Thanks for the reply and especially for the great McGill link. Exactly the approach I respect, at least at first skim. I will have to spend more time with it, but I learned something right off the bat: I didn't know that flour spoils. Truly never occured to me. The same friend gave us a lot of Dakota Maid flour, and I will have to rearrange one of our freezers to hold it. The Harvard article fell short of convincing me on bioavailability, and particularly on the magnitudes and therefore the materiality issue. But my mind is far from closed.

In a weird way, the Harvard article reminds me of a lot of what I've read about marijuana. A lot of repetition of what I'll call "stoner certainties" out there. Please don't misunderstand me. I'm not rejecting anything out of hand, but I have a generally skeptical nature -- maybe I should have been born in Missouri, "the show-me state." Not only that, but anyone with miles on the tires has to know that nutrition is a refuge for a whole lot of neurosis and laughable hype. So I look as carefully as I can. We've been fed a lot of what the bull leaves on the ground over the years.

By the way, I can make a credible claim to have a good handle on how to lose weight using 102-year-old science. Maybe I'll post about that sometime. The secret starts with a 1919 paper, "A Biometric Study of Basal Metabolism in Man," by Harris and Benedict. If they'd only teach it in high school, we'd have a whole lot less obesity in this country. Of course, Nutrisystem, Jenny Craig, et al wouldn't like it. Face it, where would they be without obesity? Whatever they say, I happen to think that "Weight Loss Inc." ought to be called "Fraud Inc." or "False Hope Inc." Atkins works, but it was designed as a pre-surgery crash diet and is not a good plan to keep it off.

By the way, I don't think it's "refined grains," but rather refined flour. The McGill link does a good job of detailing how different kinds of flour are made.