> which is not super desirable as human food without significant processing
I see this repeated all the time. Is making cornmeal or cornflour really that much more involved than wheat flour, semolina, or rolled oats?
I see this repeated all the time. Is making cornmeal or cornflour really that much more involved than wheat flour, semolina, or rolled oats?
Mesoamerican civilizations built on top of corn had a specific corn processing step called nixtamalization, which avoided the issue altogether, but unfortunately wasn't imported along with corn during the colonizations of the Americas.
But as long as you can get enough tryptophan and vitamin b3 otherwise, corn is completely fine as a main source of energy.
Best use of maize, IMO, is fermentation. Let the yeast have it first, take off the volatiles, then feed the mash leftovers to tasty critters.
The Mayans got their cooking water from out of cenotes, skylights of limestone cave systems, which might have made it naturally nixtamalizing. Were their grinding stones of limestone? (The grinding platform, the metate, was not.) Don't know what the Navaho did or do.
If it's basically the same level of involvement as as bleached flour, then the only real relevant issues are how to source a balanced protein so you don't have to eat half a kilo of carbs when you don't need the energy and how distructive other micronutrient sources are.
Of course if you spend extra time, money and energy turning your relatively ordinarily healthy grain (which is admittedly a low bar) into sugar you spend more time, money and energy and wind up with sugar. It's no different from wheat in that regard other than you should maybe add a bit more fiber to the meal.
For the majority, sure. In our immediate family I have to disagree, after many months of (undiagnosed) illness, and after several trips to hospital, my son was recently diagnosed with Coeliac[0].
Now corn products are now a key component of his diet.
[0] https://www.niddk.nih.gov/health-information/digestive-disea...