10/23/2021
THE HISTORY OF TRE-EN-EN GRAIN CONCENTRATES
*Life Before Food Processing, NeoLife Whole Food Nutrition* https://www.breadoflifevitamins.com/gnld.../gnld-oils
The story of whole-grain concentrates is of the utmost significance for NeoLife Nutrition, not only because they represent the most critical area of nutritional supplementation for all, but their history has direct roots with NeoLife’s history. In discussing the state of nutrition in our society today, it is essential to understand the history of processed foods. We must start with the most with basic staple: whole grains. Traditional processing of wheat involved grinding fresh wheat slowly between stones to prevent the heating of the nutrients in the germ and aleurone layers of the grain. Therein lie high-quality oils, significant amounts of protein, b-vitamins, antioxidants and minerals; these give the grain its life-giving sustenance. With those essential components, you can see why such care was taken to preserve the integrity of the wheat berry in milling it to flour for bread. However, today’s flour is nothing like the whole-food goodness that humans were designed to thrive on.
Steel rollers for grinding of wheat were developed in Hungary in 1839 and came to the United States in 1879. The advent of processing of wheat with steel rollers made possible the separation of wheat germ from the fiber and starch to make white flour. The product of this modern process is stripped of its essential nutrients and has little or no protein value. As a result, it is much less prone to insect infestation. Unprocessed whole wheat berries consist of 10% lipids and sterols, which are essential oils required for cellular nutrition. But since these high-quality fats oxidize and rapidly begin to go rancid after the milling of the fresh grain, they are removed from our wheat products to extend the shelf life. Naturally, bread would only last roughly a day, as it did for thousands of years and continues to in many traditional food cultures. We have bypassed the established routine intrinsic to human survival: grinding our daily bread.
It was not until 1941 that we began “enriching” refined flour with certain minerals and nutrients again because of its utter inability to sustain life. For the last 70 years, we have maintained this degradation of one of the most beneficial foods known to man, only to add back in a sparse few synthetic nutrients in order to legally call it “whole grain”. In fact, the common whole wheat products we get today need only derive 50% of their ingredients from grain origin in order to be lawfully labeled whole grain (which may be GMO or poor-quality breeds); they are not as “whole” as the manufacturer would have you believe. Are we really supposed to trust that sugary breakfast cereals are made with our daily value of whole grains to the extent the packaging label would have us believe? Eating today’s “whole grains”, a person would have to consume at least 800 calories of quality wheat, brown rice or soy to get the optimal quantity of lipids and sterols for their diet. The majority of us Americans are not doing so and consistent access to this essential whole food diet foundation is difficult to attain. Removal of the germ core of the wheat is directly linked to the nutritional depletion of human food in a nation where we often feed our animals better than ourselves, as the husk and wheat germ fiber are typically fed to livestock as waste. This was the first of many reckless departures of our society away from food as it was originally designed.
Clinical research on the effects of refined grains was first conducted in 1946 at Hollywood Presbyterian Hospital in Southern California, where women were showing no response to medical treatment for insufficient hormone function and chronic fatigue due to glandular failure (common medical conditions today). Methods for extracting vitamin E from wheat germ, rice and soya husks had already been pioneered in the 1940’s, leaving oils containing protein, B vitamins, lecithin, unsaturated fatty acids, phospholipids, phytosterols, octacosanol and other ingredients that came to be known as Tre-en-en grain concentrates. Tre-en-en is a Greek word meaning “three-in-one”. The hospital used these quality fats and oils found in the grain and legume bran to affect the patients’ body chemistry and saw significant improvement within just a few weeks. The adrenal exhaustion, PMS, and glandular failure were brought into balance as the estrogenic activity of the women went up over 300%! The conclusion was that these essential oils – linolenic, linoleic, omega-3, omega-6 and especially phytosterols – support basic cell function. This series of studies, along with many others that followed, indicated that people suffering from chronic fatigue could benefit dramatically from the mixture of whole-food plant extracts providing these broad-spectrum lipids and sterols.
Most of us think about nutrition as the food we eat. Nutrition
