[Johnny555]

How many vitamins are in non-fortified grains?

A quarter-cup serving of wheat berries contains approximately:

    158 calories
    33 grams carbohydrates
    7 grams protein
    1 gram fat
    6 grams dietary fiber
    2 milligrams manganese (97 percent DV)
    34 micrograms selenium (49 percent DV)
    0.25 milligram thiamine (16 percent DV)
    159 milligrams phosphorus (16 percent DV)
    60 milligrams magnesium (15 percent DV)
    2.8 milligrams niacin (14 percent DV)
    0.2 milligram copper (10 percent DV)
    1.7 milligrams iron (10 percent DV)
    1.3 milligrams zinc (9 percent DV)
    0.2 milligram vitamin B6 (8 percent DV)
    21 milligrams folate (5 percent DV)

https://draxe.com/nutrition/wheat-berries/

[gregwebs]

It's hard to understand if that is a good or bad profile the way the information is displayed. If you normalize the nutrient by the calories (2000 calories / 158 calories) then it is high in all of the listed nutrients except folate. But still, this is a minority of the vitamins and minerals you need and it is very low in the rest. So it's not an impressive nutrient profile that you would see from a leafy green, an egg yolk, or liver. Here's a visualization: https://eatnutrients.com/sources/sr28/20071

That's before getting into much more complicated issues around digestibility and nutrient binding making some nutrients unavailable. Suffice to say, wheat berries are not a food that humans ever ate when they grew grains: they always performed processing to turn wheat into bread, etc for good reason. It would make more sense to look at the nutrition of a particular whole wheat bread, etc.

[Johnny555]

The question was How many vitamins are in non-fortified grains, and I chose the wholest of whole grains I could think of. Though I wouldn't expect grinding into whole wheat flour to significantly reduce the nutrient content, unless baking burns some of the nutrients away.

Why wouldn't ancient people have eaten wheat berries, boiling (like in a stew) seems like the easiest way to prepare wheat or other grain like barley

[gregwebs]

> Why wouldn't ancient people have eaten wheat berries, boiling (like in a stew) seems like the easiest way to prepare wheat or other grain like barley.

You can probably boil a cup of them and eat them and be fine. But you can find the answer to the question by eating 1000 calories of wheat berries and seeing what happens. It's going to be difficult to digest since we don't have a ruminant digestive tract. Making bread helps further break down the wheat so that it is more digestible. Bread making originally used slow fermentation (instead of quick rising yeast) to maximize this process.

[Johnny555]

Why would I eat 1000 calories of any food? I wouldn't eat 14 slices of bread or 1.5 lbs of chicken breasts either. But I do eat normal quantities of boiled grains pretty regularly in stews or on a salad.

[sidpatil]

It's likely that the ancient people you mentioned were physical laborers. They would need the calories.

[Johnny555]

But you don't think they had more than one food source? And if they really did subsist mostly on boiled grains, wouldn't their body get used to it?

[kcplate]

TIL: I generally eat less carbs in two days than what is in a quarter cup of wheat berries.