Mana as the bread of life. Bread is food. Why the Sabbath, taking time and real food matter.
"Tomorrow is to be a day of rest, a holy Sabbath to the Lord. So bake what you want to bake and boil what you want to boil. Save whatever is left and keep it until morning". Exodus 16:23–24
In his sermon this past Sunday, Pastor Rob McCoy shares with us the importance of rest and the sabbath and why real food matters in the context of our health. In this sermon, at 1:17 minutes in, he talks through what I share so often with people – there is junk and there is food. There is no such thing as junk food.
Everyone can agree vitamins, minerals and amino acids are necessary building blocks for a healthy body, but where do they come from?
What if I told you that of the forty-six essential nutrients, wheat contains all but four of them (Vitamins A, B12, C and the mineral Iodine).
How we get these 40 nutrients from wheat (and for the sake of this article bread) is worth exploring.
Plants create fruit when they reproduce. Fruits contain seeds. When plants release these seeds fall or animals eat and excrete them back into the ground, the plant’s life cycle continues.
Grains are the seed-bearing fruits of grasses. Their life-giving nutrients are fully contained and perfectly stored making them an incredibly nutritious food.
Each kernel of grain has a ‘germ’ as its core, surrounded by a storage packet of starch, called the endosperm, that serves to nourish the young seed embryo when sprouted.
The entire kernel is protected by a layer of bran and sometimes an additional layer called the hull.
As long as the bran is intact, and the grain kept in a relatively cool, dry place, these ‘seeds’ will store indefinitely with no nutrient loss. This is exactly what you hope for when you read your bread ingredients like in the image below.
Once the kernel of wheat is broken open, however, as it is in the milling process, the protection of the bran is gone and much of the nutrients are lost through their exposure to oxygen or oxidation.
(Source: Henry A. Schroeder. “Losses of Vitamins and Trace Minerals Resulting from Processing and Preservation of Foods” American Journal of Clinical Nutrition 24 (1971) )
In the early 1800s, if you wanted to prepare wheat for baking bread for your family you would take your wheat berries in the morning and bake them on that day. Grinding the entire wheat berry results in a nutrient-dense but easily spoiled flour. This was how it was done if you needed flour. Not super convenient.
In the late 1800s, the invention of industrial milling brought the discovery of separating the core (bran and germ) from the surrounding storage packet (endosperm) as a way to create a white flour with a longer shelf life.
The downside to this new discovery was that you were then left with flour that was stripped of its insoluble fiber, vitamins and minerals; all of which are essential for proper digestion and nourishment. (Homemade Wheat Bread - Generation Acres Farm)
As with many things, the convenience and mass production process stripped bread of nutrients. The increased gluten intolerance many experience today is not because of the body’s inability to process gluten, but because their body is no longer processing the whole food of wheat. The nutrients that help the body break it down no longer accompany the gluten in the bread. This makes it difficult, and in the case of gluten intolerance, impossible for our bodies to break down the wheat .
Not only are vitamins, minerals and amino acids important to consume, but also necessary for our body’s digestion to work effectively. When we consume whole foods as they are in nature and meant to be consumed, it is called bioavailability, which is what makes the food absorbable and accessible for our body to use as nutrients.
Processing and MAN-ipulating our food in these ways is a huge contributor to why so many today are unhealthy. As we move away from the perfect forms of food that God has provided for us and destroy them with greedy manufacturing practices in the name of making food last longer, we are destroying our health.
And the convenience over health efforts don’t stop there. We spray pesticides and glyphosate on our crops to improve yield) disrupting and compromising our gut health even further in order to increase crop yield and the soil that our crops are planted in are also then depleted of essential minerals so we no longer get those as well. In the end these attempts to mutilate our food, continue, but there is still hope, because we have a choice.
Luckily we still have access to whole foods, and we can formulate these real foods in a way that preserves their wholeness, and this is why we are shouting from the rooftops about what we call ‘foundational foods’ like Cardio Miracle and Pro Lean Greens.
The idea behind all of this, whether it is the correct process of milling wheat or the formulation of Cardio Miracle, is that we must get back to nourishing our bodies the way God intended. We must turn away from fake, processed and mutilated junk that we call food. Remember, there is no such thing as junk food. It's either junk or it’s food. When we choose well, God Wins.
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