Dr. Jenn Simmons recommends a grain-free diet for people with metabolic disease and cancer, arguing grains are high glycemic and trigger inflammation. Modern wheat has 44 chromosomes versus 14 in ancient Einkorn, and humans evolved with short digestive tracts unsuited to grains anyway.
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Hi, it's Dr. Jen Simmons from Riddle Health MD. Today we are talking about grains. One of the questions that I get asked the most when I make dietary recommendations and anyone who has a breast cancer diagnosis, a prostate cancer diagnosis, a colon cancer diagnosis, I pretty much make a very similar dietary recommendation because we are talking about metabolic diseases. And so the best diet for someone with metabolic disease is a whole food plant based, low glycemic, grain free diet. And the reason that I insist on it being grain free is first of all, if you are talking about a low glycemic diet, most grains, including whole grains, are high glycemic foods. And this is evidenced by if you eat a bowl of oatmeal and measure your blood sugar, you will see a blood sugar spike even though oatmeal is a whole grain. Because in general, grains are high glycemic foods. But that's not even most of the reason why I recommend against grains. We are modern beings living on a very old gene code and we really have only been consuming grains for the past 3,000 years. The grains are the seeds of grass and grasses are consumed by ruminators, that is the diet of ruminators. Now, ruminators have very long redundant digestive tracts and by definition, they ruminate. They pass their food back and forth and back and forth and take a very long time digesting. And they do that so that they can extract the nutrient from these grasses. Humans, by comparison, have a very short digestive tract. And so we are not able to get the nutrient out of grains. So much so that if we never ate another grain again, we would suffer no nutritional deficiency. We have no nutritional need for grains. So given that, that we have no nutritional need for grains, grains are only an extra, an addition, and they do not have any health benefit. Now beyond that, the, the most common grain that is consumed is wheat. Now, the wheat of our ancestors, the Einkorn wheat, that had 14 chromosomes, the wheat that is consumed now in this country is dwarf wheat. Dwarf wheat is genetically modified to have more seeds to be able to produce more grain. And that dwarf wheat has 44 chromosomes. Not only have we not genetically evolved to digest grains well, but now we're talking about grains that have only been around for the last 50 years or so, maybe 60 or 70. This is a whole new type of grain. It's an even newer food. And so our body simply doesn't know what to do with it. Now, our immune system, 70% of our immune system is housed in our gut. And it is charged with determining if what we're eating is food or foreign. And so every time we eat a grain, it is going to recognize it as foreign and cause some degree of inflammation. Some people get a little inflammation. Some, some people will get a lot of inflammation. If you are cancering, if you actively have cancer, if you recently had cancer, you do not want to create more inflammation. In fact, quite the opposite. You want to be as anti inflammatory as you can be. So this is why I do not recommend grains. They are a new food. They have no nutritional benefit. The only potential is for them to cause inflammation. They are a high glycemic food, and they are of no benefit at all to anyone who is trying to quell their inflammation. For that reason, my diet that I recommend is a whole food, plant based, low glycemic, grain free diet. It's Dr. Jen Bye for now.
