You hear it, you know it, we need to be eating WHOLE grain. Ok, so, what does that mean? That means that “wheat flour”, “enriched wheat flour”, “multi-grain”, “100% wheat”, and anything other than WHOLE is not whole grain.
The whole grain is the bran; the outside of the grain where the fiber is, the endosperm; which is the starchy middle part of the grain, and the germ; the little “seed” part in the middle where the vitamins, minerals and some fat are.
I think it is easy to think of a whole “grain” of corn than wheat because most of us have seen a whole kernel of corn, but not all of us have seen wheat. So think of a kernel of corn (ya have to think of one because my attempts of taking pictures of them did not result in something “postable”), you have the outside which is the bright yellow, then the inside which is kind of whitish and liquid starchy, then you have that little bright yellow “seed”. That is the whole grain. So corn—including popcorn is a whole grain.
Items made with “wheat flour” are not. Even though it is wheat it not a whole grain, is has to say “whole” grain wheat flour or “whole” wheat flour. Multi-grain CAN be whole grain, but it would have to say whole grain. Otherwise it could be a bunch of grains that aren’t whole so you are not getting the benefits of the entire grain.
My bread, has whole grain flour (and bulgur wheat, which the MyPyramid.gov shows as a whole grain, but wiki says traditionally it is “de-branned”) as you can see:
My cereal has whole grain.
My crackers do not have whole grain, it just says wheat flour, which means they are made from some form of wheat as opposed to corn or rice . . . but it does not say “whole” so it is not whole wheat.
I think that products can be misleading, so if you are interested in getting whole grain read the list of ingredients not just the package that might say, “100% Wheat” or “10 Grain”. The ingredients has to list the flour used as whole grain.
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