[hollerith]

>The food pyramid put whole grains specifically at the base of the food pyramid. Not sure why you consider this objectionable, the body of evidence overwhelmingly points in the direction of benefits for wholegrain consumption.

Many, many people disagree with that. Most days I eat no grains at all and the rest of the time, I strictly limit my grain intake. For example, I just finished a meal where I used one tablespoonful (uncooked volume) of rice (boiled with some peas). (The meal also included meat and butter, the source of most of my calories.) White rice is the only grain I eat anymore, and I would never eat brown rice, which is loaded with oxalate and other phytotoxins. I added to this just-finished meal B vitamins in the form of pure refined powder (which I liberated from capsules).

It is very obvious from how it makes me feel that brown rice is bad for me.

The cultures that have eaten rice for thousands of years eat almost exclusively white rice. Brown rice was not even possible to make before the spread of tech for precision machining (which reached East Asia in the 1900s). You have to remove the hull from the rice before you can eat it, and before precision machining, removing the hull (traditionally done by pounding the rice with a log) also removed most of the bran and germ. Yes, some bran and some germ remained stuck to the rice -- so it was mostly-white rice, as opposed the polished, completely-white rice we have today with no bran and no germ at all. Still it had only a small fraction of the amount of bran and germ that modern brown rice has.

[KempyKolibri]

I don’t find n=1s to be a good form of evidence. Many people may disagree, but that doesn’t mean they’re right.

Look at the dose response curve for wholegrain consumption in this bad boy (and yes, it’s looking at whole cereal grains, not including fruits and vegetables). Greater consumption associated with better outcomes: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000291652...

[Spagbol]

I've read the opposite; that brown rice is just white rice with the bran still attached, and that white rice was only eaten by the elite because of the additional work required to seperate it (like white bread only being for the wealthy during the middle ages), and that beriberi was a noticed more in times specifically because of industrialization increasing the availability of white rice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiamine_deficiency Apperently a lot of white rice is now enriched with thiamine for this reason

[hollerith]

>I've read the opposite; that brown rice is just white rice with the bran still attached, and that white rice was only eaten by the elite because of the additional work required to seperate it (like white bread only being for the wealthy during the middle ages)

I've read that, too, many times, and I stopped believing it after I watched videos (on Youtube) of people preparing rice the traditional way. Particularly, I paid close attention to the color of the rice after the processing steps: it was white with bits of brown stuck to it.

I searched for bookmarks for those videos, but cannot find them.

(I don't know about wheat: I only investigated rice.)

[hollerith]

I found the bookmark. Anyone who has ever seen modern brown rice will immediately be able to tell that although there might be bits of bran still stuck to it, this rice has no more than 3 or 4% of the bran of modern brown rice:

https://youtu.be/qGNUPqHvTso?si=WWnY3OLALTBREVMs&t=525

I bookmarked another video, but it has been made private since I watched it.

Here is a very illuminating moment: the rice has already been pounded, then winnowed (the separated hulls removed), but there are still many kernels that need to be hulled (roughly one kernel in every 150 or 200 kernels), so the rice is put back in the mortar for another round of pounding. In other words, although there is more pounding to do to make the rice edible, already most of the bran is off the rice (and thrown away along with the hulls). (When only a few unhulled kernels remain, she removes them one by one with her fingers.) This supports my assertion that it is impossible with traditional methods to get the hulls off while leaving on most or even a significant fraction of the bran. Again: I think you need precision machines that only became available in Europe in the 1800s and in East Asia in the 1900s to get the hulls off (which I think you really need to do if you eat rice every day and want to keep your teeth) while leaving most of the bran on the kernel. I.e., people in traditional rice cultures did not have the ability to consume anywhere close to as much rice bran as is possible by eating modern brown rice.

https://youtu.be/qGNUPqHvTso?si=QWYryq16PBHzK8ed&t=436

[Spagbol]

Interesting, though perhaps it is possible the colour change is due to oxidation? It would be interesting either way to see a nutritional comparison of traditionally prepared and modern brown rice, as well as their bran content