"Let our food be as natural as possible!" This is the supreme commandment in the dietary mantra worshipped by nutrition-conscious people. Sixty years ago, Professor Werner Kollath, in his experiments with house mice, pointed out that feeding animals with cereal grains that had been coarsely ground and soaked until soft as their daily feed could prevent certain diseases and premature aging. From the experiment, Kollath concluded that for human beings, "besides grain and milk, there is probably nothing else that can extend life and maintain health." After all, unprocessed (and even uncooked) whole grains contain active substances in their most primitive state. Therefore, since Kollath's theory took the stage, the "delicacy" of milk mixed with hard, coarse whole grains has ascended to the pinnacle of health foods, hailed as a rare classic of natural food in today's era filled with frozen foods.
This seemingly simple and unadorned way of eating satisfies the yearning for simplicity, unpretentiousness, and a wonderful nature in people living in a world of concrete and steel. However, regrettably, this can only be considered a fanatical ideal, completely unrealistic. In nature, all things flourish, in a cycle of mutual generation and restraint. In the struggle for survival, all plants and animals strive to seize and utilize every small advantage to defeat their natural enemies or, at the very least, make it difficult for them to prevail. They often survive by making themselves taste bad or hard to digest. Disgusting tastes, pungent smells, and thorns on stems, stalks, and leaves are all part of their arsenal of defenses. These minor defensive measures can make enemies chewing on them find the food unpalatable, thus driving them to seek another food source. In the dictionary of nature, the words "righteousness and morality" do not exist; there is only "survival of the fittest." Even for humanity's "simple and beautiful ideals," nature can just as easily put them in an awkward position.
Because, the whole grains that we humans consider a classic health food of course also have a set of effective self-protection measures, and even though we have cultivated them artificially for thousands of years, it has not changed their nature. Among their many protective measures, the most well-known is probably phytic acid. Like most protective substances, it appears on the bran of the grain. Because it can firmly bind with calcium, zinc, and magnesium, it cannot be softened even after being soaked all night, and heating it is also of no use.
This experience is all too familiar to pig farmers. Excessive amounts of coarse grains not only damage the animals' gastrointestinal tracts but also require additional zinc to be added to the pig feed, even though the grains themselves are rich in zinc. Even with their robust digestive systems, pigs can only digest these coarse grains to a limited extent. Incidentally, Kollath also gained similar experience in his mouse experiments: the experiment could only proceed when he placed the rodents in zinc cages. "Using these zinc cages was a prerequisite for the success of the experiment," he wrote in his experimental report in 1950. Kollath's experiments had indeed failed when using other cages, so he should have been reminded from this that a long-term diet of coarse whole grains leads to zinc deficiency. In fact, he should have been able to derive a more universally applicable recommendation for humans from his mouse experiments. Furthermore, several recent experiments have also concluded that, considering digestive issues, mice are clearly not suitable as experimental animals for this type of study. They digest barley grains 10 to 20 times more efficiently than humans. This is because the small intestines of these omnivorous mice are teeming with microorganisms, while a healthy human body is almost bacteria-free. Herbivores like cattle and birds, which have a grain-based diet, possess a specialized "digestive equipment": in the stomach of ruminants like cattle, special microbes live to effectively break down food; in grain-eating birds like small birds, the grains are first softened in the crop before entering the muscular stomach—the gizzard—to be ground up.
And what about us humans? We invented grinding stones and fermentation vats, and thus the baking and milling industries showed their significance. Finely ground grains are more suitable for digestion than those that have only been coarsely milled. Traditional sourdough fermentation is like pre-digesting the grain before it enters the stomach. Because the moist, warm environment allows the ground grain particles to swell, and the added yeast microorganisms can also work in concert: they can activate a substance in the grain—phytase—and then work together to break down phytic acid. This process takes about 20 hours in a bakery. Although some vitamins are lost during this bread-making process, the input and output are still balanced, because without a thorough preparation process, we can actually absorb only a tiny fraction of the nutrients from these whole grains.
Have you ever heard that in other parts of the world, people happily eat raw whole grains? As far as I've heard, it's mostly a continuous process of grinding, milling, drying, fermenting, and then steaming, boiling, frying, baking, and roasting, before finally comes the sound of people's delighted praise for the exquisite food. Strangely, if unprocessed whole grains could truly solve our survival problems in a healthy way, then for thousands of years, more plant species should have been available as food resources to enrich our ancestors' granaries. Moreover, it is truly hard to imagine that in the past, in an era without machines where human labor and energy were relatively precious, how could people around the world have painstakingly ground and processed grain that could have been eaten right away, turning it into easily digestible cakes and bread, under the unanimous belief that it was meaningless?