We've been eating bread for millenia but we also moved a lot more until recently. Also, lifespans and health were worse than they are now. Also, how much does the bread we get at a supermarket today resemble the bread people ate 500 years ago?
Its easy to explain ANY side you like because there are millions of factors. That's exactly why diet research is conducted by doing statistics to isolate the impact of particular variables even as 100s of things vary across any group of people.
I think people like to argue against dietary research because it tells them things they don't want to hear. Admittedly, i didn't believe in any of this or like hearing it until recently because its made to sound so difficult - cut out sugar/refined carbs/carbs completely!
Personally i was able to move to a healthier diet after just going through a simple book on sports nutrition. It drills in a few key points that tend to get lost in clickbait. For example, what you eat over a period of time (i.e a DIET) can be unhealthy or healthy, but pointing to any ONE meal/food as healthy/unheathy doesn't make a lot of sense
That is, pardon the pun, huge. It would be nice to get some more recent data and to adjust for height.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_food_ener...
I grind my own grain at home and make my own bread. 100% difference from what's available in stores vs. at home.
You'll never find any of the artisan-style almost-burn loaves that you see on pinterst using 100% whole grain. Will never poof up like that, you'll get something closer to German-style brown breads.
They pull the wheat germ -- essentially the plant embryo, but also a source of nutrients that can go bad -- out of the flour to extend shelf life. Ditto for taking out all of the bran -- fiber! -- though "whole wheat" flours will add some of that back in later. But for the most part modern breads are nothing but refined carbs with a touch of fiber.
The germ is sold separately, as a health food or feedstock for animals.
The difference in taste and shape is noticeable. It's also much, much more filling and satisfying. Not as great for avocado toast, but does pretty well with a little cream cheese and tomato (plus a pinch of salt).
12.1% of Japanese have diabetes (https://www.nippon.com/en/features/h00249/)
For comparison, about 13% of people in the US have diabetes (https://www.cdc.gov/diabetes/pdfs/data/statistics/national-d...)
According to wikipedia [0]: approximately from 10,000 to 30,000 years ago. Let's take an average reproduction age of 25y and you've got roughly 1000 human generations eating bread.
But, also according to wikipedia [1], the oldest Homo Sapiens that we can date range from 200,000 to 300,000 years ago. That's 70-90% of our direct ancestors' natural selection process not having been exposed to bread (widespread grains, in fact).
And, if we dare to argue that human metabolism have mainly not changed since Homo Erectus, then we are in another world in terms of comparison, because Wikipedia trace the oldest signs of Erectus as far as 2,000,000 years ago [2], which represent 80,000 generations, and that's ~1% of our ancestors having evolved exposed to grains.
So, all in all, "we've been eating bread for millenia" is clearly not all that there is to say on that matter.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bread [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_modern_human [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo
Removing the husk of wheat and rice removes the source of fiber which then speeds up the metabolic process of your body turning the carbs into sugar.
It overwhelms the glucose regulator in your body similar to eating raw sugar.
This is why consuming whole fruit instead of juice is so much healthier. It's about speed of glucose delivery.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1271/bbb.90231
Maybe Japanese cuisine compensates some of the negative effects by using vinegar more often than we do. My wife used to make sushi according to Japanese recipes; the rice was soaked in vinegar. But Westerners do not soak their bread or rice in vinegar.
We generally think about an element of nutrition being a cause of some disease (cholesterol, fat, sugar etc.). We spend less time thinking about the question whether an element of nutrition may have protective effect against deleterious effects of another element.
Now I would be surprised if the average person burns more than 2k calories/day. Moreover, once you get to high fat levels your body produces more estrogen like hormones. These indirectly lower your metabolism even further. This is because those hormones impede the synthesis of testosterone, which is highly correlated with muscle-synthesis and muscle fibers are much more metabolic active tissues than fat. A feedback loop that is really hard to escape from.
Sure, it is bread, but it might as well be called bread substitute.
It is not easy to find bread that isn't made up of primarily cheap ingredients. Even so-called supermarket "artisanal" barely resembles actual quality bread.
You can see this in action with this procedure (or thought experiment):
1. Lose most of your belly fat so that you look thin.
2. Eat a tub of ice cream. Do this for two nights. You’ll see a lump on your belly. It is 4 pounds of new fat. That won’t happen if you replace ice cream with the same weight of fruit.
I would suggest a link between abundance of food and obesity. Also sedentary lifestyle
You can eat a lot of carbs over time when being physically active. But once you stop being as physically active, you have to adjust your carbs accordingly. So what OP says is correct for how most people live nowadays.