On Mon, 22 Jul 2002, Don Wiss wrote:

>  > One fact is that there are many people who get
>  >sick if they eat grains.
>
> But what if they are the cause of cancer? People don't get sick from them,
> just at some point it kills them, and they don't blame the decades of grain
> consumption.

What if, indeed?  What if red meat is the cause of colon cancer,
and so forth?  How do you propose to establish whether it is the
consumption of grains or the overconsumption of grains that
caused the cancer?  What if the carcinogen is not the grains but
the aflatoxin that results from them being stored in large
quantities -- something that happened only after agriculture.

Again, I'm not trying to argue that people should or shouldn't
eat grains, but I have a problem with the logic that forbids
thems in absolute terms from paleo.

The very fact that we have evidence of gathering grains as far
back as 17,000 years ago makes me ask: Why then?  Am I to believe
that people took up grain-eating at that time?  Why would they?
But I have no trouble believing that people ate grains
sporadically as soon as they moved into the habitats where the
grains were.  In fact, I think the basic rule of human diet has
been: exploit what's there to the maximum extent possible.

> Plus you can read about lots of other health problems in Dangerous Grains,
> and the people aren't getting "sick" from them.

What if, as Weston Price argued, it is not the grains but how we
process them that is the problem?  "Seeds, grains and nuts are
soaked, sprouted, fermented or naturally leavened in order to
neutralize naturally occuring antinutrients in these foods, such
as phytic acid, enzyme inhibitors, tannins and complex
carbohydrates."
(http://www.westonaprice.org/membership/wapfbrochure.html)  Some
of these technologies -- soaking and aprouting -- were easily
within reach of stone age people.

In short, I regard it as an open question whether our problems
with grains are the inevitable result of consuming them or the
result of overconsumption of them, especially in improperly
prepared form, or the result of giving them and other foods
to children at an age when their immune systems are not
developed.

Todd Moody
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