Are Traditionally Prepared Grains Healthy?
“People from Africa, Asia, and Latin America eat lots of grains and manage to stay skinny, so what’s the deal?”
You know this line of questioning. We’ve all heard it. We’ve probably all pondered it. It may have even stumped a few of you, left you stuttering and stammering for a quick explanation. But by the time you think of a reply (if you even have one), the moment has passed and they have “won” the argument. A briefly open mind was now closed.
But let’s be honest: it’s a valid question, and a tough one at that. We can’t just avoid the tough questions. So let’s take this head on.
Like always, the answer is multifaceted. Health is not reliant on a single feature. It’s not just diet, it’s exercise, stress, sleep, family, community, genetics, infectious burden. Within diet, it’s not just what is eaten, but also what isn’t eaten. It’s how food is prepared, whether it’s cooked or eaten raw. Find me a culture who thrived on grains as a staple food, and I’ll find you a culture who came up with some elaborate preparation method to mitigate the antinutrients and enhance the nutrient bioavailability of those grains. Find me a culture whose health thrived on toxin-rich grains as a staple without mitigating said toxins, and I’ll be waiting a long time (and observing the United States through smug Primal shades while I wait).
In today’s post, I’m going to explore the primary reason for why so many traditional cultures who ate grains managed to stay thin and relatively free of degenerative diseases: traditional grain preparation, including soaking, sprouting, and fermentation. If you’re familiar with the Weston A. Price Foundation‘s stance on grains, you’re probably aware of these preparation methods. Each step alters the nutritional experience of the grain to varying degrees, making it more digestible, less toxic, and tastier. I for one am not willing to go through hoops to make grass babies go down easier, but the process is nonetheless extremely interesting. And in the future, if any of my readers want to give grains a shot, at least they’ll do it right, or as right as it can get. As I always say, the only reason to make grains any part of your diet is as a cheap source of calories that converts to glucose very quickly.
You know how cool parents will drink or smoke with their teens to teach them mature consumption of potentially illicit substances before they learn to do it all wrong it in the wild world? This post is kinda like that.
Let’s first do a quick rundown of what exactly we’re trying to avoid, deactivate, or mitigate. We gotta know what we’re up against.
Phytic acid: Phytic acid is the main storage form of phosphorus in grains. That’s awesome for the grain, which needs phosphorus, but there’s a catch. Phytate also binds to many minerals, including zinc, magnesium, calcium, and iron, to name several. And, since non-ruminants don’t possess phytase, which digests phytate and releases the bound minerals for easy absorption, eating large quantities of phytate-containing foods results in mineral deficiencies for meat-eating apes. These deficiencies, taken to an extreme, can manifest as tooth decay, which might explain why early grain eating populations had worse teeth than the hunter-gatherers who preceded them.
Enzyme inhibitors: Grains are seeds that require certain wet, nutrient rich conditions for proper growth. Spontaneous germination is counterproductive (you don’t want your children settling down in an area with high crime and high unemployment, do you?), so enzyme inhibitors prevent it. When moisture abounds (like, when soaking grains), the inhibitors are deactivated and sprouting occurs. So why should we care? Certain other enzyme inhibitors also inhibit our ability digest the grains. If you’re relying on grains as a dietary staple, you can’t afford not to wring every last drop of nutrition out of them.
Lectins: I covered lectins fairly comprehensively in a previous post, so I’ll keep it brief. Lectins are nature’s pesticides, protecting the tiny grain from predation. They can perforate the intestinal lining, disrupt our immune systems, and there’s even evidence that they bind to leptin receptors in the hypothalamus (potentially triggering leptin resistance).
Gluten: You know this guy. Found in wheat, rye, and barley, he’s a real bastard of a protein – and possibly not just to celiacs. There’s some evidence that true fermentation can break down gluten, but not all of it. Some Italian researchers used a unique blend of bacterial species to break down 99% of the gluten in sourdough bread, but it was under strict, extremely contrived laboratory conditions. More on that later.
So, how do traditional cultures take care of the aforementioned?
Soaking and Sprouting
I’ve written about soaking nuts and seeds before, and soaking grains is the same idea. The grains are covered with water, placed in a preferably warm place, and soaked for between 12 and 24 hours. There’s not much more to it than that. After soaking, you drain them, rinse them, and let the grains sit out for a couple days. To get grains to sprout, rinse and drain them a couple times each day until sprouts emerge.
Effect on phytate: If the grain contains phytase, some of the mineral-binding phytic acid will be deactivated, but not much. And if the grain has been heat-treated, which destroys phytase, or it contains very little phytase to begin with, the phytic acid will remain completely intact. Overall, neither soaking nor sprouting deactivates a significant amount of phytate.
Effect on enzyme inhibitors: Well, since the seed has been placed in a wet medium and allowed to sprout, the enzyme inhibitors are obviously mostly deactivated. Digestion is much improved (cooking will improve it further).
Effect on lectins: The evidence is mixed, and it seems to depend on the grain. Sprouted wheat, for example, is extremely high in WGA, the infamous wheat lectin. As the wheat grain germinates, the WGA is retained in the sprout and is dispersed throughout the finished plant. In other grains, sprouting seems more beneficial, but there’s always some residual lectins that may need further processing to deactivate.
Effect on gluten: Sprouting reduces gluten to some extent, but not by very much. Don’t count on it. A little bit goes a long way.
Fermentation
After soaking and grinding, grains are traditionally mixed with a starter culture or allowed to wild ferment. Starter cultures often include whey, kefir, yogurt, or left over fermentation medium from the previous batch. Wild fermentation occurs when the grain mixture employs bacteria already present on the grains, or picks up wild yeasts and bacteria from the environment. Both methods are far more effective than just soaking and sprouting at deactivating antinutrients and improving digestibility. Plus, fermentation lends interesting flavors to and enhances the shelf-life of the resultant food (which was extremely valuable in the days before refrigeration and canning).
Effect on phytate: Remember phytase? It’s the enzyme that deactivates phytate, and it really gets cooking during fermentation. In grains that contain high amounts of phytase, like wheat, rye, and buckwheat (technically a pseudo-cereal, but close enough), a day of fermentation deactivates most of the phytate. To degrade the phytate in low-phytase grains, however, the fermentation time must be extended. Adding small amounts of phytase-containing grain to the mix will also speed up the process. Increasing the temperature also improves phytate breakdown. In millet, a low-phytase grain, it took 72 hours to completely degrade the phytate. In wheat, it took ten hours to reach a maximum of 88.8% phytate reduction using a specific bacterial strain. Other strains resulted in reductions of between 28% and 86% (with most reaching above 80%). Standard quick rise baker’s yeast only reduced 16% of phytate (that’s what 99% of wheat eaters are eating nowadays, remember!). Ten hours may not always be enough, however – another fermentation study found that at 48 hours, phytate in wheat was still degrading.
Effect on enzyme inhibitors: Fermentation also significantly reduces enzyme inhibitor activity. A few examples would be prudent, since fermentation has different effects on different enzyme inhibitors in different grains. In 24 hour traditional sorghum fermentation, both trypsin inhibitor and amylase inhibitor (which impedes starch digestion) were reduced by up to 58% and 75%, respectively. In millet, a 48 hour fermentation was required to completely deactivate amylase inhibitor. As I mentioned in the last section, one study found that 48 hours of fermentation resulted in maximum wheat starch digestibility, presumably by deactivating amylase inhibitor.
Effect on lectins: Fermentation reduces lectin load fairly comprehensively across the board, but it might take longer than you can spare. In lentils (I know, not a grain, but with similar antinutrient issues), 72 and 96 hours of fermentation at 42 degrees C eliminated 98% and 97.8% of the lectins, respectively. Specific info on grain lectin breakdown due to fermentation is sparse. Overall, fermentation appears to be pretty effective at reducing lectins (and cooking reduces them further).
Effect on gluten: No store bought garden variety sourdough you find is going to be gluten-free. A team from Italy was able to produce a gluten-free sourdough wheat bread by using specific bacterial strains from all over the world and subjecting the bread to many days of fermentation. The process was totally unfeasible for the home or average commercial baker. There’s also a guy who sells monthlong fermented sourdough bread out of LA-area farmers’ markets and claims celiacs can eat it without issue. Reviews on Yelp seem to corroborate. Maybe I’ll swing by his stand and give it a shot, but I’m skeptical. And besides, I’m personally more worried by WGA, which is biologically active at nanomolar concentrations and which may not be fully degraded by fermentation.
To Eat, or Not to Eat
Some may turn up their noses at agrarian people for relying on a “sub-optimal” grain as staple food, but not me. Yeah, I’m definitely no fan of grains, and I think avoiding them is one of the biggest positive steps a person can take for their overall health. That’s beside the point. As a technical feat, I find the taming of the grain incredibly impressive, a testament to mankind’s awesome ability to adapt to and overcome adversity. Any other animal that switches over to a new staple food that prevents nutrient absorption, causes intestinal perforation, and increases inflammation had better develop some physiological adaptions to deal with the antinutritive factors, and quickly, if it doesn’t want to die out or be forced to move to a new habitat. A human, though? Humans figured out a way to preserve the toxic food, make it palatable, drastically reduce its antinutrient content, and make it more digestible, thanks to the big efficient brain inside our skulls. It’s not physiology (well, kind of), it’s not some advantageous mutation that’s naturally selected and saves the day. It’s human ingenuity, knowhow, knowledge, and wisdom. It is manipulation of the environment to suit our immediate needs. That gets us into trouble on occasion, but you can’t say it isn’t impressive.
That said, will I start soaking, sprouting, and fermenting big batches of grains in my kitchen? No. It’s way too much work and it’s unclear whether the toxins are fully mitigated (and in the case of wheat, they almost certainly are not). I’ll admit that crusty sourdough bread can be a nice occasional treat when eating out, but it’s not something I’m interested in eating on a regular basis. Furthermore, I’m not missing out on any magic nutrient by avoiding grains, but I am avoiding the elaborate prep work required to make them moderately edible (and the toxins that may or may not be deactivated). For the billions that rely on grains for sustenance, these traditional preparation methods are necessary. Choosing between potentially toxic food and starvation, you choose the food – no question – and then you do your best to make it more nutritious. For those of us who don’t need to make that choice, for whom bread is an extracurricular treat, I think removing the risk altogether by simply avoiding the potentially toxic food is a better move. And if it’s carbohydrate you’re after, stick with safe starch sources like roots, tubers, or even white rice (the sole grain that requires no elaborate processing).
But at least you know there’s a better way than what most people do with grains nowadays. At least there’s somewhat of a middle ground for people who won’t relinquish the grass babies.
What about you guys? Do you think you’ll ever experiment with traditional grain preparation?
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Posted By: Mark Sisson
i eat two pieces of ezekiel bread w grass fed organic butter and black organic coffee every morning before i go to a crossfit class. besides, that, as primal as possible (cant always avoid oils and/or preservitives/pesticides in foods eaten outside of the house).
it doesnt seem to affect me too much
Has anyone heard of Ezekial 4:9 sprouted breads? foodforlife has plenty of products that are gluten free and they have a 7 grain flour free bread that is great and doesn’t bother my stomach at all.
I have and eat Ezekial bread all of the time. They actually have tortillas too. You mentioned corn tortillas in an earlier post…well they have some…and let me tell you they taste as good as those fresh ones you would get at a tortilla making facility in the South countries.
Um, I used to make tortillas all the time from scratch. I learned how from my Mexican MIL. Ezekial tortillas are not that good at all.
having gall bladder issues I have been told to stick to a vegetarian diet to avoid surgery…can anyone out there suggest books or cites where I can find a good vegetarian diet? I wasn’t all that aware of grains other than refined ones were bad. I do though only eat sprouted organicly grown grains when I do eat grains…I have had to substitute meat with protein filled legumes, grains (Quinoa) and plenty of F&V’s. Love some suggestions or reference to previous posts by Mark to help with this…
Anecdotally, the only person I know with gallbladder issues is a stark vegetarian.
When my friend got her gallbladder removed, she was told by her doctor that it was probably the RESULT of being vegetarian, and that if she didn’t start to include at least SOME lean meats in her diet, she could expect her health to keep deteriorating
Ezekiel breads include soy. And they’re sprouted, not fermented, so be sure to read Mark’s caveats about that.
I can’t explain it, but I used to eat one slice of their bread a day along with my completely traditional foods diet, and removing just that one slice took me from not being able to lose weight to steadily losing it as long as I kept my diet that way.
I read your posts often, and I never comment… but this is amazing and thus comment worthy in my book. Thanks so much!
K
I am a home brewer (of beer) and mostly primal otherwise (80-20 rule works) and the beer making process sounds somewhat familiar to this grain treatment posted here. Barley is malted first by soaking until a partial sprout occurs, then is heated to stop the process and slightly roast the grain for flavor. Next the malted barley is mashed by soaking in 155 °F water for an hour to convert the starch to sugar. After separating the solids from the sugary liquid, the liquid is fermented with brewers yeast until all the simple sugars are converted to alcohol.
I wonder what toxins are left in beer, besides the alcohol. I am not sensitive to grains and can eat them without issue, except for gaining weight, so I don’t. Because I don’t filter the beer, there is plenty of vitamin B from residual yeast. Overall, I think homemade beer isn’t so bad?
Thanks to Mark for another great post.
80-20 nets you 60. 8steps towards health and subtract 2 steps your progress is 6 steps forward (depending on how large those 2 steps backward are). So in 10 total steps you moved forward 6. Results will be slow and hard to notice except for over a long period of time. Consider shooting for 90-10 then the net is more efficient.
Dan, you missed the point and the question. I am not debating the 80-20 rule that Mark talks about in this lifestyle. I am actually at my ideal body composition and have had great success with Primal while drinking beer and wonder if the beer making process is similar to what is spelled out in this post. Nobody wants to be lectured, so try to stay on subject here.
I do fine with beer, too, and I have IBS and a gut that is VERY picky about grains. So my guess is that something about the processing renders the grains less harmful. I am lean and also have had good results, eg primal w beer. So the bigger issue with beer for me is that it’s using up a chunk of my carb “budget” and my total daily caloric needs…if I fill up on beer I won’t eat as many nutritious foods. Now that I’ve weaned myself from tortilla chips, it’s the only non-nutritious thing left in my diet, so I’m going to enjoy it at least for the time being but stay aware of it’s impacts (good and bad).
Soaking and fermenting grains? Are we talking about BEER?
I hope so.
The thing that sticks in my logic stack on this is that bad teeth in ancient human skeletons is the marker for transition from pastoralism to agriculture. That and that I personally feel much better when I avoid all grains. That said, we live in a really privileged little bubble, economically. I just made an extra donation to Doctors without Borders for famine relief in Sudan. I don’t know how you get people out of situations like that without grains.
But, who is to say that an orthomolecular (Linus Pauling’s word) grain won’t be bred soon. It would not be impossible. I hate GM because of what they use it for — to make things Roundup Ready, insecticidal or to survive shipping. What if they used it to make orthomolecular grains without BT toxins, etc? There is some history of “good” grain breeding. It is not impossible.
I avoid grains like a plague, (except small quantities of rice occasionally) but some times I like fermented grains… and then sometimes I like the results of continueing the process and consuming the distilled result. Okay I am not as ripped as I could be, I’m still pretty lean; but a beer, or a shot or 2 of whiskey seems okay. (I don’t kike to over do anything.) Any way seems like these are grains redeeming qualities.
Another timely blog Mark, as one of the more recent adaptions in my primal journey has been incorporating a couple traditionally prepared grains back in my diet.
Stephen Guyenet did a post a long time ago about buckwheat pancakes and Chris Kessler recently had a post claiming to have improved upon it. Buckwheat sourdough mix is easy to prepare, and similar to white rice seems like a very safe starch to add to the mix for its pseudo grain nature and high phytase content. And I personally think coconut flour pancakes are too intense and that almond flour pancakes should be avoided due to high PUFA factor (not to mention nuts also have phytate anyway).
Rye also has a lot of phytase, lots of beneficial nutrients and makes a fantastic sourdough bread. As I mentioned in a previous comment it shouldn’t be eaten in excess but makes a great vessel for wonderful primal foods such as butter and liver pate.
I know your stance on grains is they are mostly negative and I agree. That is once again why I appreciate posts like this that display how open minded and accepting you are (even if it pushed the reader to feel preparation is too much effort and that its effect is inconclusive).
The reason I love the WAPF so much is its acceptance of all foods and that they categorize very few foods as pure evil. Most foods have a place when used in a proper informed manner and can be harmful when used improperly. I feel grains are the same way and if used intelligently can become another important cog of a healthy ancestral diet.
Yeah I have been grain, legume, potatoe- free since November 2010 and I don’t miss them. I use cauliflower in leue of potatoe and I about to start using butternut squash saw some good recipes for that.
I don’t even eat rice(neither brown or white) anymore because I fear that would trigger the cravings too.
Yes Africans eat lots of grains and manage to stay slim. However they also only live to be about 60 years old, if they are lucky. Example, Angola where the average age is 18 years old and most men die in their 50s.
3rd world populations do not eat grains because they like it, they do it because its cheap and easy to store.
Careful with that “countries like Africa” thinking; it’s a big place, with complicated social, economic, political and historical factors in play in different combinations everywhere. Average age is heavily affected by non-nutritional factors like, say, civil war. AIDS. Traffic accidents from unsafe roads, jerry-rigged vehicles, late-night khat-fueled busdrivers.
But yeah, grains are cheap, ship well, easily portioned, and because of all that are also the staple of food aid programs. Plus I can’t think of an African grain-based staple food that isn’t fermented (fufu, ugali, injera…).
So thankful for this post. When I do occasionally eat grains, they are soaked. But it’s just too much work to do on a regular basis. And still too high carb for me.
I spent 4 months in Kenya this past year. The diet was based on cornmeal and cassava (a starchy root) in the poorest areas, though they did also eat a lot of wild green vegetables.
I observed that children were very skinny, so were most men and young women up to about age 30. Most women of middle age were plump– not obese, but not what I’d call a healthy weight. A few were very overweight which was surprising considering the poverty.
Worth noting is that meat is usually given in much larger portions to men, and milk mostly to children. This leaves pure starch for the older women.
Did they stew the living daylights out of the greens? What’s with that?? I have yet to graps the wisdom in that practice.
Don’t confuse weight with intake (I’m sure you don’t, but for others). My mother has always called it being “poor fat”. Taubes makes a clear argument about this, relating to the pummelling your insulin response gets from living off grains’ fast sugars and how that eventually leads to insulin overdrive where all in-calories get a one-way ticket to fat storage, leaving the body obese but starving.
Did you have a chance to observe how much the “well fed” women ate? I’m guessing not nearly enough. Part of that is without question about who eats first, and best, from the pot.
Mark, in your other post about rice you say ” Heat does little to phytate, but, since it’s located in the bran, physically removing the bran removes the phytate.” Is this also true of most “wheat” flour? Hasn’t the bran been removed from most of what is sold in the store?
Thanks
I’ll stick with beer.
Great post for an end of the world, apocalypse type senario where the only food left is bushels and bushels of grain. ahh I’ll get started on the underground bunker/pasture … can cows live under ground?
There are also traditions from China to stay healthy while regularly smoking opium , I’m confident most people would be better off simply avoiding opium.
Let’s not forget the traditional Mexican/South American treatment of corn to make masa – Nixtamalization.
http://www.fao.org/docrep/T0395E/T0395E05.htm
Like Mark talks about the very occasional sourdough bread, I think Mexican food just ‘aint the same without tortilla.
That being said, here in the USA, you have to make sure you find tortilla that specifically states it was made with lime-treated masa.
What about Quinoa?
I have given up all grains and found Quinoa to be a great substitute. I have read that it is a seed and not an actually grain. Help! I love Quinoa….
Way too much work for me!
Mark, does walnuts have the same antinutrients as grains?? lately ive been gaining weight.. please reply
Oh, boy! I hope the follow-up to this article is the one that I requested. It sure would make a great companion article!
Thanks! I love these kins of posts the most, Mark!
After reading Nourishing Traditions, we started soaking the the grains that we haven’t been able to eliminate yet…. I started doing it with oatmeal (soaked overnight with warm water and yogurt) when my daughter was about 9 months old. I wanted to try it after reading that the soaked/fermented oatmeal is good for lactating mothers and their milk production. After a few mornings of eating oatmeal this way (I wasn’t eating oatmeal at all before), I did notice a remarkable increase in my milk production. Coincidence? Maybe. It certainly wasn’t a blind study! I didn’t make any other noticeable changes in my diet that I can remember, so I’m inclined to attribute the increase to the oatmeal.
Any thoughts or similar experiences? Is this crazy?
After reading Nourishing Traditions, we started soaking the the grains that we haven’t been able to eliminate yet…. I started doing it with oatmeal (soaked overnight with warm water and yogurt) when my daughter was about 9 months old. I wanted to try it after reading that the soaked/fermented oatmeal is good for lactating mothers and their milk production. After a few mornings of eating oatmeal this way (I wasn’t eating oatmeal at all before), I did notice a remarkable increase in my milk production. Coincidence? Maybe. It certainly wasn’t a blind study! I didn’t make any other noticeable changes in my diet that I can remember, so I’m inclined to attribute the increase to the oatmeal.
Any thoughts or similar experiences?
Sorry for accidentally posting twice.
Awesome post as usual!! I rely so heavily on posts like these to help me explain my lifestyle to people!! I can’t thank you enough Mark for sharing your knowledge, research, and hard work!!!
I’ve been grain free for 9 months and have experienced all of the anticipated good results BUT I was warned my my naturopath that I could expect bad results to my complexion. Any ideas about that ?
Sadly, my historically clear complexion has been marred by a rash of some sort that is clustered on my chin and at the base of my nostrils so I fear she may be right.
detox?
I experienced an outbreak (rash) after about 5 months into the paleo lifestyle. My doc says my body is detoxifying. Apparently, the body stores toxins in fat tissue; and releases said toxins when the fat is metabolized.
I’ve tried to introduce real Sourdough (Rye fermented over 48 hours by a special Baker with no yeast etc) back into my primal diet, so I can have some of the raw goats cheese and homemade marmalades from local farmers.
It gave me all the exact digestive problems as if I had oatmeal or wheat bread. I was backed-up for many, many days and had a bloated belly.
Grains are permanently out for me, except the occassional bite I take when someone pushes a homemade, proudly baked bread into my face and says “Try this, you’re gonna love it.”
I guess I’ve always wondered on the anti-grain camp…how long did Paleo man live, exactly?
And if you look at the healthiest peoples living TODAY, they almost always eat beans. The Okinawans and the Mediterraneans – now of course, there are other big issues there – lifestyle and stress for sure (and Okinawans generally only eat until 80% full).
BUT…why is it that the healthiest and longest living people still eat grains? Is it because they don’t damage their bodies with processed crap? Is it that they eat only certain grains? (I believe I read somewhere that Okinawans actually eat a relatively low-carb diet as far as Asians go).
Great post! My question may not be exactly relevant to this subject, but close enough… So what is a mother of a 5 year old boy to do when he will NOT eat meat in any form? He will not touch chicken, fish, red meat, organic “grass-fed” hotdogs or home-made chicken nuggets (I do try to fake kid-friendly foods at home). My kid lives off of rice, pasta and bread. The only protein he actually likes is eggs (thank God for small favors). The situation is made worse by the fact that he is severely allergic to whey and is a picky eater – I can’t even hide ground beef under the pretence of a spaghetti sauce. Traditional doctors advice has not provided any solution. Does anyone on this forum experience a similar issue? Please comment.
You’re the adult. You provide nutritious and interesting food on a reasonable and predictable schedule, and the child gets to choose what, how much, and in what order to eat. No child will starve themselves voluntarily.
You might want to check out GAPS; there’s a section in there on introducing foods to kids with severe neuro-developmental issues – if it can work for them, it must be good! The point to note is that the body (and more importantly the out-of-whack gut flora) may be addicted to white foods, so take it on like an addict’s intervention.
I do find the hardest part with kids is not the kids, it’s other adults. On that topic I’ve got nothing, sorry!
Thank you for the GAPS suggestion – never heard of it, but reading up promptly on the web. Will probably need to buy the book for the section you are referring to. Thanks a bunch!
I don’t have kids, so take my comment with a big rock of salt, but is your kid so anti-meat that he will actually starve himself to the point of lasting damage if he is not presented with his preferred foods? Or is it just that he puts up a big stink/has a tantrum when you try? Because it seems to me that a few missed meals might make him much more amenable to your dietary “suggestions”… hunger being the best sauce and all.
that’s rather cruel and hypocritical. What if someone forced grains on you? It’s his choice, just like you made yours to go primal or whatever.
Your child sounds like a prime candidate for GAPS, with carb addiction, extreme picky eating, and severe dairy allergy. Please, search on it, find Sarabeth’s picky eating recovery story, and don’t waste a minute! It will affect every aspect of his health!
We had a picky eater in our household. He’s 8 now and for most of his life had refused almost anything that wasn’t white bread or breaded. He loved pizza and Chinese food and McD’s burgers but would refuse the smallest hint of lettuce or shadow of a pickle.
Then we went primal. I have to tell you that at first I was worried he might starve. He’s already thin, the thinnest among us actually and I didn’t want to force him to eat anything. But hunger and the smells coming from the kitchen induced him to try things and I can’t believe the changes we’ve seen over the past year of primal eating. It was slow a first, a bite of salad here, a few berries or nuts there, but soon he was eating buttered steak, burgers without the bun, chicken curries, thai beef stir fry with onion and bok choy (this is insane, he voluntarily ate something green! I used to have to make pizza sauce myself and blend broccoli into it to get him any natural vitamins). He’s now eating spicier foods than he had ever touched before. This is a kid who for a time wouldn’t even eat ketchup because it burned his tongue. Now he eats everything. It’s amazing.
I’d say keep at it, keep offering primal foods and restricting the non primal options, slowly eliminating things. Our son was addicted to cereal and would often use it as a crutch. If he balked at dinner he’d have cereal, if he didn’t like lunch, he’d have cereal. We allowed it, but we switched the milk to heavy cream, which he seemed OK with. As time has gone on the cereal has been used less and less and now it hasn’t been touched in months.
It is easier to hide meat which was cooked (boiled till soft, which will take approximately 3 hours) then ground or put into a blender, then added to a pasta souce. It is possible your son is a super-tester, meat you cook may taste too strong for him. Try to give him a chicken just boiled in a salted water.If your boy eats rice, make sure to cook it in a bone broth (try to add a little at the beginning, remove all coagulated protein because it is easy to spot in the rice in order to avoid changing taste too abruptly). Also make sure he doesn’t drink ANYTHING what contains calories, only water and absolutely no snacks between meals. If he wants to eat sooner, give him normal meal. Try to eat with him while not paying attention does he eats or not. Children have tendency to mirror what other people are doing, and became more fussy when forced to do something or if somebody is paying too much attention on them. Remove all food from the home you don’t want your child to eat even if it is not convenient for other family members. Prepare to stop worrieng if you child may not survive wery limited food for a week.
Just a few weeks ago i asked about sprouts, and here you are on top of things, and responding in detail. Thanks, Mark, your service is impeccable. Kapo
Excellent post Mark. I spent years eating just two slices of fermented bread every and still had some health issues. After reading your book I ditched the grains completely ( or as near as possible) and have not looked back. Best health move I have made and if I am craving some carb to go with my butter a potato is much more digestible and absorbs way more butter. I know this is an emotive issue but unless I am faced with starvation its grain free from here on.