Are grains making us fat? If so, we should be much thinner than 1914.

For this kind of article we need a new word like Steven Colbert's "truthiness". Scienciness? It has a lot of that. This is the reason we don't let MBAs and economists do medical research. The tonnage of grains consumed says nothing about the form in which the grains were eaten. If you want to maintain that a slice of bread and a chunk of beef is equivalent to the same wheat- and meat-equivalent in Hot Pockets, this article will be food for thought.

Yes really, the delivery mechanism can change how fast it hits your system, and that makes all the difference. Your liver can handle X amount an hour but not Y amount an hour before shit starts acting up.

From the article: Was it that all the grain consumed before 1950 was healthier whole grain? No. As flour became an industrial product in the late 19th century, mills began processing out the germ and other "whole wheat" elements because the fats in the germ caused the flour to go rancid. By 1914, your great grandmothers were mostly baking with white flour. Polished ("white") rice was similarly well established, and for some of the same reasons. And of course corn, the other major American grain, does not have a healthier "whole" alternative.

The author doesn't address meat since she is focusing on the hypothesis that carbs are making us fat.

Yes, social changes could produce dramatic changes. But social changes themselves are usually very slow, and I know of few exceptions to this in the context of health. Normally people blame obesity on social aspects (like exercise) which 1) have changed very gradually and 2) don't matter anyways (explaining that would make this a much longer discussion). If someone could come up with an example of just 1 social change that dramatically shifted in 1980 I would be very open to the idea. The only thing I know of is weight-training- the obesity numbers used are normally just based on BMI- they don't take into account that muscle isn't fat.

Here are some actual numbers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USObesityRate1960-2004.gif What we see is a linear increase starting around 1980, where before then rates appeared to be constant.

Before 1980, 1/3 of Americans were overweight. Every overweight person has the same metabolic problem as the obese, just to a lesser extent. The fact that 1/3 of Americans are now obese 20 years later is what I would expect due to a gradual decline of American health that hit a tipping point for obesity around 1980.

> Also, patronizing. And quite possibly mistaken.

Perhaps I was unclear. It was my intention to point out two things. First, that the base ingredient grains we eat now are a great deal different from what was regularly consumed in 1914. Second that our sources of grains are more likely to be prepackaged foods containing ingredients that were very uncommon in 1914. This was done as a means of pointing out a significant logical fallacy in the original article.

Seems like we've got some scope mismatch here. I very specifically want to point out that what goes into a loaf of bread now is not the same as what went into a loaf of bread in 1914. Fine white flour (and sugar) were still somewhat dear around the turn of the century. It's no surprise that a dishonest baker would extend it with chalk. The less close you were to the city, the more dear they were or the more likely you were to grow your own or do without. I made the assumption that most people would eat more coarse bread. Just for kicks, I looked up the ingredients of three different brands of bread. The main ingredient was, indeed, flour. Typically followed by HCFS, water, yeast and less than 2% of stuff like barley malt, soybean oil, diglycerides, and guar gum. Thus I am willing to accept "exaggerated" over "wrong" -- while I was writing, my frustration over the afore-mentioned ingredients in DAIRY products was foremost in my mind. If you haven't already read it, I recommend _Food Politics_ by Marion Nestle. http://www.foodpolitics.com/

It just so happens that I've got a stack of very old cookbooks that belonged to my great grandmother. Well, half of it. My mom has the other half. I started baking using recipes from those books around the age of 9. The backs of these books are full of notes written in her spidery handwriting. Notes about substitutions (she lived through two world wars), notes about compensating for ambient conditions, and the recipes from her childhood. Well, longer than that -- she didn't come to the US until she was 30. When my results did not match hers, I assumed her base ingredients were different from mine. This partly responsible for what lead to learning how flour is typed by ash in Europe. It's also how I learned that most of the oats consumed in the US around the time my great grandmother emigrated here would have been imported from Scotland and Canada, and that they would have been steel-cut to increase cooking time. And that rolled oats came into being sometime around 1910. It's also what eventually lead me to read _Day of St Anthony's Fire_, but that's a whole 'nother topic of conversation. From this, I'm making an "educated guess" as to what a cup of flour would have been like in 1914. And you have to admit, it read well.

This would be one of those deals where I have zero credentials to offer other than the claims made in the last paragraph. Or you can ask tptacek... pretty sure he'll provide a glowing reference for my cooking skills. Having no phone, television or computer in my childhood, I turned to the big stack of cookbooks and the abundance of fresh ingredients available on our small farm. Doesn't make me an expert, but I am quite facile at slinging some tasty hash.

As for non-grain foods, jam is, more or less, flavored pectin. Why is there pectin in Stonyfield Farms yogurt? So they have to put less actual yogurt in there. Why is there 'modified food starch' in Breakstones's cottage cheese? "Mouth feel," is what they'll tell you. But I've had hüttenkäse that had much better "mouth feel" with nothing in it but milk, salt and culture (likely due to higher fat content).

And thanks for the links. It amazes me to think that my great grandparents -- the ones I knew, at least -- lived into their late 90s with plaster, alum, strychnine, sawdust and bean flour in their food. Maybe the fact that the latest act cited in the second article was passed in 1899 helped, somehow.