I have a diet that I'm roughly following (I think it's the DASH diet or something)... and I don't really watch the calories but watching the salt has the side effect of lowering my calorie intake.
Also, don't believe everything you read on the web. The world is full of more "authoritative" pseudo-science than it ever was.
I follow scientific journals and university studies and question everything, but I know how to verify what I hear on the web.
-=History Lesson=-The reason why grains are at the bottom of the food pyramid is because the grain industry has the most lobbyists. The food pyramid is all about money. We've only been eating grains for a little over 30,000 years, whereas we've been eating fruits, berries, veggies, and meat for millions of years. -=History lesson End=-
If you want a more reliable source for the calorie quality argument, an
article from the study's university should prove more enticing to skeptics.
Now, for grains there are a few things that I need to cite to give you the full story... First up is a news article on
the healthiness of grains. I hate citing news articles, but Huffington has pretty reliable articles. In fact, the author touched on some topics I forgot about.
If you want to get into the raw science of it, this
ncbi article will touch on all the same topics.
This
next article... It's accurate, but I hate having to cite stuff like this with a passion. There's a high risk of an author like himself exaggerating to promote his own agenda. It's biased, but not too extreme. This is all about phytic acid(an anti-nutrient) in nuts, but it has a handy chart of various foods and their levels of phytic acid. There are some interesting things that make the list, though anything clocking in at under 300mg/100g I wouldn't be concerned about.
There's really only one way to make grains worth eating imho, and that's through extensive genetic modification. The problem, then, though, is that we've stripped these plants of their defenses.
