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DECONSTRUCTED
    WHETHER IT’S A LOAF OF organic high-fiber multigrain bread or a Twinkie, what exactly are you eating? We all know that the Twinkie is just a processed indulgence, but conventional advice tells us that the former is a better health choice, a source of fiber and B vitamins, and rich in “complex” carbohydrates.
    Ah, but there’s always another layer to the story. Let’s peer inside the contents of this grain and try to understand why—regardless of shape, color, fiber content, organic or not—it potentially does odd things to humans.
WHEAT: SUPERCARBOHYDRATE
    The transformation of the domesticated wild grass of Neolithic times into the modern Cinnabon, French crullers, or Dunkin’ Donuts requires some serious sleight of hand. These modern configurations were not possible with the dough of ancient wheat.An attempt to make a modern jelly donut with einkorn wheat, for example, would yield a crumbly mess that would not hold its filling, and it would taste, feel, and look like, well, a crumbly mess. In addition to hybridizing wheat for increased yield, plant geneticists have also sought to generate hybrids that have properties best suited to become, for instance, a chocolate sour cream cupcake or a seven-tiered wedding cake.
    Modern
Triticum aestivum
wheat flour is, on average, 70 percent carbohydrate by weight, with protein and indigestible fiber each comprising 10 to 15 percent. The small remaining weight of
Triticum
wheat flour is fat, mostly phospholipids and polyunsaturated fatty acids. 1 (Interestingly, ancient wheat has higher protein content. Emmer wheat, for instance, contains 28 percent or more protein. 2 )
    Wheat starches are the complex carbohydrates that are the darlings of dietitians. “Complex” means that the carbohydrates in wheat are composed of polymers (repeating chains) of the simple sugar, glucose, unlike simple carbohydrates such as sucrose, which are one- or two-unit sugar structures. (Sucrose is a two-sugar molecule, glucose + fructose.) Conventional wisdom, such as that from your dietitian or the USDA, says we should all reduce our consumption of simple carbohydrates in the form of candy and soft drinks, and increase our consumption of complex carbohydrates.
    Of the complex carbohydrate in wheat, 75 percent is the chain of branching glucose units,
amylopectin,
and 25 percent is the linear chain of glucose units,
amylose.
In the human gastrointestinal tract, both amylopectin and amylose are digested by the salivary and stomach enzyme amylase. Amylopectin is efficiently digested by amylase to glucose, while amylose is much less efficiently digested, some of it making its way to the colon undigested. Thus, the complex carbohydrate amylopectin is rapidly converted to glucose and absorbed into the bloodstream and, because it is most efficiently digested, is mainly responsible for wheat’s blood-sugar-increasing effect.
    Other carbohydrate foods also contain amylopectin, but not the same kind of amylopectin as wheat. The branching structure of amylopectin varies depending on its source. 3 Amylopectin from legumes, so-called amylopectin C, is the least digestible—hence the schoolkid’s chant, “Beans, beans, they’re good for your heart, the more you eat ‘em, the more you ….” Undigested amylopectin makes its way to the colon, whereupon the symbiotic bacteria happily dwelling there feast on the undigested starches and generate gases such as nitrogen and hydrogen, making the sugars unavailable for you to digest.
    Amylopectin B is the form found in bananas and potatoes and, while more digestible than bean amylopectin C, still resists digestion to some degree. The
most
digestible form of amylopectin, amylopectin A, is the form found in wheat. Because it is the most digestible, it is the form that most enthusiastically increases blood sugar. This explains why, gram for gram, wheat increases blood sugar to a greater degree than, say, kidney beans or potato chips. The amylopectin A