The Problem With Paleo: Why It's OK To Eat Bread, Grains, Legumes, Cheese & Milk.

Happy holidays, folks. This is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness show. And this is a special episode, basically because we're too lazy to record a podcast on Christmas Eve and simply would rather hang around in our pajamas, opening Christmas gifts and singing Christmas songs around the crackling fire while roasting chestnuts, which I've actually never done. I've never roasted a single chestnut. I'll have to add that to my list of things to do this holiday season. Anyways, though, I do have a fantastic podcast for you today. A really cool discussion that I had about Paleo diets. I talked to the food historian and a wild plant, wild edible plant expert about paleo diets and whether we actually can get away with eating things like grains and bread and legumes and chickpeas and lentils and dairy and if we can, why and how we can do that. So it's a really fascinating talk. I think you'll enjoy it quite a bit.

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Hey folks, it's Ben Greenfield here. And a few weeks ago, while I was in Israel, I posted a photo on my Instagram page, and that's over@instagram.com BenGreenfieldFitness and on that page I had photos of all these amazing breads and cheeses and grains and falafel made with the local chickpeas and popcorn that we ate that was literally grown on somebody's rooftop. And freshly picked spelt and rye and goat milk cheese that was sprinkled with fresh herbs and tahini that was blended with beets and all these amazing foods that technically, if you think about it, many people eating popular modern diets like a ketosis diet or a Paleo diet or any of these other popular diets would technically not be able to to eat if they were following the rules of that diet. And what I commented on my Instagram page was, oh well, more for me. Well, I gotta admit that I stuffed my face with pretty big portions of just about every food that I just listed while I was in Israel, but also when I visited a home in Galilee for this traditional weekly Shabbat feast. And during that particular dinner, I sat next to a guy named Yuri Meyer Cizik. He's also known as the Israeli locavore. He's a food historian, he's a wild edible plant expert. And we actually had a really interesting discussion about traditional agricultural foods that you'll find in many places in Israel and around the world, like bread and cheese and the surge in popularity of the strict avoidance of these foods by people who adhere to, say, like, a hunter gatherer, paleoesque diet. And Yuri was kind enough to actually agree to come on my podcast, and he's on the call with me today. And I gotta tell you, this guy is the real deal. Not only does he cook amazing food, but he leads these hikes and tours of the Israeli countryside to find local wild edible plants. And he teaches outdoor cooking classes, he gives food history lectures. He prepares gourmet meals in nature and reconstructs historical recipes with wild plants. And when he's not traipsing through some valley in northeastern Israel with a pot and pan in his hand, he's lecturing and he lectures about food and the history of local food preservation, ways that ancient medicine used nutrition as a way to achieve balance, and traditions of foraging and healing and cooking in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. And, you know, even if you don't live in the Mediterranean or the Middle east, you're going to learn a lot in this podcast about how we can marry, you know, a lot of what we've historically enjoyed, like breads and cheeses and legumes and things like that, and kind of also bear in mind some of these modern principles of hunter gatherer paleo type of diets. So, Yuri, thanks so much for coming on the call today.

Thank you for having me here.

Well, I'm curious. You're a food historian, and I guess I'm not really sure what a food historian actually does. What is a food historian?

I think nobody knows exactly what. Even us, we don't know what we do. But naturally, I usually gather historical information about the food people ate through history, you know, through old recipe books, through local traditions, through archaeology and many, many other sources, and trying to learn from that about what people ate through history, why they ate it, and how it affected what we're eating today.

Did you go to school for food history or was that what you studied in Israel?

We don't have, really a faculty for the history of food. I found a professor that allowed me to research this subject under his supervision. And I consulted with many other scholars around the world and tried to figure out how this thing is done. And slowly, slowly I got to know the people and the sources that I need to use to reconstruct the local traditional food.

Interesting. Okay, so then you're also a wild edible plant expert. How did you become a wild edible plant expert or become interested in that too?

You know, when you deal with food, you deal with everything. And gathering of wild edible plant is part of the local tradition through history everywhere around the world. You know, the knowledge about the. The edible plants, how to use them, where to find them, how to construct food from them. It's knowledge that was gathered for thousands of years and actually we're going to lose it. And part of my work is trying to preserve the local knowledge of gathering wild edible plants. Cool. Actually, in the land of Israel here, around here, you can see many, many plants that are still in the wild. And we know them as part of our agriculture. We can see here the wild wheat and the wild mustard and the wild pears and many, many other wild plants that we can see in the markets. And it's very interesting to see the connection between these plants in the wild and how they became to be agricultural.

You mean like seeing them in their native form and then seeing them at the market and then served to you at restaurants and things like that, Trying.

To figure out why did, you know, people thousands of years ago try to cultivate them?

Yeah, yeah. You gotta wonder who the first person was. Right. Who decided that they were going to. To eat a specific grain or grass and prepare it in a certain way. And I'm sure that as a food historian, you know all the stories and how that actually happened. And obviously there's tons of things that we could talk about when it comes to food history and wild plants. But when we sat at dinner, we started talking specifically about Paleo. I think that was one of the first things we started talking about and how even in Israel, the Paleo movement seems to be getting popular. And yet the Paleo diet adheres to this philosophy, philosophy of no bread, no grains, little to no dairy, no legumes, et cetera. Now, how has this been received in a culture where it seems that bread and legumes and wheat and cheese and all these foods are such staples?

The Paleo diet is very popular in Israel now. And what we understand now that it has a lot of sense to it because, you know, hunters and gatherers ate mostly vegetables and some meat. But also we need to consider the fact that for thousands of years we're eating legumes and cereals. Of course, we didn't eat them in the way we're eating them now, but it was part of Our diet. And I think it began to be like two separate cultures. One is the palliat when they eat only meat, and the other is the agricultural, westernized Israeli diet when they eat only cereals, white bread, sugar and other stuff. And I think we need to find the balance, the historical balance between them.

So when someone living in Israel, say, is following a paleo diet, are they just completely avoiding like falafel and hummus and goat cheese and when they sit down to dinner, bread and things of that nature, or are they cheating?

Yes, actually they have. There are many kinds of paleo people in Israel. Some of them eat only meat, only, you know, animal fat and vegetable. And some eat also fruits, also legumes. It depends on how deep you into the paleo diet.

Okay, got it. So when you talk about, you mentioned how grains and grasses and things of that nature are a traditional part of something that we've been eating for thousands of years. I know that perhaps there, and I've heard folks like Loren Cordain, for example, argue that sure, maybe we were eating them for thousands of years. But then if you look even farther back than that, maybe those are still very, very modern foods from a human history standpoint. And I'm curious if you look at least at recent human culture, whether or not you believe how far back human culture goes when it comes to the consumption of these foods. Let's start with bread, for example. How would bread be traditionally prepared in a manner that would make it different than say, modern bread?

Actually, the bread they ate through history, especially here in Israel, was very different from what we eat now. First of all, it was a whole wheat bread. The flour was constructed from the whole grain. Everything. They took the grain, they crushed it, and they used it to make bread. The second thing is the grain was not the same as the same grain that we're using today. You know, it's funny to say that, but. But most of the wheat in Israel these days is imported 95%. But through history, most all the wheat that people ate here was local wheat, local wheat that was grown in non irrigated fields through over Israel. And the grain was very, very hard grain and with not a lot of gluten.

So when you mentioned, and I want to ask you about that gluten that you just talked about, but before that you said that it was local and that there was no irrigation. Why would those two factors matter?

Because the kind of wheat that grew here, non irrigated fields, was hard wheat and the bread that we fermented. We will talk soon about the fermentation part was very, very heavy. And the heavy bread with a lot of. With a lot of fat in it, you know, the germ was bigger. And the germ is the portion.

The germ is the portion that contains all the fatty acids, right?

Yes, yes. And the bun. The. Let me find the exact word that you're using for that. The skin, the peel, the shells. The wheat was much bigger and much harder. So the wheat was easier to digest in our digestive system. And also, we need to consider that in every culture, actually, the seeds that were eaten, cereals and legumes, they understood thousands of years ago that in order to digest them in the right way, you need to do something to them. You know, see the nature. When it dries on the plant and fall into the ground, it needs to survive till the next season so it can sprout. And during this survival time, it builds for itself like a protective environment. Okay, Right. And when we eat it with this protection. Okay. When we eat it with these acids and things that it makes in order to protect it into, to preserve it to the next season, it's very hard for our digestive system to digest it. But if we sprout it or we ferment it, the fermentation or the process of sprouting the grain will make it easier to digest for our digestive system. And they knew it through history. And every cereal and legume that were eaten through history in Israel and all around the world was all sprouted or fermented.

For people who don't understand the difference between sprouting and fermenting, what's the difference?

Sprouting is a natural way of the cereal. If you put a grain, wheat, or a legume like chickpea or fava beans or any other legume in the. In water and then in the ground, it will sprout, and then it would have a flower and pods, and it goes around and you can eat it, you know, fresh or dry. And if you want to put it again in the ground and sprout will grow again. And we sprout the legumes and the cereals many times before we eat them. We take the. Let's take an example, the chickpeas. We soak them in water for a night or a day, and then we take it out of the water, put it in a place with a lot of air, and after 24 hours, you see a little sprout goes out of the seed.

Yeah, yeah. It's actually amazing when you start to do this yourself on your Kitchen counter. It's almost like you're growing something. It's amazing how quickly something will grow a sprout, whether it is a.

It's like growing a field of chickpeas.

Yeah, yeah. And then once you've sprouted something, then you simply move along and use it in whatever recipe that you want to use it in, such as bread. Right.

You can eat it fresh, you can boil it, you can do anything you want. When I make hummus paste, I make it from sprouted hummus. Hummus, chickpeas. I take the chickpeas, I sprout them, and I then boil them and grind them with tahini paste. And it's much more nourishing than any other hummus that is done from a regular chickpeas.

Yeah. A caveman never would have done that. They would have simply realized it was bad for them and left it alone.

A caveman didn't set legumes aside. They ate them fresh. That's what they did. They ate fresh food, and that's all they didn't. Dry food. We started drying food, or let's say, for example, and stocking food. Okay. Only when we started the agricultural revolution, and when we started the stocking food, then we had the need to sprout the grains because they were dry or to ferment them.

Gotcha. So what you're saying is that if it's not dried, you don't need to sprout and ferment it.

Yes, if it's fresh. If you take a fresh chickpea from the field, you can eat it like that.

But in modern agriculture, so that we could feed people en masse, we had to start drawing these things for storage. And once we start drying them for storage, it requires them to be sprouted and fermented prior to you eating them. If you don't want to cause gastric issues or damage your digestive system. What is it about drying that makes it so that it needs to be sprouted or fermented when it dries, like.

I said before, it builds a defense mechanism.

Okay. So that's what builds the defense.

We don't want to eat it with the defense mechanism of it. So that what makes it hard for our digestive system to digest it, we want to make it easier for our digestive system, so we sprout them or ferment because, you know, flour of a whole wheat, you can't sprout. So the way they found is to ferment it. Lactic acid. Fermentation.

Fermentation scares a lot of People, they find that. And I find this when I talk to people about fermentation, they don't understand it or they think that it's hard to do. Can you explain how someone would just simply take a local wheat or grain or a legume that they'd purchased, and usually it is in its dry form. If you purchase it, say, from your local grocery store or. Or food market, how do you ferment it? What's a really practical, easy way to ferment?

Yes, I think the fear from fermentation is coming from the fact that it's a lost tradition. Through history, everybody fermented, and then now nobody is fermenting. So it became to be something strange and something that we don't really know if it's okay, you know, germs and bacteria, we don't really know. But actually, most of the bacteria in our digestive system is lactic acid bacteria. And most of the fermentation through history was lactic acid fermentation. You know, they fermented everything. Yogurt is the lactic acid fermentation of milk and the cabbage. You know, sauerkraut is lactic acid fermentation of cabbage. Actually, the best thing to do when you start like a beginner in fermentation is to ferment cabbage.

That's funny that you say that. That's exactly what my wife started with, was cabbage. And making kimchi with cabbage and sauerkraut.

Yeah, that's the easiest thing to do. You can't really go wrong with that. And then you have the lactic acid bacteria in your fermented cabbage, and you can use it to other things. But if we're talking about bread, bread is something else. Bread, we're using the sourdough. Actually, there was the word source. English came from the word seor in Hebrew.

Really?

This is. Yes, seor in Hebrew. It came from the word leftover. Why? Because every time they made the dough, a new dough, they took the leftover, the last part after the fermentation, and used it to ferment the next dough for the next bread.

Yeah, and that's exactly. Honestly, I eat probably about half a loaf of bread every week, like a big loaf of bread. And it's made by my wife, sourdough bread. And that's really the only type of bread that I'll typically eat. But I'm curious, when you sit down to a Shabbat dinner in Israel, isn't it? This isn't like a sourdough bread that you're eating, for example, it's like an egg bread. Is that also made from a grain that's been fermented? Or would you say that that's not a traditional form of preparation?

No, the modern yeast and also the challah bread is not the local traditional way of preparation. The challah bread came from Europe to Israel. And of course, the. The yeast, the modern yeast, the fermentation, you know, the lactic acid fermentation, the sourdough that they used through history. The modernist, the industrialist, only wants to make the bread bigger.

So is the only type of bread that you would say is healthy is bread made from fermented grain like sourdough? Or can you eat bread, for example, that's been sprouted instead of fermented?

Actually, you can eat a sprouted bread. You know, there was an Essayan bread here. The Iseans, they live in the Judea Desert. They made an Isean bread. They took the wheat, they sprouted it for 2 or 3 centimeters, then they grinded it and they dried it. The dough that they made, they dried it in the sun, and that was their bread. But this bread was not, you know, swelled. Okay, I don't know the exact word in English. It wasn't big like a loaf of bread with a lot of kale.

It had. It hadn't. It hadn't really. It hadn't really, like, risen and. Well, what was it?

Yes, it didn't risen the way that we used to eat bread. It's very nourishing. This isn't bread. I tried to do it once, but it's not as big as the bread that we know. And the sourdough bread is rising, and it's very nourishing. The industrialist only are only rising the bread, but they're not fermenting it. And for us, in the nutritional point of view, the fermentation is very, very important to our digestive system.

Okay, gotcha now. So for bread, we're looking for something that has been prepared from a sprouted grain or fermented. And this would fall in line with the way that our ancestors would have traditionally prepared a grain had been dried that hadn't been picked fresh from the field. Now, you had mentioned how you make the hummus from a sprouted chickpea. And I know that would kind of fall into the line of something like a lentil, for example, as well. All sorts of legumes out there that folks say are high in lectins and can cause issues with your digestion. And when it comes to something like a chickpea or a lentil how would people have traditionally prepared those? Simply sprouted them, or is there more to it than that?

Mostly they sprouted them or ferment them the same way as the bread. We can see it in traditional food all over the world. Even soy in China, they used to ferment or sprout before they used it in the same way. Every area in the world, the local legumes were in. Cereals were all fermented, all sprouted and then used mostly, you know, the chickpeas and lentils in Israel were mostly sprouted or eaten fresh, of course. But I also know many kinds of dishes that were used. Fermentation. We have fermented the chickpeas paste that we used to make like, you know, pancakes from. You ferment, you take a chickpeas flour, you ferment it, and then you make like a pancake from it.

And when you ferment something like that, are you just using like a, like a lactic acid or a whey or something like that?

Yes, usually what I do in this modern day, I take some water from the cabbage, the fermented cabbage. And then when you put the water from the fermented cabbage in the, like the dough that I make for the, from chickpeas flour, it ferments it because it has the acid bacteria inside.

And when you, when you take that, when you originally ferment that cabbage from which you use the, the liquids to then ferment or to soak, say, like the chickpeas or the lentils in, are you using like a. Well, my wife, for example, she strains the liquid off of yogurt, right? So first she gets milk and then she makes yogurt out of the milk and then strains the whey off of that yogurt and uses that as the fermentation medium for something like, say, cabbage. What do you use as a fermentation medium or a starter?

It helps. But, you know, the lactic acid bacteria is on the air because when you breathe in and breathe out, when you breathe out, you spread millions of lactic acid bacteria to the air. And when you make cabbage, even if you don't put intentionally lactic acid bacteria inside, the lactic acid bacteria will get there from the air and will ferment it. Actually in the cabbage, you make a special environment that inhabits the lactic acid bacteria to grow, and then it grows and it. How do you say it in English? I don't know. Just a second. Gets over. It takes over the cabins.

Right, Right. Okay.

That's the fermentation Process.

Okay. And so. So what are you using to start that fermentation of the cabbage? Are you simply using, like, salt and water or simply.

Yes. I don't add salt. Don't. Don't add water. I take the cabbage. I cut it very fine. I put 2% of salt. So for 100 grams of cabbage, I put 2 grams of salt. I let it sit together, you know, I treat it like a dough. I'm kneading it a little bit, and I let it sit together for the salt and the cabbage for hour or two. And then the cabbage is getting softer, and the fluids from the cabbage, the water from the cabbage go out. And then I use this. I take the cabbage with its own water, put it in a jar, and press it down so the water will get over the cabbage. Then I close the jar tightly, and in the first three to four days, I open it once a day to, you know, so it won't blow because it makes a lot of gases inside. You Open it for 1 second, 1 second every day, and the gases go out. And after 10 days, it's ready. You don't need to add anything. You don't need to do anything. It's the cabbage and the salt. Actually, the cabbage and the salt makes the environment safe for the lactic acid, the bacteria, and helps it to take control of the bacterial environment there.

Yeah, and it's very quick and easy to do. I mean, we're talking about a process that takes about five to 10 minutes to start, and then a quick check in your kitchen, for example, to let the air off as it ferments. It's crazy how lazy some people are and would rather just buy a loaf of whole wheat bread and then go to the doctor or deal with the gas and bloating that ensues from them not being willing to learn how to soak and sprout and ferment. But it's so, so easy to do once you figure these things out, you know? And, for example, you know, my wife and I have one book that's really, really good. It's called Nourishing Traditions, and it teaches you how to do all these things. I mean, even if you don't get this book, which is a cookbook just for the recipes, I mean, a lot of the things that Yuri's talking about, like, it teaches you how to do right in the beginning of the book. But, like, that's one of our. One of the staples in our kitchen. As a matter of fact, there's two copies of it on our stairs right now that my wife is giving away as Christmas gifts just because we like some of the concepts in that book. So I'm curious.

The book I use is also an American book. It's called the Art of Fermentation.

Yeah, my wife has that one too.

Yes, I use it very, very. It's amazing book.

Yeah, it's a good one. The Art of Fermentation. Absolutely. And by the way, if you're listening in over in the show notes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Israel2 that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Israel the number two. I'll put links to these books like Nourishing Traditions and the Art of Fermentation and Yuri's website and Instagram page and things along those lines because there's a lot of interesting follow ups here that you can dig into. But how about cheese? So we talked about some of these grasses and grains, but then there's cheese. And there's all this talk about how cheese and milk and you look around and no other animal drinks the milk of another animal and how it's unnatural for humans to be consuming milk and dairy and how once we're past the age of one or two or whatever, we lose our ability to tolerate lack of lactose sugars from milk. And there's a lot of discussion again in kind of like the Paleo ancestral health movement about how dairy isn't good for you. But when I was in Israel, obviously there's goat cheese and milks and yogurts everywhere. So what about cheese? How is it that dairy would have been done in a traditional way?

Actually we need to consider first that cheese is not like meat. If we know that we are eating meat or hunting for let's say 2 million, 3 million people, even say 10 million years cheese, we're eating and using the milk of animals, we're doing it only for four to six thousand years. It's nothing. You know, when you consider the evolution history of the humankind, it's connected to the second product. We call it the second product revolution when we started using animals not just for their meat, but only for, but also for other uses. So we started drinking milk, but also it was done in specific places around the world. That's why most people are lactose intolerant. So if you ask me, you know, if it's good to eat cheese or not, I would say that most probably eating cheese on a daily basis is not something that is really fit to our digestive system really.

So what about even cheese or dairy products that have been like, say, fermented, for example, like yogurt.

But if you're eating dairy product, you need to know. I think you need to consider two things. First, you need to know how the. The animal that gave you this milk grew what it ate. You know, we know that the effect of good food for animals on the milk is amazing. You know, also in humans, if you eat good food, the milk is. Is better.

Right, Right. And I think that obviously a lot of folks would know that commercial feedlot cattle that was fed, like, antibiotics and injected with hormones and things along those lines would not necessarily be something from what you'd want to eat, like the milk or the yogurt. And that's why we did a podcast a while back@BenGreenfieldFitness.com about which brands of yogurt, for example, here in the US are derived from good animals versus we did stony filled versus dannon, versus some of the Greek yogurts. And the best choices, the best brands when it comes to yogurt as far as the way that the cattle were treated. But I'm still curious about the rationale behind how you're saying that you shouldn't eat dairy every day. And I'm curious about it because I eat dairy almost every day. So I'm wondering if I shouldn't be doing this or if there are other considerations here.

I think mostly I think it's not suitable for our digestive system because like I said, there are two things in the milk that are hard to digest for our digestive system. The first one is the lactose, and the other is the protein of the milk. The protein of the milk is really hard for us to digest.

Why is that?

I think it's not fitted for human digestive system. And because we ate it for a short time only our digestive system didn't get too fit to digest it. Well.

Does it depend what animal that the protein came from? Because I interviewed a goat farmer who highlighted research that shows that, like, a goat protein, for example, is more easily digestible for the human body versus like a cow protein when it comes to the dairy.

Yes, it's true. It's true. The cow protein, it's much, much bigger than the goat in its structure, than the goat protein. So the goat protein is much easier for us to digest, but it's still. It's not the same protein like when we're breasting or other protein that we use to digest. But like I said before, if you eat dairy products, you need to know where it comes from. And it's preferable that it will be fermented and high in fat.

And I understand that lactose content will decrease really significantly when you, when you ferment dairy. But why the fat consideration? Why would you want to choose a source that's higher in fat?

Because for our nourishment through all history, we ate animal products not for the protein of it, but for the fat. And we need that fat. We need high quality fat to our brain, to our body. And if we know that it's high quality, it's preferable that we eat milk product high in fat. We need that fat.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I know that when you homogenize and you pasteurize a lot of these dairy products. Well, actually, you'd probably do a better job explaining it than me. But how would you like when it comes to the modern processing of dairy and what that does to the fats? Can you explain why that might not be a good thing?

First, we know that when cows are grass fed, for example, and not eating grain, they have more Omega 3 and other. Good fatty acids in the fat in higher content. Okay. We have higher omega 3 in milk that came from cows that were grass fed and not grain fed. And of course, like we, like everywhere, when we damage the fat, like in homogenizing and other stuff and pasteurizing the. Pasteurizing the milk, we damage the fat, we heat it, and then by homogenizing it, we break it. We break the molecules of fat. And so it make it fat that is not good for our digestive system. We want a high quality fat. And the way they grow the cows and the way they treat the, the milk affect the quality of the fat.

Yeah. And from what I understand, when you homogenize and pasteurize milk and change the fat globule size, I believe that that makes the proteins that adhere to the surface of the fat globules less digestible. And so when you talked about the proteins, probably just because we've been consuming milk for perhaps a shorter period of time when it comes to the human culture, that we are simply making it even harder to digest those proteins when we break up all those fat globules or even remove them from milk. So it's an interesting observation though, because I'm lactose intolerant if I go out and have ice cream, I am destroyed if I go drink 2% milk, say from the grocery store. And I did this all the time when I was a kid. And I would always wonder why I'd have all this gut pain And I'd drink like four glasses of milk a day from just milk from the grocery store and would just be destroyed. And I still am. It changes my mood. It gives me a bunch of gas pain and bloating, like anytime I touch, like ice cream milk, things along those lines. But my wife gets raw milk from a local farm. It doesn't do a thing to me. And when I consume yogurt and fermented dairy products, I'm fine and can tolerate those just perfectly. And even, like protein, like whey protein that's made from cows, for example, I can't digest it and I'm like constipated the next day and I feel horrible. But when I consume whey protein from goats, for example, I do just fine. So it's really interesting. I've kind of found that I can do okay with some dairy and then some dairy is just like, I have a very hard time with.

So you can do okay with high quality dairy product. That's the. That's the point. Yeah, dairy products, you know, where they came from and what they've been through.

Yeah. So what this comes down to, it sounds like if you're listening in, consider the quality and the source and the way that your dairy product that you're consuming has been treated. And maybe consider not eating dairy every day. When you consume lentils and chickpeas, look at whether they've been soaked and sprouted and fermented. When you consume bread, look at whether it's from a local source, how the wheat was grown, and whether that's been sprouted or fermented, for example. And once you begin to take all this stuff into consideration, a lot of these ancestral methods tend to make these things healthy and even nourishing and digestible. I want to ask you a question about the social implications of this, though, Yuri, because we talked about this a little bit, named Spencer Wells on my show. He wrote this book called Seeds of Deception. I believe it was called Seeds of Deception or no, Pandora Seed. He wrote a book called Pandora's Seed. And the book is about how when we transitioned from a hunter gatherer to an agricultural society, that it was bad for human culture when we started farming and concentrating cities around farms. How it kind of disrupted human culture and led to the spread of disease, as all these humans were like, concentrated in one small area. Do you have thoughts on that? On like a hunter gatherer lifestyle versus an agricultural lifestyle as far as societal implications?

Yes, actually, I think about that a lot. I think that the main thing that happened after the Agricultural revolution is that we started to move away from our involvement in the food production. In our food production. We're moving away from our involvement in our food production, and that's putting in risk our health, our environment, and our community. And when people ask me what I'm doing, you know, I'm not studying the history of food just for fun. I have a mission. And what I'm trying to do is get people closer to their food and asking the question where it comes from, why we eat that food. And I think if people will go back to be involved in the food production, we'll be much healthier and our community will be much healthier. I think that most of the damage that the agricultural revolution did is taking us away from the food production. There are many, many ways that we can go back and be part of the food production. We can cook, we can ask, you know, where this food came from. We can go and buy local. We can eat wild edible plants, go to gather plants. And there are many ways, but we need to get, you know, for the, to keep this environment, our environment, healthier, we need to get closer to the food production.

Interesting. So what about the concentration of populations, like around farms and things like that? Do you think that's a problem? I mean, do you think that we should still be gathering and constantly moving to new areas instead of settling cities down around agricultural areas? Or do you think that the bigger problem is that we've simply lost touch with food because it's being produced by third parties?

Yes, I think it's complicated because, you know, you can't go back. You can't move all the people from cities back to towns, but you can make them ask where this food is coming from and how we're using this food economy not just to make profit, but also to take care of our environment and our health and the community.

Yeah.

And I think if it will work like that, that the, the big companies will ask not just where the money is, but also how we're taking care of the environment, the health and the community. The world will be much better to live in.

Yeah, and, and getting in touch with your food. I mean, like, you know, I'm. I'm fortunate enough to where now I, I live in a place where I have, I have eight garden beds outside my house. I've got a big enough yard to where I can put that many garden beds. But I had dinner. I was in Vermont a couple of months ago. I had dinner next to a guy who produces his whole business is he produces towers and These are gardening towers that you can put on your patio or on your porch, and you can grow an entire week's worth of food, like vegetables and fruits and produce, using simply one of these towers. I think a lot of people who perhaps are listening in and live in an apartment or condominium or an area with a very small space, I mean, understand that you don't need a lot of space to grow your own food. When in the house that we lived in before we lived in the house I'm in now, we had about a quarter acre. My wife dug up the entire backyard, got rid of all the sod, all the grass, all of our, you know, the traditional American, you know, grassy lawn, and instead just dug it all up and planted a garden. And pretty much the only grass left was this tiny strip of grass that we used as a walkway between the two plots of dirt that she turned our entire backyard into. So, I mean, once you start to think about the space that you have available, it's so easy to get in touch with and to grow your own food, and then once you've done that, to use some of the ancestral preparation methods that Yuri and I have discussed. So, Yara, I have one other question for you as well. When I visited Italy, for example, there was a lot of talk there about the rise in celiac disease and gluten intolerance there due to the, I believe, a change in the ancestral farming methods. I'm curious if farming has changed in Israel as well, in terms of the way that they're growing food on farms and whether there's been a change in the human health or the gut in Israel based on that.

The same as in Italy, there's a big rise in Israel in celiac disease and gluten intolerance. And I think the reason for that mostly is the amount of white flour that we eat. Because when you eat. When you're not eating a whole wheat flour and you're eating a lot of flour, you eat a lot of gluten. And the raise on the gluten intolerance is due to the amazing rise in the amount of flour that people eat. You know, through history, they ate bread, they ate whole wheat bread, but they didn't eat bread the whole day. You know, we're eating bread and cakes and snacks and pasta and many, many other things, all contained big amounts of gluten.

Well, is there. Is there. When you talk about gluten, do you get to a certain point where your gut can only tolerate so much? Like you could do okay with, say, like two slices of bread a day, but then once you get up to four, there's. I mean, does your body reach an overload point or does the extra gluten just pass through you? How does that work?

For many, many people, if they will eat, you know, two slices of whole wheat bread in a day, it won't do anything. But for many other. But if they eat, you know, the bread and the pasta and everything else, it would. It can, you know, the. The way it affect you varies a lot. It can make a stomachache or gases. It can. It can affect your feeling in that day. It can make headache, can make you many, many. It can, you know, it affects. In very, very different ways. And we can see a correlation that when in some countries they're eating a lot, a lot of gluten, there are many more people that have celiac disease. And also there are much, much bigger community, you know, population of people that have a gluten intolerance. So it's getting bigger and bigger in places that are eating more gluten in the world. And I think that's the main problem. The gluten is not the problem, is the way we're using it. We're overusing it, actually, in our digestive system.

Is it true that when wheat is grown in a way that allows it to be. To generate like a higher yield crop, or I even even heard about, you know, genetic modifications, for example, to get a crop to get more yield, does that somehow concentrate or increase the proteins like gluten or wheat germagglutinin that are indigestible?

I think that the industrial agriculture wants to create wheat with more and more gluten, because what makes the bread rise well is the amount of gluten. And also, if they don't have enough gluten in the wheat, they will take, you know, gluten from other wheat. They can do it today and put it into the bread.

Okay, so basically you're making a bread that. That most humans would find to be more attractive or more palatable when you increase the gluten content.

Yes.

Okay, interesting.

Because we want bread that is very high.

Yeah. It's funny when my wife uses a local red wheat from the Palouse here, near to us, like in Pullman, Washington, and she makes her sourdough bread using this. But when it comes out, even though it tastes really good, and it's actually really kind of dense, but it's also flat, right? Like, if you see it at the grocery store, you'd be like, oh, that's a little flat one that's not gonna be like a big fluffy piece of bread, but it's also much, much lower in gluten. So that's interesting. So they know that when they concentrate gluten that it's going to make bread that could potentially sell better.

Yes, that's what they want to sell, More bread. Yes, of course.

Interesting. Wow. Well, this has been a fascinating discussion. I mean, we could talk for a really long time and I wish I could come have dinner with you again, but it's a little bit of a long plane flight. But anyways, what I'm going to do, you have a really good Instagram page with some really cool food photos and you've also got a great website as well. So over in the show notes for this episode, if you're listening in, if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com that's BenGreenfoldFitness.com Israel. And then the number two, you can check out Yuri's website as well as some of the resources we talked about, like the book Nourishing Traditions and the Art of Fermentation and Goat Protein versus Cow Protein and other podcasts that I've done on that Vertical Gardening Towers and pretty much all the resources that we talked about. So check all that out over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and, and by the way, also if you're listening in, I know that a few times during this show we talked a little bit about Paleo. And even though I'm not Paleo, I will still be speaking at the Paleo FX conference coming up in April. So if you want to check that out, you can go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com Paleo15 if you go to BenGreenFitness.com Paleo15, you can, you can get into that Paleo FX conference, which you can go to even if you're not Paleo. So, Yuri, thanks so much for coming on the call today and for sharing all this with us.

Thank you. It was fun talking to you.

All right, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Yuri Cizik signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week.

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