[orbsycli]

Cereal Has been my anti depressant since I was a baby.
It stopped me from crying, then,
And it gets me out of a bad trip, now.

But...what exactly is cereal?
I'm eating Malt-O-Meal Berry Colossal Crunch
and wtf is this stuff????

[Drip Curl Magic]

well, I hear that milk is very vital in ceretonin balance. Which would explain why cereal helps with bad times.

as for the cereal itself... uhhh. iunno, mang.

[Michaelangelica]

Good question. I don't know. Yet I eat them everyday!
I know wheat is the West's major cereal and it was ony a botanic accident that we ended up with it and not something else from either Persia or S.America
Excavations at Abu Hureyra on the Euphrates found : "seeds from over 150 taxa, all of them edible" c 9000-8000AD Seems a lot more than we would use now? A more varied diet?

Also an interesting fact about why we ended up with wheat and not some other grass:

"domestication occurred remarkably quickly but involved major changes in wild cereal grasses. In the wild such grasses occur in dense stands, growing with a brittle joint, known as the rachis, between the stem and the spikelet with its seed. This allows the ripe grain to fall to the ground and reseed, or foragers to harvest it simply by knocking the stem against a basket at the exact moment of ripeness. In contrast, domestic cereals have arachis so tough and strong they can only be harvested by a sickle or by uprooting the plant, effectively giving humans control over the timing over the timing of the harvest."

From "Time detectives" How archeologists use technology to recapture the past, by Brian Fagan, Simon & Shuster GB 1995

(Also has some interesting stuff on the very advanced farming methods of Central and S. America - (some grains they used we no longer cultivate).

Hope you find this as interesting as I did.
Michael

[Racoon]

Originally Posted by orbsycli

But...what exactly is cereal?
I'm eating Malt-O-Meal Berry Colossal Crunch
and wtf is this stuff????

Read the Ingredient list!
I stopped eating most cereal and drinking milk years ago. ( I prefer vanilla flavored Soy milk )

Most cereal is processed garbage with mondo amounts of sugars and colorings and what-nots; with huge marketing behind it.

I loved cinnamon toast crunch as a kid!
Dat's Da Bomb!

FYI - Henry D. Perky produced the first shredded wheat bisquit in Niagra Falls in 1894!
Try and eat the whole-grain, minimally processed variey.

[Drip Curl Magic]

Originally Posted by Racoon

Read the Ingredient list!
I stopped eating most cereal and drinking milk years ago. ( I prefer vanilla flavored Soy milk )

I recently stopped eating cereal for the most part. And I've always hated drinking milk by itself.

This is causing incredible calcium deficiancy (my toenails are cracking and falling off )

But this flavored soy milk interests me...

[Michaelangelica]

From:
http://www.cancercouncil.com.au/edit...p?pageid=1036#
Diet has an important influence on the expression of some cancers. In cancers where prevalence varies significantly from country to country, such as colo-rectal cancers, heritable influences account for at most 35%, and for breast cancer about 27%. This indicates that environment is a major influence. Wholegrain and wholemeal cereal foods are important components of a healthy diet as they contain dietary fibre and associated phytochemicals, which may assist with disease prevention. Evidence is now building for the importance of including wholegrain foods regularl"y in a cancer prevention diet."

also:
http://www.abc.net.au/hobart/stories/s853652.htm

"the best way to judge the worth of a breakfast cereal is to read the small print on the side of the packet. “The small print is accurate,” Cath told Ric.

The Australian Consumers’ Association study found 35% of breakfast cereals provide the consumer with a healthy meal, 25% are O.K and the rest were extremely doubtful.

Of the top ten selling breakfast cereal in Australia only six get the thumbs up. When it comes to breakfast cereal designed for children, only one in the top twenty gets the thumbs up."

you can even make a career out of cereal See:
http://www.agric.usyd.edu.au/courses...20v_cereal.htm
What do Cereal Scientists do?

Cereals are members of the grass family (Gramineae) and constitute the major source of protein and carbohydrate for much of the world's population. Examples of cereals are wheat, corn, rice, barley, sorghum, rye and triticale. Each of these cereals have varying quantities of the three most important constituents of human and animal nutrition namely protein, carbohydrate and lipid. The exploitation of cereals and their manufacture into edible products for humans and farmed animals is usually a direct consequence of fundamental studies carried out by cereal chemists.'

You can even help dictators like Sadam buy more guns (While your troops/navy are busy on the other side of Iraq guarding against gun-running)
See:AWB (Australian Wheat Board)
http://news.google.com.au/news?q=AWB...=news&ct=title

Useful stuff cereal
Michael

[Pyrotex]

Originally Posted by Michaelangelica

...Cereals are members of the grass family (Gramineae) and constitute the major source of protein and carbohydrate for much of the world's population. ...

There are "cereals", the plants mentioned above, and then there are "cereals", the processed foods we typically identify with breakfast. It was not always thus in America.

There was no such thing as a "breakfast cereal" in America before about 1875. Breakfasts were typically heavy meals, not unlike lunch and dinner. My grandparents talked of eating leftovers from the previous evening meal--cold fried chicken, cold beef and ham, desserts. Morning indigestion was a big problem in the late nineteenth century. Cooked cereals, like oatmeal mush, grew more popular if for no other reason than people just felt better in the morning after oatmeal than they did after eating sausage and kidneys.

But cooking anything in the morning was expensive in time and fuel. The race was on for an uncooked breakfast food. By the 1880s and 1890s hundreds of cereal based breakfast foods suddenly appeared. The first were variants on puffed wheat and puffed rice, which were heated under pressure--the pressure was suddenly released, simultaneously cooking, drying and puffing the grains. A mister Kellog in Battlecreek Michigan, found a way to turn a slurry of wet cornmeal into flakes, and the revolution was underway.

[Michaelangelica]

In Asia breakfast is noodle soup.
( break fast was literally that, you couldn't break your fast until you had received holly communion at mass. You don't want God sitting on a pile of cereal do you? So after mass you broke your fast from the previous night- in the days when people went to mass every day)

"The first known appearance of noodles was about 4,000 years, in north-western China, on a terrace on the upper reaches of the Yellow River. The archaeologists call it the Lajia Neolithic settlement. The evidence seems to show that a huge earthquake, and later catastrophic flooding, destroyed the settlement. In the debris, the archaeologists found a prehistoric bowl of noodles, upside down, under three metres of clay sediment. The noodles were sitting in the small air gap on top of the clay that almost filled the upside down bowl. Dr. Houyuan Lu, from the Institute of Geology and Geophysics at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, writes, "The noodles were thin (about 0.3 cm diameter), delicate, more than 50 cm in length and yellow in colour. They resemble the La-Mian noodle, a traditional noodle that is made by repeatedly pulling and stretching the dough by hand."

His team found that the noodles were made from the cereal, millet."
Source:-
http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/moments/s1631654.htm
from the same www
Does anyone know anything about this which i found facinating:-

. First, they analysed the starch granules, and found they were the size and shape of starch granules found in modern millet. Second, they found that tiny phytoliths in the noodles also pointed the finger at millet. "Phytoliths" are tiny glasses that some plants make, and that are unique to each plant. The glass is not optical-grade transparent glass, but it is glass. Perhaps it's not so surprising - rocks are made from silica, glass is made from silica, rocks and plants exist together in the soil, and some plants have worked out how to make glass, without resorting to the high temperatures that we humans have to use. Indeed, the stinging tips of stinging nettle are tiny pointy sticks of glass.

V. clever things plants

[anglepose]

Cereals 'the plant' Are grasses that have been slectivly bread for us to eat such as weat ,oat and rice. cerals for breakfast however are loads of thing mixed together. The strange alphebet multi colored cereal im not sure if theres is any cereal in it atall. i eat good and healthy musli and if im right cranberry juice is good for cancer becuase i love the stuff and get through two cups of it a day
I feel sorry for those mexicans who eat refried beans every day

[Michaelangelica]

I notice an increasing variety of wheat free breads in my supermarket.
Is this because of increasing intolerance to wheat?

Genetically, it now has heaps more genes than any other food crop I know.
Is it the only plant with three sets of genes?

"Among agricultural crops, common bread or hexaploid wheat (Triticum aestivum L., 2n = 6x = 42, AABBDD) has the largest genome at 16,000 Mb, ~8-fold larger than that of maize and 40-fold larger than that of rice (ARUMUGANATHAN and EARLE 1991)."

i was advised to go off whet to treat chronic diarrhoea many years ago by an orthomolecular specialist. It worked. he said Asians starting on a wester (beef +Wheat =hamburger) diet are showing more and more auto-immune disorders like SLE. he said this was because Asians did not have the enzymes necessary to digest beef and wheat proteins.

i since met a lot of people who are gluten intolerant. A problem common among my Irish ancestors and some Jewish people.
Recently I had a stomach bio-opsy ( for an unrelated problem) and the gasto. said I was not a coeliac (someone intolerant to the gluten in wheat.) I said how could he know as i did not eat wheat. He just mumbled. As I understand it the little villi (hairy bits in the stomach) all lie down when in contact with whet and this can be seen in a bi-opsy. you therefore need therefore to be eating whet surely?!

Genetically wheat is a relative newcomer especially the cultivated version (10,000 years of cultivation); while rice has been around for 45mil years

This is agood site that discusses whet genetics
http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/168/2/1087

Some quotes:-
the workshop, various approaches to sequencing the wheat genome were considered. These included selected BAC/CBCS, MF, HC, and/or a combination approach. The discussion was focused on the relative efficiency of each strategy in relation to cost and division of labor among the international participants.

The WGS approach was considered too difficult mainly because of the large size and highly repetitive nature of the wheat genome.
Grasses originated 55–75 million years ago and now dominate 20% of the land area. The three major cereals (rice, maize, and wheat), which diverged from a common ancestor ~40 million years ago, provide most of the food for humans.

Humans and wheat share a remarkably parallel evolutionary history. About 3 million years ago, humans diverged from apes, and diploid A, B, and D progenitor species of wheat diverged from a common ancestor.
About 200,000 years ago, at nearly the same time that modern humans originated in Africa, two diploid grass species hybridized to form polyploid wheat in the Middle East. Humans domesticated wheat ~15,000 years ago in the fertile crescent (modern-day Iraq and parts of Turkey, Syria, and Iran), marking the dawn of modern civilization. Comparative genetic and genomic studies during the last 10 years revealed extensive synteny among major cereals, and the concept of grasses as a single genetic system emerged.

The genome sequence of rice (420 Mb) is nearly completed, and it will serve as the anchor genome to promote gene discovery in all cereals.
However, recent data suggest that most domestication-driven, agronomic, and end-use traits, as well as those genes involved in landmark speciation events such as polyploidy, are crop and species specific.

The emerging view is that DNA sequence information of all key species is essential for investigating grasses as a single genetic system. Maize (2500 Mb) genome sequencing is underway, and wheat (16,000 Mb) genome sequencing was discussed at the workshop. Figure courtesy of W. J. Raupp, based on discussions with P. F. Byrne, Colorado State University, Fort Collins, with additional data from HUANG et al. (2002).