating more bread was not very
successful - in fact, I think a lot of people alreadey ate that amount of
bread.

Our sence of food history is very distorted. I know that most Swedes don't
know  that wheat was a very small crop in Sweden till about 1900 and that
oat was hardly produced at all until the beginning of 1800. At that time it
came in as a crop because we used a lot more horses compared to earlier
times when we used oxes to work in the farms. Horses did better on oats than
did oxes.

When Swedish agriculture changed in the beginning of 1900 using more
tractors and not so many horses the authorities realised they needed to find
a new use for oat and it became human food. Most Swedes think that we have
eaten oates for hundreds of years while in fact it is only for 200 years,
that is 8 generations. wheat has only been common since the 1930'th.