The healthy diet community is split between the majority who believe whole grains are healthy and a minority who believe they are best avoided. The anti-grain camp is lead by Loren Cordain and his book, The Paleo Diet.Cordain writes that grains were introduced into the human diet after the domestication of wild grains. Because human populations before the advant of "civilization" didn't eat grains, he argues, we shouldn't either.
Our view is that Cordain is mistaken about the consumption of grains in paleolithic societies, and also about the healthiness of whole grains in the diet.
The oldest evidence we have for the domestication of grains is about 10,500 years ago. But the direct evidence for the processing of grains for food (mortars-and-pestles) reaches back to 17,000 BC, well before agriculture.
Now, archaeologists have found new evidence for the organized storage of wild grains near the Dead Sea in Jordan. Some 1,000 years before the first domestication of grains, the inhabitants there had built and used graineries for storing wild barley.
We believe grains have existed in the human diet for ages, and are a vital part of any healthy diet.
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