Soak your grains, soak yourself

How do you prepare your grains? What the preparation process of grains can teach you?
We understand nowadays the negative effects on our health of refined cereals like bread made with refined (bleached flour) wheat, white rice or polished pearl barley. These effects come mainly from the fact that the nutrient-rich bran and germ of the cereals have been removed, stripping the grain of many of its valuable vitamins and minerals and leaving only the endosperm. Due to this understanding, we know now that is best to consume wholegrain foods (which contain the three parts: the bran, the germ, and the endosperm) just as traditional societies did. Rye, millet, oat, and corn are also cereals.

However, wholegrain foods are not limited to cereals, they also stand for pulses and nuts, which provide the body with a myriad of macronutrients and micronutrients: proteins, minerals, vitamins, fats, carbohydrates, and phytonutrients. Pulses are edible seeds from a legume plant like peas (green peas, yellow peas), beans (kidney, black, navy, butter, pinto, garbanzo, mung, peanuts) and lentils (yellow, black, green, brown). Nuts are one-seeded dry fruit with a hard shell like brazil nuts, cashew nuts, coconut, hazelnut, macadamia, pecan, pine, walnut, almonds, pistachio, etc.
Apart from the beneficial components, the grains also have anti-nutrients, which are components that can block the absorption of nutrients in the body. Some of the common anti-nutrients in the grains are lectins, oxalates, phytates, saponins, tannins.

The presence of anti-nutrients might be the reason why traditional societies never used these foods in large quantities as we eat today. Traditional cuisines spend a lot of time soaking or fermenting the grains before consuming them. And that explains the European traditions of eating porridge, fermented bread (sourdough) with natural starters (not yeast), mexican tortillas with fermented cornmeal, indian rice fermented pancakes or fermented preparations like tempeh or miso from soy beans.

Science now is demonstrating why traditional societies cooked grains in this way. The soaking process neutralizes part of the phytic acid (which prevents the absorption of some minerals) and the enzyme inhibitors, increasing the availability of the nutrients present in the grains.

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