This is great!  I'm eager to hear of a commercially-available ground Einkorn wheat flour.  I don't have the means or know-how to mill my own flour but I'd really like to try baking with Einkorn.

Pasta is one non-Primal carb I do not miss at all.

-why try to simulate neolithic foods with paleolithic-type ingredients?

-why try to eat pasta at all?

-is it really that hard to give up?

Pasta dates back 4,000 years and has a lower glycemic index than bread, so I don't think it is such a bad thing.

Here is  Einkorn flour:
http://www.growseed.org/einkorn.html

Expensive, but may be worth it.  I'd love to know if anyone gets it and has success baking with it.

-4000 yrs is nothing for human evolution and nutrition

-a snickers bar has a lower GI than pasta
-but I wouldn't eat a snickers bar either
-if something is bad, relative to something else that's "not so bad"....why eat it at all???

Interesting recent discovery:


Bread was around 30,000 years ago -study

LONDON (Reuters Life!) – Starch grains found on 30,000-year-old grinding stones suggest that prehistoric man may have dined on an early form of flat bread, contrary to his popular image as primarily a meat-eater.

The findings, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) journal on Monday, indicate that Palaeolithic Europeans ground down plant roots similar to potatoes to make flour, which was later whisked into dough

[edited]

The researchers said their findings throw mankind's first known use of flour back some 10,000 years, the previously oldest evidence having been found in Israel on 20,000 year-old grinding stones.

The findings may also upset fans of the Paleolithic diet, which follows earlier research that assumes early humans ate a meat-centered diet.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20101018/india_nm/india522760

Einkorn is becoming popular all across the US.  Jovial Pasta is a great product and an easy way to try einkorn.

I have been able to secure a supply of whole organic einkorn wheat berries and make them available for sale on the einkorn blog.  

This einkorn really is fun to cook with too.

Regarding 300,000years ago eating grains.

You need to read the following article, which shows that startling papers are easier to publish. Also Medical establishment is not very good at catching analytical errors.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/11/lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science/8269/

Evidence of grains on seeds doesn't imply that humans were eating grains. It does mean that they were using some grains. It could be for colors for painting. It could also be that sometimes they were starving and ate it.

Just getting some thing published in a journal doesn't automatically mean that the abstract says what the paper says or the paper reports things factually, or the paper uses the evidence correctly, or the paper does the analysis correctly. There are so many ways of getting the desired results, and the peer review only works to throw out unpopular ideas. Eating wheat is not unpopular.

I came across Jovial in WF a few weeks ago. I am not wheat sensitive, so I can't comment on the that difference, but I will say it is the best whole wheat past I have ever tried- hands down not even close.

Thanks Anand for pointing out the lies-damned-lies-and-medical-science Atlantic article!

Hmmm....sounds interesting. But I worry - just because we don't feel outward symptoms doesn't mean harm us not being done.

Now, I sound like a hypocrite since I like my tequila and wine, but Einkorn won't give you a buzz. ;)

I agree - stone age man probably had a very hard time collecting seeds and "grain". Add to that the grinding and the rest of the preparation and I very much doubt that is was anything like a staple. Grains may be a means of survival when nothing better can be obtained.

To "Anonymous" who said: "...[Jovial] is the best whole wheat pasta I have ever tried - hands down..." I wonder how you'd say this compares to Dreamfields pasta.  I realize we're not exactly comparing apples to apples, but still some sort of practical comparison would be useful.

@Anand Srivastava  

So basically, we shouldn't believe anything we read on this board?

Hi, Bonnie--

Judging from my single einkorn baking experience and from what GrowSeed.org's Eli Rogosa tells me, you can bake perfectly fine bread with einkorn. It will not rise like conventional wheat flour, rising only a little.

However, I am not trying to paint einkorn as a problem-free grain. It is just an interesting indulgence and part of a fascinating broader conversation about this thing called "wheat.
"

My girlfriend and I tried Jovial pasta last week, and the taste and texture were similar to regular whole wheat pasta, so we plan to substitute it in our recipes.

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Since no one has yet posted their baking-with-Einkorn results in detail, I will! Complete with step-by-step photos of my bread-baking experience. I think it's delicious!
http://www.illinoislori.blogspot.com/2012/12/honest-food-trying-ancient-wheat.html

This post comes with great timing for me, in a way...
I just went to my dr last week to have my cholesterol checked since I have been on Dr. Davis' recommended protocol for 3 months and wanted to get accurate results to determine my current progress. In January my dr was recommending statins for me due to a slightly elevated LDL with an HDL of 65
/trig-80/tot-235.

At my appt. I asked her to do the test to get specific results for my LDL naming the best tests mentioned here. She looked at me as if I was from Mars and told me she never heard of such tests and those type of results would be of no benefit to any course of treatment and my insurance probably wouldn't pay for them because they may be experimental...got the picture.  Lots of resistance.  She then asked me where I got all of these ideas and so I told her about this "blog" well you can imagine her little grin as the dreaded internet doctoring reared its ugly head.  So, she said let's go to my office and look up this "blog" so I can see exactly what this LDL test is.  Low and behold as she put in the heartscan blog address, it came back ACCESS DENIED.  She tried several times and could not get in because the Scripps Medical Group system has it blocked.  

So, I ended up getting a regular lipid panel and she added a Lp(a) test and kept saying something about fluffy particles. I don't have results yet but I am definitely feeling a lack of confidence in this physician who seems very together in a busy practice, yet isn't up on things to manage preventative care in a knowledgeable way.  How do we find primary care drs who know what they are doing?  For those of us in our 50's it is crucial to get these things under control to lead healthy lives and avoid many common problems that plague people as they get older.

My husband and I don't want to wait until we need a cardiologist to get the type of information we are getting here.  

Jan

Jan,
Even my cardiologist is ignorant about LDL particle sizes so what hope for the poor local Dr.

I thought the whole basis for cholesterol being bad was centered on lipoproteins and not on cholesterol itself.  It is the Friedewald equation which has been used in arguing for cholesterol being bad.  So even though cholesterol tests are inaccurate, it doesn't matter, becasue the whole basis for the lipid hypothesis was based around lipoproteins and that Friedewald equation.

Would the same studies implicate cholesterol (in the lipoprotein) if more accurate tests were used?  

It could explain why in so many studies, HDL and LDL have conflicting correlations.  In one set of individuals, high LDL indicates high LDL cholesterol.  That is to say, for a certain lifestyle and environmental and genetic factors, the individuals with high LDL will also have high LDL cholesterol.  

Then in other populations, their lifestyle (and other factors) makes it so that high LDL lipoproteins does not coincide with high LDL cholesterol.  

Or some individuals with low LDL can have high LDL cholesterol.  

Mark.

Sadly, I suspect much of the reason for sticking with the inaccurate and misleading LDL #s is that much of the research is paid for by drug companies pushing LDL lowering drugs, so of course it is not in their interest to have the truth come out that LDL per se is not really important.  Does taking a statin reduce the number of LDL particles? or just the amount of cholesterol in the particles?

It's also horrifying (as Jan comments above) that this site is blocked by the medical establishment.  No wonder the doctors don't know anything- they can't even look up information easily!

Thanks for all your educational posts.  There is still a lot of resistance out there,  but I think you are making progress.

Cynthia

18% is very unlikely to be true for the total population. I think the actual number is much lower.
The question should really be put to health care people : which test do they use for their patients?

can you explain the difference between 25(0h)2 vs. 1.25?  What does it mean if the 1.25 is high and not the 25(oh)2 which you say should be measured.  I have been taking D3 and agree with all the benefits cited.  Thank you

In many parts of the UK you can only get TChol. Lipid panels are "too expensive". They need to save money on the tests to afford the statins. My GP is clueful enough to turn a blind eye when I biro in the Full Lipid Panel, and also to interpret the results (LDL is nominally over limit but is trumped by my excellent trigs and HDL) but her cluefulness is very constrained by the accountants. They pay bribes to get a certain % of patients on statins irrespective.

Jan
Was it Scripps Clinic or Scripps La Jolla?  Was it simply that her in house computer was blocked from surfing the internet?  This is very common.  Lab corp or Quest (better) will run your NMR.  Just have your doctor order it and find a draw station.  Blood needs to be spun and needs a YELLOW and BLACK tube.

homertobias,

The dr is with Scripps Clinic and she had access to the internet in her private office without any apparent problems.  When she entered the address of the blog it was blocked and when a google search of dr. davis found the blog that too would not open.  

I had written down all of the tests that dr davis recommends here and she had no idea what that was about. I asked for NMR  and she didn't know what to order, which was why she wanted to go to the blog to see it for herself.

I got my lipid panel results yesterday but the Lp(a) test she ordered did not come back.  They're checking on that one.  

Thanks for the info.

Jan

I'm betting they just have a generic block on blog sites (blogger, wordpress, etc).

I'm pretty sure my insurance uses the calculated LDL value. It's rather irritating as our annual blood test scores are used along with a series of questions about diet/exercise etc. to determine how much of a credit we get on our paychecks. They also use the BMI which I've read is very innacurate for athletic/lean bodies. Our human resources rep had no answer when I pointed out it would probably put me at overweight if I was 210 lbs at 6' tall but 10% bodyfat even though I would be healthier.

This is useful. I can't remember who posted it but all credit to them. The Iranian Formula corrects for the low trigs I hope we all have where the Friedewald Equation falls apart

http://homepages.slingshot.co.nz/~geoff36/LDL_mg.htm

If they were interested enough, they'd look it up on their own computers when they got home. If they had only a business laptop, which would lock them out of helpful sites, then they'd find a way of doing their own research - just like the rest of us have to when not relying on the medical establishment.