Whole Wheat. Whole Grain. Multi Grain. 7-Grain. 12-Grain! It’s all about the fiber nowadays ain’t it? Everywhere you look – at least where grain oriented things are concerned – you see labels and menus and scruffy jackasses screeching “Whole Grains! Whole Grains!”

   Eat me.

   The problem with the whole grain hullahballoo is that, like so many other nutrition crazes, it makes it seem that this will be a cure all for everything. Eat lots of whole grains and you’ll increase your nutrient intake many-fold, drop some cholesterol points, and lower your risk of heart disease, evade some cancers, stay regular, lose weight, and see things four hundred meters off in the dark. And naturally if you’re not working on curing and improving all these things then you are actively striving to bring about your own demise.

   So as long as something is made using whole grains as opposed to processed flours then it’s going to be good for you right? The answer to that is a flat out “Fuck No.” A 12-grain loaf of bread is obviously bringing more to the table – literally – than a bag of Wonder Bread. So it has an advantage there; protein-rich nutty stuff and tasty, grease-rich sunflower seeds. But when it comes to a simple sack of whole wheat or oat bread that advantage might not be that great. They’d need to be vitamin enriched, which the national/mainstream white breads almost always are. I’ve run into that at Trader Joe’s where I’ve bought organic whole wheat bread for my tyke only to discover that it had no iron or B-vitamins listed on the nutrition panel. Artificially added or not these are essential nutrients for kids and big people alike so until somebody can tell me exactly what the fibrous shell of a wheat kernel does for you, then whole-grain alone ain’t gonna cut it. It’s back to the regular supermarket to buy a national brand of wheat bread. And a bag of dense white bread, ‘cause wheat bread makes a crappy ham sandwich.

   Breakfast cereals are another place where the focus has shifted to whole grains. But since every single box of General Mills cereals are going to say “Made with Whole Grains” from now on it will be easy to become lulled into a false sense of nutrition. Not every whole grain thing is going to be a wonderful thing to eat. The type of grain, for instance, is very important. I love tortillas, and tortilla chips, and Corn Flakes, and Corn Chex, and Sugar Pops, and Trix and Kix and all sorts of other things made from corn. But corn is actually quite a shitty grain. Fibrous and full of carbohydrates, sure, but way low on vitamins and protein. And nobody is really touting the singular glory of corn fiber yet.        

   Another thing to think about is the amount of sweetener in a cereal. Cereals by nature are starchy – carbohydratey  – and adding sugars increases that carb load.  And lots of carbohydrates can help get you fat. So if you are porking up then you are also working against any of the purported benefits of the whole grains. If you’re healthy and very active this matters less because the fibers are doing whatever the hell they do and you’re using the extra carbs for energy. But you fatties need to be careful, because the food industry loves the fact that you can overlook a fuckload of sugar as long as some health fad is noted on the label. Corporations love the fact that the chubby, or nascently chunky, mind thinks, “Well it does have 40 grams of carbs – but it’s whole grain! Whoo Hoo! If I eat this I might live to 50!” Of course the industry has noted that fat people are getting smarter so they’ve responded with cereals (and everything else) in “light” forms with “half the sugar!” I got snookered by that a year or two ago, thinking that they were now making a Frosted Flakes that wasn’t as sweet. But the box didn’t say “Half as Sweet!” and the first spoonful had me screaming “Twice as Sweet! Twice as Sweet! Dear Sweet Jesus what the fuck is happening to my tongue!!!” Splenda was happening. The saccharine of the new millennium. The industry relies on all of us to be stupid at least some of the time. So Splenda it is for now – until it’s shown to cause sterility or that it makes us not give a shit that the government gives billions and billions in tax concessions and royalty breaks to oil companies.

   But are all sugars and sweeteners bad for you? Sugars are if you don’t control your intake or if you aren’t active enough to use them for fuel instead of building fat. Artificial sweeteners are bad if your taste for sugary things makes you eat more than you need. Does all that outweigh the benefits of whole grains? Maybe not, but it has to come close to balancing it all out to a “nothing gained” sort of thing.

   People used to open their smart fucking mouths to ask why I bothered to go to the gym if I smoked anyway. Smoking works against the effects of exercise. But exercise does the same to the effects of smoking and I felt I deserved my cigarettes a hell of a lot more than some slouch expanding on his Barcalounger. So the help or harm of sugars it really is up to your own mindset – as well as what you encourage in the people who are most influenced by you: your kids. I’ve quit smoking for just that reason.

   Now, I eat a lot of fibrous crap these days. I always actually have because I’ve always kept a good cut of fruits and vegetables in the mix and fiber abounds in the plant kingdom. I’ve started dumping extra whole grain stuff, notably oat-based, into the diet as well because my cholesterol went way up in the last couple of years. After quitting the cigarettes I enlisted in the ranks of Fat America for a spell and all that extra bacon and butter left its mark. So I eat cheerios (high vitamins; good for you, good for kids) and whole grain English Muffins. And if it weren’t for the oatmeal cookies (the methadone for my brownie addiction) things would get dull. Soon enough I am going to go back to my doctor and get my cholesterol tested again. It would be nice to know that the adjustments are working because I sure don’t feel like anything has changed. Well that’s not true. High fiber days seem to louse up my intestines good. It’s not supposed to be that way. Fiber keeps you regular they say. Makes a great natural laxative they say. I say I want my morning cigarettes back with my black coffee because you could set a watch by my daily “sit down”. All ONE of them: quick, clean and complete. But give me a bowl of oatmeal or a glass of Metamucil and there’ll be several trips to the hopper to enjoy what feels like a plaster piglet getting pushed through a rubber sleeve. Then breaking in half before it’s fully evacuated. This is what a colon being cleaned feels like? I’m not buying it, so I’ll just have to see the blood work before I’m a believer. It’s a tough sell for me on face value alone. And for all the “fiber lowers cholesterol” flap nobody really gets into the how’s. What is the process? I’ve tried a semi-serious internet investigation into this matter. But after half a dozen or so search parameters I gave up.  The main Google results were always “Fiber lowers cholesterol.” Never any “lowers it by…” Does oat fiber enter your blood stream, go scrape some cholesterol off your arteries, ride down to the kidneys and shoot through the wang of a now healthier me? That can’t be right, right? If that isn’t the way then the next effective scenario I can come up with is that the fiber grabs cholesterol before it gets into your blood. Which means that there’s still the cholesterol already inside you that needs lowering and now I have no fucking idea about how this all works. The doctor better have a good answer when I see him.

   Without a good solid explanation of things you have to go on faith alone. Or treat the words of the faithful as fact. And the faithful often argue their points in persuasive tones based on flimsy foundations. One is that processed, white flour is bad for us. It is? Who has it sickened or killed besides those with gluten allergies?  Then there’s one that I just love to hear: for most of humanity’s existence it had been sustained on a diet which was mostly fibrous vegetation and whole grains. Products made of flour which has been stripped of its coating are newcomers born in the Industrial Age (often referenced in derisive terms). The idea is that if mankind has survived so well for so long on cereals in all their rough glory, that our modern habits of stripping them to the bare essentials goes against that which nature intended. 

   Funny thing about Nature is that for our 100,000 to 200,000 years as Homo sapiens Nature liked to kill us off pretty early in life. For most of our species’ run making it to forty meant you were really old. And dying of starvation in a ripe stand of wheat surrounded by slow, delicious animals was a possibility because all those roots, tubers and grains you’d consumed in life had fucked up your teeth something fierce, having ground the enamel off long before your hair could turn gray. All that changed with the Industrial Age and all its dietary evils. My grandmother made to her late nineties but I’d never seen a slice of whole wheat bread in her house.

   So it might seem that I have gained no ground on the overall worth of whole grains and fiber. But I haven’t actually ruled them out as beneficial. As often is the case it’s just the extremes which seem fail. Seeking to ensure that every grain-based item on the grocery list incorporates the entire freaking seed is going to take all the fun out of eating. And if too many of the whole grain stuff you bring home cost a little too much and tastes a little too rough then skip some of them. Why suffer? You can balance a diet with the things you do like without having to buy everything you hear is essential to your life. And you will probably outlive the vast majority of our ancestors.