Whole Grains for Life

If you pay attention to current nutrition recommendations, you may have heard that you should be eating more whole grains. The 2010 Dietary Guidelines for Americans, released this past winter, say that at least half of the grains that you eat should be whole. I personally attempt to do this by cooking and eating only whole grains when I'm at home. It can be such a challenge to find whole grains in a restaurant (save for the occasional offer of brown rice, which will often cost you extra money) that I figure whole grains at home is a good attempt to balance that out. My friend and teammate Stephanie recently passed along this article where Michael Pollan answers reader's questions. Someone asked "what is the single best food we all should be eating every day?" and he responded (in more words than this): "whole grains." So why should you want to eat more whole grains? In brief, they're less processed than refined grains and contain healthy fiber, vitamins, and minerals. They've been shown to help with weight maintenance and provide a lowered risk of diabetes, heart disease, and stroke.

A few years ago I had the pleasure of attending a gluten-free culinary summit where a woman from the Whole Grains Council spoke. I was surprised to hear that there was such a thing, and even more surprised to learn about a bunch of whole grains I'd never even heard of! (Teff anyone?) The council has lots of information and recipes on their website, and they make it easier for consumers to purchase products that contain whole grains by putting this stamp onto products:

Yes, there are products out there that are whole grain that don't have the stamp, but it's a good place to start if you're unsure (click here for a full list of stamped products). Also, when purchasing wheat products, be careful - it needs to say in the ingredient list "whole wheat flour" not just "wheat flour." It might be brown and it might say "wheat bread" but if the first ingredient is "unbleached enriched wheat flour" then it's not made from whole grains.

Lest you think that whole grains are limited to brown rice and whole-wheat flour, here's a list of whole grains (the gluten-free grains have an *):
Amaranth*
Barley
Buckwheat*
Bulgur
Corn*
Farro
Kamut
Millet*
Oats* (gluten-free when certified that they have not been cross-contaminated)
Quinoa*
Rice (brown)*
Rye
Sorghum*
Spelt
Teff*
Triticale
Wheat
Wild Rice*

So, go whip up a batch of buckwheat pancakes, have a snack of rye crackers with low-fat cheese, enjoy a lunch of quinoa salad with beets and goat cheese, and finish the day off with a bowl of mushroom barley soup and a berry crumble made with oats and you'll be well on your way to living a healthy, whole-grain lifestyle!