VIDEO: Whole Grains vs Refined Grains vs Sprouted Grains
TRANSCRIPT
Hey everyone! I am here today to talk all about grains. Whole grains, refined grains, sprouted grains – what does it mean, which one should we be eating? Let's answer all those questions!
Let's start out by talking about what grains are. You have to kind of understand the anatomy of a grain to understand the different types so I'm going to use my kids’ handy-dandy dry erase board here to show you guys. First of all there's four main grains that we eat in America – there’s more, but these are the four big ones: wheat, corn, rice, and oats. Regardless they all start out as grass. Grains are the seeds of grass plants, and in nature these seeds would just fall off into the ground or they would get eaten by a bird and pooped out down the road but regardless they would end up back in the ground and they would sprout out new grass. This is how grass reproduces. But humans, a long time ago, although not as long as you might think, but a long time ago, figured out that we could actually decide where to plant these and we could harvest them before they have a chance to fall off. When we do that, regardless of which one it is, it all looks like this under a microscope. You've got three main parts of a whole grain that comes off of the plant. That's going to be this outer layer which is called bran, this little guy here which is called germ, and this inner part which is called endosperm. The bran's job is to protect the plant. Bran is this fibrous outer layer that makes it so that if the plant does get eaten by a bird it doesn't get digested, it just gets pooped out and can regrow a new piece of grass. It's a very protective, very hard fibrous outer layer. The endosperm is like the food for the seed. That's the carbohydrates that are going to feed the plant, the seed, so that it can grow into a new plant. Then the germ that actually is the baby, that's the future piece of grass. That's why you when you think of the word germinate, that's the idea that the seed is going to grow into a new piece of grass. The germ contains a lot of the vitamins and minerals and fats that are inside of the grains.
So when we talk about a whole grain, there's a couple different things you can think of. One is when we actually eat this whole grain, so the perfect example of that is brown rice brown rice is just a whole grain piece of rice, all three parts are there, it's very simple. In the case of corn, popcorn, or corn on the cob or even most corn flours are made from the whole grain. Popcorn is a good way to visualize a whole grain. In the case of oats, if you've ever seen an oat groat, that is an uncut up piece of oatmeal and that's going to be a whole grain. A whole grain piece of wheat is called a wheat berry – you might have seen it on salad bars and stuff. Most people don't just eat wheat berries at home but by all means you could, and again, that's a whole grain. Then the next thing you can do is you can grind the whole grain up into flour. That would be 100% whole wheat flour. If you're actually getting 100% whole wheat flour you're getting a whole grain. Corn flour usually is a whole grain, so cornmeal, that's a whole grain. So those are still whole grains they've just been ground up.
Unfortunately we've started, in the human culture, isolating just this endosperm part. The endosperm, if you remember, is just pure carbohydrates – no fiber, no vitamins, no minerals. I mean, it has a little bit of all those things but not much. When you take away the germ and the bran you lose most of that. So why did we start doing that? Why would we take away the good part? Well people realized that whole grain flour, when it's stored in a cellar, it goes rancid and it gets eaten by bugs. All those nutrients, those are good for bacteria those are good for bugs and so the product would go bad before people could eat it. Whereas if they took off the bran and the germ and just ground up the endosperm, no animal and no bacteria wanted it because endosperm is practically devoid of nutrition. Unfortunately that goes for us too – we don't want to eat something devoid of nutrition, especially now that we live in a world with refrigeration and with pantries and central a/c and heating. There's no reason for us to be eating white flour any more. We need to go back to the whole grain that we would have preferred in the first place.
So that's the deal with whole grains. A lot of people have been asking me about sprouted grains because you'll see that I post a lot on my Instagram stories that we eat a lot of sprouted grains. A sprouted grain is really cool. A sprouted grain is when you take this seed and it's dried out and you get it wet again and you let it start to grow a new piece of grass. Just a teeny bit, just a little piece of grass. And when that new piece of grass starts to come out that's now considered a sprouted grain. And the reason it's so different from just a whole grain is that in the germ there's some defense mechanisms, mainly phytic acid. Phytic acid is protecting the seeds so that if a bird or an animal was to eat it and poop it out down the road, the seed would still be intact and could grow somewhere else. But that actually applies to us too. When we eat grains with a lot of phytic acid, a lot of the vitamins and minerals that are in here are actually very hard for us to access. So even if a label says that the whole grain product has a lot of vitamins and minerals in it, there's a good chance they'll end up just exiting our body in our poop and they'll never actually get absorbed and used by us. But with a sprouted grain the grain has to give up a lot of its defense mechanisms to take a risk and start to grow a new piece of grass. It's very vulnerable when it's in that state. That makes it so that when we eat a sprouted grain it's easier to digest and it gives us a lot more of the locked and nutrients – they become unlocked. So for that reason I am a really, really big proponent of sprouted grains. We don't eat them 100% of the time at our house because they are a little bit pricey and a little harder to come by, but when you have the chance sprouted grains are definitely a good thing to opt for.
So talking about products, you can certainly buy actual whole grains. We buy sprouted brown basmati rice, that's a good option. Sometimes we'll grind our own flour out of sprouted white wheat berries and you can also just cook this up kind of like a rice. We like to buy sprouted popcorn, for a snack we will pop that on the stove. So those are some examples of actual whole grains that we use. We also do buy sprouted grain bread and tortillas sometimes, and if we can't get the sprouted grain stuff I would just recommend looking for 100% whole grain products. Remember if it just says it's wheat bread, that doesn't mean that it's whole wheat bread. That’s a trick – they know people have heard they're supposed to eat whole wheat and then they see the word wheat on the bag and they think this must be whole wheat. But what I always tell people is: if wheat bread is made of wheat, what is white bread made of? WHEAT! The question is was it made from whole wheat or just the endosperm. It's all wheat bread for the most part. I mean there's gluten-free breads now that don't contain wheat, but by and large it's mostly wheat bread that you're seeing on the shelves. So you need to see the word “whole.” The other big trick is things labeled multi-grain. Multi-grain could just be the endosperm of multiple grains, so multiple refined grains – this is not a win for health. If it's multiple whole grains then great, that's good, but you don't usually see that. You usually just see multigrain and that usually implies multiple refined grains. So be a real sleuth when you're looking at packages. You're looking for the words “100% whole wheat” or “brown rice,” things like that. So be on the lookout out there get the best things you can get for your family when it comes to grains.