Wednesday, March 2, 2011

Ingrained Ideas (or) Why you should embrace whole grains with open arms

    Ever since recent visit to Austin where my good friend Sirsha introduced me to oats as an alternative substitute for rice, I’ve been hooked to using oats in lunches and dinners more often than not. To make sure I was doing the right thing by making this dietary modification, I figured I wanted to do a more detailed study on oats on the internet. One thing led to another and I realized there’s a fascinating world of whole grains out there. I mean, we all know we should be eating healthier. Grocery store aisles are packed with a million different products that have the buzzwords “multigrain”, “whole wheat”, “low fat”, “organic”, “fortified” etc on their labels that feed into the health hype. Call me paranoid but I don’t always trust those labels. If you read the fine-print, you’ll see that a lot of the multigrain breads have less than 2% of the multiple grains in there apart from the ubiquitous corn syrup and other unpronounceable words. Anyway, that discussion is beyond the scope of this article. To overcome the trust issue and encouraged by the oaty success, I decided to buy more unaltered whole grains and seeds in their raw form and to use these directly as rice / roti substitutes in our daily diets.

Why bother, you ask?
a)      I get bored easily cooking the same stuff
b)      Making rotis is a time-consuming and messy affair
c)      I am not a big fan of rice
d)      I’d rather die of old age than some horrific disease related to dietary lifestyles
e)      As I learnt from my research and experiments below, it’s easy enough to incorporate a greater variety of whole grains in our diets. As is evident from my study, the main complex carbs we consume (wheat/rice) definitely don’t provide all the nutrition/health benefits we could be getting.

Anyway, the more I read about this topic, the more I figured I’ve been living under a rock for the longest time!! Here is a compilation of what I’ve found so far which I thought you guys would find interesting –

1)      Why rice and / or wheat is not enough for you
I am a big follower of The World’s Healthiest Foods (http://www.whfoods.com/). It’s my Food Bible. I like the fact that they provide valid scientific references for any information (very important for a scientist :D). Here is a compilation of the nutritive values of some of the whole grains I’ve experimented with so far (Fig. 1 and Fig. 2). Firstly I want to point out that white rice does not even feature on the website as a healthy food for obvious reasons – the more you process rice, the more you lose nutritive value. You’re better off sticking to brown rice. Personally speaking, Rajat and I are not big fans of brown rice…it’s just not yummy enough ;).

Next, I want to highlight the fact that by sticking to rice and wheat, we’re missing several key nutrients including iron, phosphorus, copper, and calcium as well as protein and amino acids such as lysine AND dietary fiber. A variety of the other whole grains listed here provide these nutrients. I highly recommend reading up on all of these grains on whfoods and you’ll see I’ve barely scratched the surface where it comes to promoting their nutritive goodness and health benefits. Another comparison is provided in Fig. 2. Notice that rice is comparatively low on the scale of nutritive contents compared to other whole grains.
Fig2 : Nutritive content from 200 calories of a bunch of whole grains
Fig. 3 is a compilation of whole grains rated according to their glycemic index (GI). GI and glycemic load are important indices that rank carbohydrates according to their effect on our blood glucose levels. Low GI carbs, i.e the ones that produce only small fluctuations in our blood glucose and insulin levels reduce the risk of developing diabetes and heart disease. Low GI carbs are ones with a rating <60. As you see in Fig. 3, examples of low GI foods are amaranth seeds*, pearled barley, bulgur wheat, oats, rye, buckwheat and quinoa. It’s good to be aware that maize, wheat, some varieties of rice and millet are on the wrong side of 60. Also, I was surprised to learn that Basmati Rice has a lower GI value than other short-grained rice. I always thought it was unhealthier than other rice varieties in every way, but apparently not. Brown Basmati Rice is healthier than short-grained white rice according to several websites. Another thing I learnt was that the GI value can drastically vary according to how much the grain has been processed. In general, the “rawer” the grain, the lower the GI value (grain flours have higher GI values).

2)      This is all fine and good but how much does it cost to make the switch to eating healthier whole grains?
Fig 3 : GI values of a bunch of whole grains
It is obvious that whole grain prices are going to vary according to several factors like where you stay, where you shop etc. Moreover, the prices of the main complex carbs most humans consume, i.e rice and wheat have been fluctuating a lot lately, thanks to shortages worldwide. Here in Atlanta, we’re pretty blessed with the having the Dekalb Farmers Market, a huge international market that has a wide variety of produce and grain products from all over the world at discount prices, a fact that I fully exploit!
You may have to do some scouting around to find these grains in your local stores, but Trader Joes / Whole Foods would be a good start. I know some people who buy these grains cheap and in bulk off websites like Amazon. (Note : For those of you in India / other countries, I’m curious to know how much whole grains like Barley, Oats and Quinoa cost there…let me know!).
Going by the prices from the cheapest sources of these grains within Atlanta, you’ll see that almost all grains apart from Quinoa and Buckwheat, fall within the same price range (Fig. 4). That works out fine, as I don’t really cook Quinoa/Amaranth on its own, it’s always with another cheaper grain as the main base which drives down the price a bit :).
Just to cover my bases, I did another analysis last night to see how much it costs to spend on rice vs oats based on calorie consumption. I estimated that as a couple, we consume about 20lb of rice in a month which is equivalent to ~11800 calories (1oz rice = ~37 cals). Interestingly, 1oz oats provides ~106calories, which means in an ideal world 20lb rice is equivalent to 8lb oats!! Again, in an ideal world that translates to a saving of a couple of bucks per month if you switch to an oaty lifestyle :) My strategy then would obviously be to incorporate a bunch of grains from all ends of the price spectrum, ensuring a better diet at no additional cost :D The verdict: It’s won’t cost you much to incorporate “exotic” whole grains into your diet.
Fig 4 : Cost comparison of a bunch of whole grains
3)      How on earth does one cook these crazy grains?
This is an easy question. All I’ve been doing for lunches and dinners is pouring out some whole grains in a large glass bowl, adding water (appxly 1-1.5 finger width above the level of the grains), and cooking in the microwave for exactly 5 mins. That’s it!! I’ve tried this with oats alone or oats in combination with amaranth, quinoa and bulgur wheat so far and it’s worked great. Pearled barley in the mix tends to increase cooking time by another 5 mins.
Some observations so far: Oats tend to boil over, even within 5 mins so keep an eye out for that happening. I prefer the texture of steelcut oats to rolled oats (nutritionally, I don’t think the two are very different). For whatever reason, I’ve seen that people cook steelcut oats and pearled barley for upto an hour on the stove or in the slow cooker for hours on end. I think that’s a completely a waste of time and energy. In my experience, 5 mins for oats and 10 mins for pearled barley in the microwave is way more than enough! Also, if you let the grains sit in the hot water after cooking, they’ll soak up the excess water on their own.
I’ve used quinoa in a whole range of dishes, including main course accompaniments, soups, salads and upma. There’s no reason to believe the other grains can’t be used the same way…let your imagination run wild!

4)      If these whole grains are so healthy, they’re bound to taste terrible….NOT!!
No way, Jose is all I’ll say! You are not going to know the difference after the first few times of trying these grains. If anything, they taste even better than plain old boring rice. Steel cut oats and pearled barley have a wonderful texture. Quinoa and Amaranth are versatile seeds that can be nutty or soft depending on how you cook them. My favorite way, as mentioned before is doing a mix-and-match of several soft and nutty grains and cooking them minimally to provide a range of textures and nutrients!

5) Disclaimers
            I’m no nutritionist or expert on the aforementioned topic and would gladly value any opinions or corrections to the facts if I’ve got them wrong. I would also LOVE to know if you’ve experimented with these or other whole grains and the outcomes. Write in, please!

Since I started with a rather cheesy title for this article, I’m going to end with an equally cheesy bottomline for this article: Variety is the spice (err..grain) of life :)

*The end*

Coming up in the next issue:
Ingreened ideas (or) why you should embrace green leaves with open arms ;)


*Note: I could not find a trustworthy source for the GI value of amaranth seeds. Many websites list the seeds alone as having a GI value of 25-32, but then foods made with amaranth flour seem to have GI values as high as 95. My take on it is that I’m still going to stick to buying just amaranth seeds because they are unaltered and good for you according to whfoods!

2 comments:

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  2. Great post Kaniks. I am glad you are blogging about your culinary experiments, I look forward to trying your recipes :)

    I have tried Quinoa by itself as a grain. I normally just boil the quinoa with water and salt. I saute some cucumbers and tomatoes with scallions, salt and pepper flakes (for no more than 3-5 mins) and mix it with the grains. You can garnish with cilantro if you wish. Healthy and yummy - takes 10 mins to prep. (Clearly I am not very good with listing recipes using quantities etc :) but I hope you get the idea)

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