The white bread of idleness

Today, I was reading in Proverbs 31 and it describes a "capable woman" as someone who can:

 be trusted, bring good and not harm to others, work with willing hands, supply food and clothing to her household, buy land and plant on it, conduct business, embrace the poor and needy, make garments, be strong, laugh at the days to come, speak wisely with loving instruction, and lastly "she watches how things go in her house, not eating the bread of idleness."  

Did you ever notice how eating too much white bread can make you tired and craving more?  You get nowhere fast.  On a basic level, your body recognizes both white flour and white sugar very similarly.  When you eat these simple carbohydrates, your blood sugar rises rapidly, insulin dumps, blood sugar dives, and you're left wanting food again.  This ends the mystery as to why many people eat too much.  It's why I used to have a compulsive overeating addiction for 7 years.  You can't satisfy a God-given craving for live nutrients by feeding it dead calories.

So, my 8 year old daughter asked me the gnawing question, "WHY?  Why did they take all that nutrition out of the wheat flour?" The answer is simply so that it will have a longer shelf life.  This profits the food industry.  But what does it profit you?  

I'm actually going to answer that question.  If you buy white flour, or a processed food with white flour, you get the simple ease of a cheap good tasting food which is also very popular and familiar to most Americans.  It's likely the flour will not be rancid because the more perishable parts of the wheat (being the bran and germ) have been removed.  And you don't lose time trying to figure out the lost art of preparing whole grains.  

But that's like avoiding great works of literature because it takes too long to read them... or avoiding getting to know people because they are too complicated.  It's like building your house using only drywall because you like the way drywall looks when it's finished.  But there's no structure.

God made whole wheat grains to be rich in nutrients but during the process of turning whole wheat into white flour, the B vitamins as well as vitamin E, calcium, zinc, copper, manganese, potassium and fiber are removed.  Too bad all that work goes into removing good things... just to have it "enriched" with synthetic vitamins that our bodies don't fully recognize.  Talk about an inefficient system.  The industrial revolution was great for car manufacturing but not for food.

Nevertheless, it's so cool how God made whole foods with their own self-contained glycemic regulators found in fiber, protein, and healthy fats.  This keeps your blood sugar stable naturally.  So, eat your apple with the skin.  Eat your endosperm (white part of the wheat) with the bran and germ in tact.  Sprouted whole grain tortillas taste great.  Eat your yam with the skin.  Let the cream stay in your raw milk and yogurt.  Eat veggies raw as much as possible.  Embrace the learning process because chances are that your work will one day create a domino effect and release the next generation into a new norm of substantial thought and clear sight to see that God created food intricately and exactly how He intended it for us.  Custom-made.  

Taste and see that the Lord is good.

Amy