To recap from Part I, Paleo Diet advocates argue that humans are genetically wired to eat meat, foraged vegetables, fruits, nuts, and seeds. Paleo peoples, they argue, did not eat grains, legumes, or dairy and were superbly healthy.

But, what’s wrong with grains?

First, we’re eating too many grains on a daily basis. Luise Light, M.S., Ed.D, wrote What to Eat, in part, to make this case. As detailed in Mainely Tipping Points Essay 12 on my blog, Light was hired by the USDA to produce the 1980 food guide. Light’s team of scientists concurred that two to three daily servings of whole grains were optimal — two servings for women, three for men. A serving is one slice of bread or one-half cup of a cooked grain or pasta. When Light sent the new food guide to the office of the Secretary of Agriculture (a political appointee), it came back changed: grain servings now numbered six to eleven. Light was horrified, furious, and feared that the alteration would increase national risks of obesity and diabetes, which has occurred.

Read Part I of the Paleo Diet here.

William Davis, M.D., a preventive cardiologist who recently published the New York Times bestseller, Wheat Belly, asks us to look at how many feet grain products occupy in the average grocery store. There’s at least the bread aisle, the cereal aisle, the pasta aisle, the cracker aisle, the cookie aisle, the chip aisle, the baking aisle, the wheat products in the fresh and frozen food cases, and the store bakery. It’s hard to eat in America without consuming grains.

Secondly, grains are mostly carbohydrate. Wheat, Davis writes, is “70 percent carbohydrate by weight, with protein and indigestible fiber each comprising 10 to 15 percent” and with a tiny bit of fat rounding out the package. Today, many American nutritional “experts” promote eating whole-grain products as they are complex carbohydrates, unlike simple sugars.

But, Davis writes that the carbohydrate in wheat is split between amylopectin A (75 percent) and amylose (25 percent). Amylose is not digested efficiently; some makes its way to the colon undigested. Amylopectin A is the most digestible of the amylopectin forms found in plants, which means that whole wheat increases blood sugar more than other complex carbohydrates. In effect, “eating two slices of whole wheat bread is really little different, and often worse, than drinking a can of sugar-sweetened soda or eating a sugary candy bar.” The glycemic index of whole grain bread (72) is higher than sucrose (59) or of a Mars bar (68).

Third, grains, like all plants, have developed powerful, and mostly underestimated, chemical properties in order to carry out their life agendas. Rob Wolf, in The Paleo Solution, notes that if you eat a grain, “that’s it for the grain.” But, grains don’t go down “without a fight” and grains are “remarkably well equipped for chemical warfare.”

Both Wolf and Davis do a really good job of explaining the adverse impact on humans of the chemicals in grains, information that is both widely available and, until recently, ignored. I can only try to summarize the highlights, using Wolf’s text. Hopefully, you will investigate more deeply, especially if you are having digestive problems, arthritis, diabetes, neurological problems, or infertility.

All grains, writes Wolf, contain a variety of proteins, called lectins. These proteins cause more damage when derived from the gluten-containing grains — wheat, rye, triticale, spelt, barley, kamut, bulgar, and oats. Lectins are “not broken down in the normal digestive process,” which leaves “large, intact proteins in the gut.” Grains also contain protease inhibitors, which “further block the digestion of dangerous lectins. “

Serious problems occur, writes Wolf, when undigested proteins “are transported intact through the intestinal lining.” For one thing “these large, intact protein molecules are easily mistaken by the body as foreign invaders like bacteria, viruses, or parasites,” so the body begins to create antibodies to attack them. In addition, the undigested lectins damage the intestinal lining during passage, which allows “other proteins to enter the system,” and the body creates antibodies for them. These antibodies can attach themselves to organs and, even, your brain. Attachment causes a “wholesale immune response” that destroys the tissue of that organ.

When the intestinal wall is damaged, writes Wolf, the “chemical messenger, cholecystokinin (CCK) is not released — so the gall bladder and the pancreas malfunction, which results in nondigestion of the fats and proteins we have eaten. Removing the gall bladder is the mainstream solution, but this procedure is akin to “killing the 'canary in the coal mine.'" Wolf believes removing grains from the diet and allowing the gut to heal is a better solution.

Grains, notes Wolf, also contain antinutrients, like the phytates, which help prevent premature germination of the grain. Phytic acid, in humans, binds to calcium, magnesium, zinc, and iron, which means your body can’t absorb these minerals. Malabsorption is one reason ancient peoples who started settled agricultural lives “lost an average of six inches in height.” To partially mitigate the impact of phytic acid, the Weston A Price Foundation advocates grains be soaked, sprouted, or fermented.

Nora T. Gedgaudas, CNS, CNT, in "Grains: Are They Really a Health Food?: Adverse Effects of Gluten Grains" (May/June 2012, Well Being Journal), notes that grains contain goitrogens, which are substances that inhibit the thyroid. She also notes that “chronic carbohydrate consumption, in general, depletes serotonin stores and greatly depletes the B Vitamins required to convert amino acids into many needed neurotransmitters," which may be a cause of today’s “rampant serotonin deficiencies, clinical depression, anxiety, and some forms of ADD/ADHD in our populations.”

Fourth, grains are addictive. Wolf says grains “contain molecules that fit into the opiate receptors in our brain….the same receptors that work with heroine, morphine, and Vicodin.” Gedgaudas says the morphine-like compounds in gluten-containing grains, called exorphins, are “quite addictive” and leave “many in frank denial of the havoc that gluten can wreak.” She calls gluten a “cereal killer.” Davis agrees and writes that grains can produce the same vicious circle of addiction and withdrawal that crack cocaine does.

Fifth, and maybe the most important reason of all, as Davis explains in Wheat Belly, is that since the 1950s, the wheat that humans have eaten for the past several centuries has been radically changed by industry to increase yield and to allow patents. These changes have introduced gene changes that “are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of genes apart” from the pre-1950s wheat. Wheat now contains a new “protein/enzyme smorgasbord” that has never been tested on humans.

Davis warns that if you eliminate wheat for several weeks and try to eat it again, you will likely have extreme reactions. In his clinical practice, however, eliminating wheat has consistently produced weight loss, the loss of the dangerous “wheat belly,” and the cessation of many chronic conditions.

In Mainely Tipping Points Essay 32 on my blog, I discussed Konstantin Monastyrsky’s 2008 book, Fiber Menace. Monastyrsky believes one should eliminate grains gradually as the body has to adjust to less fiber, which is what I did. Swedish Bitters, a tonic made from greens, helps with any constipation that ensues with the cessation of eating a lot of grain fiber. Eating lots of greens is an even better idea.

Louisa Enright lives in Camden.