Posted on 12/07/2016 8:28:25 AM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Here’s an excerpt from the Wheat Belly Cookbook about modern high-yield, semi-dwarf wheat, what I call the “Frankengrain” because of the extensive and bizarre changes introduced into this grass by geneticists and agribusiness. (Even though a cookbook, I tried to make the Wheat Belly Cookbook a standalone book that discusses the background on why and how the Wheat Belly lifestyle yields such unexpected and extravagant health and weight loss successes. For this reason, the first 90 pages of the cookbook reiterate many of the Wheat Belly basic concepts.)
From the Wheat Belly Cookbook:
Wheat encapsulates a fundamental dilemma of our technological age: How much should we permit modern agriculture to modify our food, change its genetics, alter its biochemistry—but not tell us what they did, how they did it, why they did it, and that there are potentially uncertain effects on us unwitting humans who consume it with our breakfast burrito?
If your hairdresser one day decided to give you a new hairdo and dye your curls red, surely she would discuss this with you first. If your spouse decided that life would be better in Anchorage, Alaska, wouldn’t it first come with a bit of discussion?
The production of our food does not seem to adhere to such common courtesies. Food crops and livestock are changed, you buy them, you eat them—no questions asked. The changes introduced are not just that of a new color, or an adaptation to grow under some unique condition. The food is, in many cases, fundamentally changed.
More than any other common foodstuff, wheat stands apart as the most changed. Selling bread, pretzels, or ciabattas to you under the guise of wheat is a deception that you would not tolerate in other areas of your life, certainly not from your hairdresser or spouse.
Modern wheat reflects the technological capabilities of agricultural geneticists that predate the age of genetic engineering and genetic modification, the use of gene-splicing technology to insert or delete a gene. Wheat is the brainchild of genetics manipulations that were employed before such technologies were developed. Wheat represents the product of genetic methods that were crude, often stumbling, less controllable, less predictable—far worse than genetic modification. Yes, believe it or not, modern genetic modification using gene-splicing technology to insert or delete single genes, as frightening as it may be in its implications to mess with natures’ design, represents a substantial improvement over what geneticists were doing previously.
Using breeding methods that predate genetic modification, geneticists were unable to precisely control which genes were changed, which genes were turned on or turned off, and whether entirely new and unique genetic traits were created by accident. They simply looked for the characteristics relevant to their own interests, such as shorter height or greater yield, but had no real interest in nor insight into what the total package did to humans. Why would they, since none of us ever asked?
And yet the products of these stumbling early efforts at creating “improved” genetic variations of your food are already on your store shelves. And you’ve been consuming them for something like 35 years.
PING!
Eat an egg.
Do they use this to make Frankenberry cereal?
Do they still make frakenberry cereal?
LOL!
Anyone who uses terms like “frankengrain” I take with a huge grain of salt. My first suspicion is “scare mongering for profits”.
We eat only organic wheat and make our own bread. We don’t have any problems.
Recently I ran out of org. white flour (I use about 1/2 ww and and 1/2 to 1/3 white) and used non-org. white. We both felt like crap.
IMHO not having read the book, that the problem is the chemicals used in ag biz including the Roundup on wheat that is the problem.
Hello there, little jeremiah! Always glad to see your name on a comment. How are you doing?
“Using breeding methods that predate genetic modification, geneticists were unable to precisely control which genes were changed, which genes were turned on or turned off, and whether entirely new and unique genetic traits were created by accident. They simply looked for the characteristics relevant to their own interests, such as shorter height or greater yield, but had no real interest in nor insight into what the total package did to humans. “
Umm, hate to break this too you, but before humans started doing that, nature was doing the exact same thing to the wheat anyway. Selection is selection, whether we do, or whether nature does it. We simply get the job done faster, and can push it in a direction that suits out interests.
Bingo. If it’s really bad, you don’t need to invent propaganda terms to scare people, you can just tell the truth.
Gluten intolerance was unknown before genetically modified wheat.
While that's true for my son, it's been a bit longer than that for me and longer yet for my husband. Humans have been eating genetically modified foods ever since we invented agriculture. Furthermore, as another poster pointed out, Nature has been genetically modifying organisms for billions of years, long before humans ever got the idea that maybe wheat with ten seeds per stalk is preferable to grow than wheat with four seeds per stalk.
I clicked on the article thinking that it would be another anti-GMO dingbat rant. But in reality, the article is sensible.
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There is a massive difference between hybrids produced by pollen, and the deadly frankencrap that results from direct tampering with genes.
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Matthew 24:
[22] And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.
“There is a massive difference between hybrids produced by pollen, and the deadly frankencrap that results from direct tampering with genes.”
The wheatbelly book claims the current GMO wheat has been modified to the point of our bodies being 10,000 years behind it in evolution.
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Evolution????
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I wonder if you are aware that ANY difference you see between a plant and its wild-type parent is because of changes in the genes? For example, those huge knobbly purple streaked "heirloom" tomatoes are no more "natural" than that cheese stuff that squirts out of a can. Their genes are different. Their proteins are different. Their fats are different.
It does not matter how the genetic engineering is accomplished--or even if no genetic engineering takes place--the offspring are genetically altered from the parents.
There is no more a baseline genome for the foods that we eat than there is a baseline climate for the earth from which we are deviating due to human activity.
Article about ancestral tomatoes.
There is no rational reason to suddenly be afraid of eating genetically engineered foods just because we found new and precise methods of engineering them in the last 40 years. And we are able to understand both the starting material and the end product with far more detailed knowledge than ever before. It's a big improvement over randomly crossing plants (or animals), hoping to get more desirable genetic traits than deleterious ones.
“Anyone who uses terms like “frankengrain” I take with a huge grain of salt. My first suspicion is “scare mongering for profits”.”
That, and “ignorant liberal that thinks they know better but has zero education and is seeking attention”.
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