Grain of Truth
Why Eating Wheat Can Improve Your Health
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- 5,49 €
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- 5,49 €
Publisher Description
A Pollan-esque look at the truth about wheat: meal or menace?
No topic in nutrition is more controversial than wheat. While mega-sellers like Grain Brain and Wheat Belly suggest that wheat may be the new asbestos, Stephen Yafa finds that it has been wrongly demonized. His revealing book sets the record straight, breaking down the botany of the wheat plant we’ve hijacked for our own use, the science of nutrition and digestion, the effects of mass production on our health, and questions about gluten and fiber—all to point us toward a better, richer diet.
Wheat may be the most important food in human history, reaching from ancient times to General Mills. Yafa tours commercial factories where the needs of mass production trump the primacy of nutrition, and reports on the artisan grain revolution. From a Woodstock-like Kneading Conference to nutrition labs to a boutique bakery and pasta maker’s workshop in Brooklyn, he also finds that there may in fact be a perfect source of wheat-based nutrition. Its name is sourdough.
For readers of Salt Sugar Fat and The Omnivore's Dilemma, Grain of Truth smoothly blends science, history, biology, economics, and nutrition to give us back our daily bread.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Journalist Yafa (Cotton: The Biography of a Revolutionary Fiber), declaring himself protected by a "sturdy armor of skepticism," devotes this informative but unwieldy book to a critique of dietary and nutritional trends notably, the gluten-free craze that position wheat as inherently bad for human consumption. In the course of examining the American wheat industry, he achieves a more nuanced position: the technological breakthroughs in grain milling and expedited fermentation have allowed America to prioritize "production of commercial white bread at low cost in massive quantities." As a result, bread companies have enacted "grave health consequences" on consumers. Gluten is a significant problem for those who have celiac disease, but it has little to do with the other issues around bread consumption. This conclusion is stated early on, while the rest of the book is dedicated to informing the reader about bread. Readers may start to wonder how many scientists, artisanal bakers, and children Yafa must interview before he feels he has sufficiently made his points: bad bread is processed and produced by big companies for mass consumption and capital gain, good bread "comes from wheat grown and nurtured in harmony with nature's cycles," and sourdough is cooked slowly and could be suitable for some gluten-intolerant people.