We all eat it. Most of us love it. If you grew up in France, you can’t live without it.
Could this everyday food be harmful?
I’m Dr. Jean-Marc Slack here in Burlington, right next to Lexington. I have a story that I think is really interesting. And it came as a revelation to Dr. Linda and I. We noticed, as we were getting older, that we were experiencing more stiffness and body aches, and just general sluggishness, both physically as well as mentally.
One of the things that our readings and information from classes we took pointed at is that gluten, grains in general, wheat in particular, could be the cause of this feeling (here is a great book on the topic). So we eliminated all wheat. No bread, no pasta, no pizza, nothing that has wheat or gluten in it. Sure enough, our vivacity and vitality went up. Our minds cleared up. Our bodies felt better. The joints stopped being achy and creaky, and we were more limber and able to perform at a higher level. We return to our dynamic, younger selves! (this is what we did to eliminate grains)
This is the experience that a lot of people have already noticed when you eliminate gluten from your diet and wheat in particular. As you know, we go to France every year to visit my family. A surprising thing that we noticed is that while in France on vacation, we’d eat bread. We’d just say, “Okay, let’s forget about it. We’re in France. We’re going to eat like the French and the French have bread.” A lot of bread. They have bread for breakfast, a piece of bread with butter and a little jelly on it. You dunk that in your cafe au lait in the morning. That’s breakfast. Bread with every meal. Bread with lunch. Bread with dinner. Afternoon snacks for kids? Bread with chocolate. Bread all the time. We went to France, we had bread.
We noticed that in spite of eating all this bread, we didn’t have any of the bad effects. No joint stiffness, no brain sluggishness, no achiness, no creakiness in our whole entire body. And we noticed that over several years again and again. We come back here, we have wheat, we have problems, we’re bloated, we put weight on, we’re feeling that stiffness. We go to France, we eat that stuff? Nothing happens.
Well, we looked into it farther and what we discovered is that the type of wheat that they grow and use in high quality places in France is different than the type of wheat that we have access to here. That is a key difference. There are different breeds of wheat that have different effects, that grow differently, use different pesticides but also have different gluten level. I am not talking about GMO alterations, just different breeds of the grain.
I had to find out if there is something that I can obtain right here that I can use in my cooking. And I found it. I can use wheat flour again. It is flour from an older breed of wheat called einkorn. It is an ancient grain. It is an older kind of wheat. It is organic, of course, so no pesticides on it. And when we’re having that in small quantity, occasionally, it’s not an everyday thing and we’re making things at home with it, we don’t have the side effects that regular wheat flour can trigger.
So, I thought you’d like to find out about that. You can order Einkorn flour online here. If you’re going to bake cookies for the holidays, if you’re going to eat a more and less strictly, as we all do for the holidays, maybe you want to pay attention and make sure you’re using the type of ingredients that your body can work with and have a better result and not have your health be set .
I can’t wait to see you. Happy holidays.