Jared Diamond wrote a famous essay in 1999 called The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race. He was referring to the mistake of our transition to agriculture and the production of grain flour. By 1941, the Committee on Food and Nutrition recommended that flour be fortified with nutrients to help combat widespread malnutrition in areas where the American population relied on flour-rich foods. This led to white bread and flour, pasta, and rice being enriched with thiamine, riboflavin, niacin, and iron. Then, in the 1970s, the Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs made grains the basis of our diets. This post tells the story about our tragic switch to grains when agriculture was invented, the health costs, the realization of their poor quality in the 1930s, and, strangely, their illogical placement in the food pyramid as the basis of most of the calories in the American diet.

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