Anthony Colpo - Whole Grains, Empty Promises: The Surprising Truth about the Worlds Most Overrated Health Food

The late Ernest G. Ross once wrote: About almost any subject, there are the facts everyone knows and then there are the real ones.

Ross was referring to those snippets of wisdom that have been repeated so often most people simply assume theyre true, but when one starts searching for actual evidence it quickly becomes apparent there is none .

Here are a few such gems:

Red meat is bad for you. Vegetarians live longer. Saturated fat and high cholesterol levels cause heart disease. Carbs and insulin make you fat.

These are just some of the bromides, incessantly fed to us by the media and so-called experts, that Ive already dissected in my previous books -- a nd shown to be totally false.

In this book , Im going to take another widely-held and cherished mainstream dietary belief, break down its pseudoscientific faade, and expose it for the fallacious nonsense that it is.

Get ready , ladies and gentlemen, as youre about to learn why the belief whole-grain cereals are healthy is a total sham.

Before I start dismantling the evidence used by the whole-grain believers to support their pseudoscientific claims, a little history lesson is in order. How, exactly, did this belief that whole-grain cereals are healthier than their refined offspring first come into existence?

That dubious honour falls to one Denis Parsons Burkitt (1911-1993), an Irish-born physician who served as a missionary in Africa during and after World War II. It was there, prior to forming his cereal fibre hypothesis, that Burkitt performed some truly invaluable work and forever stamped his name into medical history. Whilst serving in Uganda in the late 1950s, Burkitt was introduced to a facial tumour that mainly afflicted young children. The severity of the tumours and the lack of effective treatments prompted him to investigate further. During a trip to the UK in 1961, he met Tony Epstein, described his observations, and the two began a collaboration that produced the first electron microscopic evidence of a virus in tumour cells. This eventually led to the discovery of the ubiquitous Epstein-Barr virus, now implicated in a wide variety of disease conditions.

Later in 1961, Burkitt and two colleagues departed on a car journey that would take them more than 10,000 miles around western Africa in a quest to determine the geographic extent of and a possible cause for the virus-induced tumour. Burkitt and his colleagues eventually concluded the virus developed primarily as a result of immune suppression in children with malaria. It was at an international cancer conference in 1963 that the tumour first became commonly known as Burkitts tumour, a name later modified to Burkitts lymphoma.

In 1964, Burkitt was able to convince pharmaceutical companies to supply him with chemotherapeutic agents, arguing that his patients offered the chance for a controlled experiment because none had been treated with X-rays. The success of chemotherapy among the African patients was amazing, with much lower doses required than had been reported for other tumour types[1].

For a lot of African children, Burkitts compassion and tenaciousness was quite literally a lifesaver.

But then things turned to crap.

Literally.

The Burkitt story took a major turn in 1966, when the physician-researcher moved back to England to work with the British Medical Research Council. The following year he met naval Surgeon Captain T. L. Cleave, who believed refined carbohydrate consumption was the cause of many chronic diseases in the West. Cleave shared his theories with Burkitt, and the latter immediately saw parallels with his earlier work on the African lymphoma; namely, that seemingly unrelated diseases may in fact have a common cause.

Aware that certain chronic diseases occurred with much less frequency in Africa than in Western populations, Burkitt applied the same mode of thinking hed employed when hunting down the cause of the lymphoma. Burkitts philosophy was that one must determine the geographical distribution of a diseaseand then seek the environmental factors that are prevalent in areas or groups exhibiting a high frequency of that disease and absent where the disease is rare. [1]

This process is known as epidemiology . The field of epidemiology has been responsible for some truly momentous advancements in public health, such as determining the demographic susceptibility to various infectious diseases and the recognition that smoking was a major cause of lung cancer.

That said , the field of epidemiology has long since degenerated into a data-dredging, cherry-picking free-for-all, one responsible for some of the most absurd and counter-productive nonsense ever contrived in the fields of nutrition and medicine. A classic example is the lipid hypothesis of heart disease, which grew from the early work of Ancel Keys, who cherry-picked small samples of countries then compared their CHD mortality rates in order to create the impression that dietary fat intake and serum cholesterol were related to heart disease. From this fraudulent base, the lipid hypothesis quickly rose to become the cornerstone of modern cardiovascular disease prevention. Its patently false and pseudoscientific nature is readily reflected in the fact that after some five decades of global cholesterol-phobia, CVD still remains the number one killer in the Western world.

As I discussed in ).

So while epidemiology was undoubtedly of great value in the study of smoking and the demography of infectious diseases, it has repeatedly proved a complete dud for studying relationships between diet and chronic illness. Infectious disease outbreaks tend to be marked by acute and obvious symptoms, and their demographic distribution can hence usually be determined quite quickly. Similarly, the geographic relationship between smoking and lung cancer was so strong, and the likely mechanism so obvious (repeatedly filling your lungs with noxious gases may harm themduh!), that there was little doubt as to just what researchers were dealing with.