Holistically wholemeal

I was brought up with a baker. My granny, who I spent a lot of time with as a child, was Baker by (maiden) name and she baked out of necessity. She was a member of perhaps the last self-sufficient generation, before industrialised food and supermarkets became dominant in the late 20^th century. Granny did everything by hand, cooking from scratch and baking everything that could be baked: bread,  buns, cakes, doughnuts, tarts and pies. I stood beside her in her kitchen ‘helping’, which usually meant scraping mixing bowls with my finger and licking off the remains of sweet doughs and cake mixtures.

For me, cooking and gardening are labours of love. I absorbed my granny’s love for cooking and that love became an ingredient in the food I produce. I also learned my grandpa’s skills as a gardener and his wise belief that if you love what you do, you will never do a day’s work.

Whole food

Fast forward about 20 years, when I moved to Scotland and met my wife. Her first job there was in Beano’s, a whole foods shop in Dundee, where bulk goods were displayed in baskets, boxes and sacks. People helped themselves, had it weighed and paid accordingly. We were both vegetarian already but Beano’s introduced us to whole food and the reasons for eating it. Cooking whole grains and pulses, as well as eating wholemeal bread, became the basis of good nutrition for our minds and our bodies. 

Our next move was to Glasgow, where I furthered my nursing career by training in intensive care and my wife moved to a whole food shop called Grassroots. Again her involvement with the people who worked and shopped there introduced us to a community whose nutrition came from whole food. I began mainly making wholemeal bread, which we understood to be more nutritious than white factory loaves. 

In the early 1980s, I was asked by Diggens, a local bakery chain, to create a simple recipe that they could produce in bulk. Made without additives from organic, wholemeal flour, it was very popular. The Diggens Loaf, as it became known, was the only wholemeal bread available in the trendy west end of Glasgow. Two years later, my wife and I became founder members of Basil’s, a vegetarian restaurant whose aim was to produce highly nutritious, home-cooked food. 

Life force

Following a four-year education in classical homeopathy at the end of the 1980s, I have now been practising classical homeopathy for 32 years. Homeopathy works with life force, using treatments to enhance our vitality. Life force is in all living things but many factors can damage it: stress, toxins and an unhealthy diet do little to help us maintain healthy vitality. Healthy vitality powers the immune system and the innate ability to heal ourselves. For me, life force is one of the most important ingredients in food. When the whole of the food is present, it contains healthy life force – particularly when it is organic and fresh.

A decade ago my interest in healthy nutrition was further stimulated by reading research into the human microbiome. A number of studies have concluded that there are links between biodiversity of bacteria, viruses, fungi and other microorganisms in the gut, and both mental and physical health. I asked myself: as well as prescribing constitutional homeopathic remedies, what more could I do to help my patients? 

I realised we can help ourselves by eating a gut-friendly diet, rich in a diversity of plants and fermented foods that provide natural probiotics and prebiotics. Probiotics are live microorganisms, including those in unpasteurised yoghurt, kimchi, kombucha, krauts and other live ferments. Prebiotics are complex carbohydrates (such as dietary fibre) that help to sustain microorganisms. Sourdough wholemeal bread is often given as an example of prebiotic food.

Sourdough

A downside of foods containing a lot of bran or other seed cases (wholemeal bread, for example), however, is that they are high in phytic acid. This is sometimes known as an ‘antinutrient’ because it binds with certain minerals, inhibiting the body’s ability to absorb them. Sourdough fermentation creates conditions favourable to the production of phytase, an enzyme that breaks down phytic acid and reduces the ‘antinutrient’ effect.

Though it has yet to be proven as a general fact, some people who thought they were unable to eat bread, owing to some sort of gluten intolerance, report that they can eat long-fermented (the amount of fermentation is important) wholemeal sourdough bread. Also anecdotally, a friend with irritable bowel problems has found the same, as have I, despite not responding well to white flour. I began to share these observations with selected patients, some of whom now eat genuine sourdough wholemeal bread.

The ancient Greek physician Hippocrates is often credited with saying: ‘Let food be thy medicine and let thy medicine be thy food’.* Whoever first said it, this is one of the most important things that we can do to help ourselves remain healthy. I now make 24-hour fermented sourdough bread using flour from Scotland The Bread, which they mill from genetically-diverse Balcaskie Landrace wheat, grown locally on certified organic farms. 

My journey to Real Bread feeds my family and patients with life-affirming food. Oh joy, life is good!

 

*Some people dispute this, notably Diana Cardenas. In her 2013 paper ‘Let not thy food be confused with thy medicine: The Hippocratic misquotation’, she states that 'the existing knowledge on Hippocrates’ medicine consists of more than 60 texts known as The Hippocratic Corpus (Corpus Hippocraticum)' in which the phrase 'is nowhere to be seen.' [ed.]

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Originally published in True Loaf magazine issue 59, April 2024.

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See also

Wholemeal: better bred bread