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Avoiding Gluten? This Book Could Change Your Mind

About the book:

Meal or menace? No controversy in nutrition is bigger than wheat.First Wheat Belly came along to tell us the grain was a one-way ticket to obesity, diabetes and chronic illness. Then Grain Brain chimed in by proclaiming wheat responsible for early Alzheimer’s Disease and a host of other mental disorders.  These mega-sellers paint  wheat as the new asbestos. But the story they neglect to tell is that when it is grown and processed the right way, wheat adds essential nutrients and fiber to our diet. The right way includes long sourdough fermentation, which breaks down the gluten molecules that give some of us problems.

When it is grown and processed the right way, wheat adds essential nutrients and fiber to our diet.

Grain of Truth explains how and why that happens, and a whole lot more. By taking us through the botany of the wheat plant we’ve hijacked for our own use and simplifying the science of nutrition and digestion,  Yafa shows why mass production—not wheat itself— may jeopardize our health. Refined processing converts the best part of the wheat kernel to animal feed, and sells us the least nutritious remainder. In direct contrast, Yafa takes us inside the local artisan grain baking revolution from a Woodstock-like Kneading Conference to nutrition labs to a boutique bakery and pasta maker‘s workshop in Brooklyn to present an alternative  whole-food approach that points us towards a better, richer diet.

Smoothly blending science, history, biology, economics, nutrition, Grain of Truth gives us back our daily bread.

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Credit Yael Marmar
Stephen Yafa and his wife, Bonnie Trust Dahan, with a loaf of still-warm sourdough bread

Do you have a story about wheat or gluten you'd like to share? CONTACT Stephen Yafa

Stephen Yafa lives in Mill Valley, California. He has written, produced and directed in a wide range of formats. Grain of Truth followsCotton, his first non-fiction book.

A wine producer of Pinot Noir in the Russian River region of West Sonoma, he writes on wine for the San Francisco Chronicle and  other publications. He created and edited the iPad wine magazine, Uncorked, for Nomad Publications and contributed the lead story in the recent non-fiction book, Adventures In Wine from Travelers Tales.

As a Hollywood screenwriter at MGM, Columbia, Paramount and other major studios he wrote the original screenplay, Three In The Attic, as well as movies for Michael Douglas among other actors and producers.

As a novelist he wrote Paxton Quigley's Had The Course, and as a playwright his work as been produced nationally at theaters including ACT in San Francisco, the Magic Theater, and on public television, as well as  other venues; as a journalist he has been a frequent contributor to Playboy, Rotarian and a list of magazines that includes Details, American Heritage and Rolling Stone.

He is also video producer, and was formerly executive producer and director of the Digital Story Center. A graduate of Dartmouth College, with a Master of Fine Arts from Carnegie-Mellon, he is married with three grown children.

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