As befit for the time of year, here comes one of my intentions for 2017 🎉, namely to find out once and for all which grains I ‘tolerate’ and which ones I don’t.
Why?
I _love_ eating all sorts of different shades of darker breads. There are the supposed and documented health benefits, but unfortunately they don’t make me a happy person.. quite on the contrary: I can safely say that each time I eat any (?) non-white bread I have a guaranteed bout of depression within 4 hours after eating it. The effect is _very_ reproducible.
Just avoiding ALL grains isn’t going to work for me; I refuse to stick to a white bread-only diet for the rest of my life.. So here’s the “action plan”:
🎺 *insert trumpet sound* 🎺
I know for a fact that I’m sensitive to rye, and I suspect the same is true for wheats. As most breads contain a mix of grains, finding out by buying and eating commercial breads is not going to be very helpful. So I’ll be doing my own experiments, yep, we wouldn’t want it any other way now would we 🙂
From the little I know thus far, it appears that wheat and rye have been connected with symptoms of depression. The reason why I might tolerate the white-only bread could be because the ‘allergen’ that elicits my reaction might be in the outer and innermost layers of the grain (‘bran‘ and ‘germ‘ respectively) as white bread does not contain these but is purely based on the starchy part in between (the ‘endosperm‘). Consequently, a possible approach to confirm is to determine whether
🔍 eating the ‘bran’ or ‘germ’ of wheat grains trigger depressive bouts.
Other questions that remain include:
🔍 Are the ‘bran’ and ‘germ’ parts similar in terms of other grains?
🔍 What do they consist off (for wheat and for other grains)?
🔍 Is there a universal ‘allergen’ that can be identified?
I guess these are all questions that may be quite hard to figure out with limited time at hand. What will be easier to address is:
🔍 comparing effects after eating barley, millet, oat and spelt vs rye/wheat.
🔍 using sour dough techniques to produce breads from the grains and seeing if symptoms still persist
🔍 experimenting with soaking and sprouting of grains to assess if symptoms still persist.
Be sure to find updates on this topic on these pages!
Last but not least, if you have any experience in this matter or have information that can be helpful, please do feel free to let me know at nancy <@> yellowcouch <.> org (without the space and <>).
PS: Here comes a comparison for terms in English and translated to Dutch and German, which may be of interested to some readers:
- WHEAT (EN) = Tarwe (NL) = Weizen (DE)
- RYE (EN) = Rogge (NL) = Roggen (DE)
- MILLET (EN) = Gierst (NL) = Gerste (DE)
- OAT (EN) = Haver (NL)= Saathafer (DE)
- SPELT (EN) = Spelt (NL) = Dinkel (DE)