No Grains... Ever!

 No Grains… EVER! 

 When it comes to your health and us guiding you back to Your Original State with The O.G Me, one of our core philosophies and aphorisms is “No Grains… EVER!” Why are we so uncompromising with our position on this. Well, there are a number of reasons. Let’s dive in. 

Way, way, way back in our evolutionary history – as far as we’ve been taught anyway – our food lifestyle was Hunter Gatherer. We didn’t farm animals or crops; there was no agriculture. We hunted wild animals and we gathered nuts, seeds, berries, vegetables and herbs that were already just magically growing out of Mother Earth. The plants we gathered were seasonal, which meant that fruits, higher in natural sugars, were only available for a couple of months in the year, designed by nature to give us an extra layer of fat to sustain us through the winter period when animal foods were less available. Eating seasonally in your region is most beneficial because the foods don’t suffer the concept “food miles”, which refers to the distance a food has to travel – not to mention the storage processes – to get to you, for consumption. Notice how today, our modern food lifestyle affords us the luxury of most fruits and vegetables all year round? Well, beware of this. Ask yourself, “What genetic, or otherwise, modifications are being done to these foods so that I can have them whenever I want?” Nature did not intend it this way. FYI – the term GM or genetically modified, has now been replaced with “Bio Fortified” or “Bio Engineered”. There is nothing naturally biological about it at all. When science interferes with nature’s food – what could possibly go wrong?... 

So, as we leave the Paleolithic Era of the nomadic hunter gatherers, we transition towards the Agricultural Era with the 10,000-year period called the Neolithic Era. This is where humans apparently decided to stop being nomads, put roots down permanently in many regions of the world, grow primarily grain crops and raise pastured animals. It is becoming ever-increasingly difficult to find any other narrative than this, when doing some investigative research. The jury is still out, in my opinion, as a tonne of information, in general, is now “un-findable” when searching online – information that was readily available as early as 5-10 years ago. That being said, let’s move on. 

We started growing grains, lots and lots of grains. As it turns out, growing grains was very inexpensive. Large agriculture corporations were born and invested heavily in this era, and they have never looked back. Grains became a cheap food to grow, and so it was mass produced, to feed the world and become a “staple” in the household pantry. If you’re over the age of 40, like me, you’ll remember the original Food Pyramid that was part of the Australian government/corporation/big pharma propaganda campaign, called the Australian Healthy Eating Guidelines. Grains were the bulk of those guidelines, to consume more of those than anything else on the food pyramid. This originates from the USDA (United States Dept of Agriculture) original food pyramid –  http://www.nal.usda.gov/fnic/Fpyr/pyramid.gif  https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=680809  

Let’s dive deeper into the truth about grains.  

Refined grains are put through a process where their fibre and nutrients like zinc, iron, calcium and B vitamins and minerals, are removed – for the purpose of giving the end product more shelf life. However, at the end of the day, it matters NOT whether grains, like wheat, rice, corn, oats and barley, are unrefined (so-called healthier “wholegrains”) or refined – they are carbohydrates (carbs) and the building blocks of carbs are SUGAR molecules. Without the fibre, these carbs are readily taken up in the body and converted to sugar. Why is this bad? Insulin is a hormone that the body produces, and its main role is to move sugar from the blood into the cells to be used as energy. That’s not so bad, right? Wrong. The danger lies in insulin’s secondary role. If the sugar that’s been moved into the cells isn’t used up by the body as fuel, as energy, then the insulin converts this unused sugar into…. FAT.  

Let that sink in. 

When we eat refined grains (carbs made up of sugars, remember), our blood sugar levels spike very quickly, then crash again, causing you to be hungry again just a couple of hours after you’ve eaten a rice or pasta meal, for example. This is where overeating and other sugar cravings come into play, potentially leading to worse conditions such as obesity or type 2 diabetes. It is important to note that sugar is present in a vast range of non-sweet-tasting processed and packaged foods, as much as it is present in foods that are designed to be sweet, i.e., cakes, pastries, biscuits, chocolates, lollies etc. And the sweeteners range from cane sugar and high fructose corn syrup (a highly processed grain), right through to even higher processed so-called natural sweeteners like xylitol, maltitol, sorbitol – all the “-tols”. And it is very common for one packaged food item to have 3 or 4 or more types of these sweeteners in it. And they manufacturers have the audacity to label them “No artificial sweeteners” ! 

Unrefined grains may slow the impact of blood sugar levels rising, due to their fibre being intact, but they are still converted into sugar in the blood. This results in both blood sugar spikes AND insulin spikes, and this is damaging on your body and your health. And we haven’t even started to introduce the concept of the stress hormone, cortisol, yet, which is a huge piece of this puzzle, and one we will unpack in detail later.  

Getting back to insulin. When unused energy is turned into fat – fat under the skin (think obesity) and fat inside and outside vital organs – these fats have the potential to cause cardiovascular disease. Not to mention a condition called “insulin resistance”, which occurs when the body does not respond the way it should to insulin, and the result is an excess build-up of glucose in the blood. The pancreas then overcompensates by creating more insulin to counter the glucose, which then leads to a bigger list of problems including high blood pressure, high cholesterol, metabolic syndrome and diabetes.  

Decades of studies now show a close relationship between insulin resistance and chronic inflammation. Why is this a big problem? Because chronic inflammation is underpinning most chronic diseases. And these are modern diseases that did not exist prior to monoculture crops subjected to chemical fertilisers and pesticides, over the last 60 years or so. What could possibly go wrong? Well, modern disease rose right alongside this era of monoculture cropping. Grains today do not resemble “ancient grains” from the past. It’s more than just issues with insulin, blood glucose, fat, diabetes and chronic illness. It’s a full-scale attack on our food manufacturing, sold to us as “healthy wholegrains full of fibre, essential vitamins and minerals”. The truth is much more damaging. Grains that are full of chemicals, have been genetically tampered with for nearly 100 years, led by food corporations aligned with the pharmaceutical industry and mainstream media outlets, to keep us fat and sick and reliant long-term on their pharmaceutical drugs for survival. 

There is one more thing to cover regarding inflammation. Gluten. The etymology of the word gluten has its origins in the Latin word “glutinum”, meaning “glue”. Gluten is a protein found in many grains and one that is not easily digested by the human intestinal tract. If the meaning of gluten is “glue”, then it makes perfect sense why you feel sluggish, bloated or heavy in the gut after you’ve eaten bread and pasta products – and that’s just for the regular folks who don’t suffer the worse side effects from conditions such as gluten intolerance or coeliac disease. Many years ago, when I had my grain-free granola manufacturing business, I came across some of Dr David Perlmutter’s books – “Grain Brain”, “Brain Maker” and “Brain Wash”. I highly recommend these books that go into great depth on how Perlmutter stumbled upon the relationship of his autoimmune affected patients and omitting grains from their diet, and how their symptoms were dramatically reduced and their quality of life greatly improved. Perlmutter and many others also explain lectins – chemicals that plants create as their defence system against predators – which also contribute to inflammation and are harmful to humans when consumed, as we cannot digest them in their raw state. Much more on this in later blogs and our podcast for The O.G Me. <INSERT PODCAST LINK> 

The data on our total global grain production for 2023/2024 is 2,315 million tonnes – data sourced from https://www.igc.int/en/gmr_summary.aspx . If we, as a human species, are consuming more modern grains than ever before, then we are keeping our bodies in a constant state of inflammation – a state that many studies present a huge amount of data that incriminate grains in the rise of modern and chronic illness.  

 However, there is a huge light at the end of the tunnel. The world of low carb healthy fats (LCHF) and ketogenic (keto) diets has gained a lot of momentum in recent years, as a way to not only shed the excess fat from the waistline, but to improve heart and brain health. Back in the 70s, Dr Robert Atkins devised the famous Atkins diet, which promoted restricting carbohydrates and instead fuelling the body with calorie rich foods from protein and animal fats, as a method to reduce weight and increase energy. I even have a copy of a newspaper article from back then, prescribing this as a protocol to successfully treat mood disorders such as anxiety and depression. This is related to the concept mentioned earlier – stress – and will be included when we unpack that topic in greater depth. And, as recently as August this year, Robert F Kennedy Jnr and Donald Trump have teamed up, committed to MAHA – Make America Healthy Again – tackling chronic disease by changing the way our multinational food corporations influence the manufacturing of our food, which keeps the pharmaceutical industry in the business of the “sickness industry”, not the health industry. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=527cSMrbz4c  

 For now, while The O.G Me supports you in your journey back to optimal health – Your Original State – our philosophy of “No Grains… EVER!”, stands. Does that mean you can never have bread or pasta or cakes or cookies, ever again? Of course not! Head over to our online store for all the LCHF/Keto approved products by The O.G Me - <INSERT STORE LINK> 

And remember to check out our recipe page where we post a recipe each week of our favourite, healthiest, most mouth-watering goodies you can create in your own kitchen. Your gut and your family will love you for it!