Buckwheat - Beneficial Foods

Buckwheat is one of the oldest cultivated foods still eaten daily by hundreds of millions of people, and one of the most widely misunderstood. It is not wheat, and it is not a grain in the botanical sense at all — it is the triangular seed of a fast-growing flowering plant more closely related to rhubarb and sorrel than to anything in a wheat field, and it contains no gluten of any kind. What it does contain is an unusual nutrient package: a protein with all nine essential amino acids and more lysine than any true cereal, roughly 231 mg of magnesium per 100 g of dry groats, a starch that digests slowly and turns partly resistant when cooked and cooled, and a flavonoid called rutin that is almost absent from ordinary grains.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction and History
  2. A Pseudocereal, Not a Grass
  3. Nutritional Profile
  4. Complete Protein and Lysine
  5. Rutin, Quercetin and the Flavonoids
  6. Starch, Resistant Starch and Blood Sugar
  7. Naturally Gluten-Free
  8. Soba, Kasha and Traditional Dishes
  9. What the Research Shows
  10. How to Buy and Store It
  11. How to Cook It
  12. How Much to Eat
  13. Who Should Be Careful
  14. Connections
  15. References & Research
  16. Featured Videos

Introduction and History

Buckwheat is the seed of Fagopyrum esculentum, a knee-high annual with hollow reddish stems, arrow-shaped leaves and dense clusters of small white or pink flowers that bees work hard. The seed inside the tough dark hull is a pale greenish-tan pyramid four to six millimetres on a side. Hulled, it is a groat. Ground, it is buckwheat flour. Toasted, it is kasha.

The plant was domesticated in southwestern China, most likely in the mountains of Yunnan and Sichuan where its wild relatives still grow. Archaeobotanical remains and pollen cores place cultivation there at least 4,000 to 5,000 years ago. From China it moved outward along mountain corridors rather than river valleys, because that is where it thrives — buckwheat is a crop of thin soil, short seasons and high altitude. It reached Tibet, Nepal and Bhutan, where it is still a staple above the wheat line, and Japan and Korea, where the earliest records date to roughly the eighth century.

Buckwheat arrived in Europe late, travelling west across the steppe with Turkic and Mongol traders and reaching Russia, Poland and the German lands by the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The English name comes from Dutch boekweit, "beech wheat", because the seed looks like a miniature beechnut; the French called it blé noir or sarrasin (Saracen), crediting it vaguely to the East.

What made buckwheat spread was reliability, not flavour. It goes from sowing to harvest in ten to twelve weeks, faster than any cereal. It crops on acid, sandy, exhausted ground where wheat fails, smothers weeds with its own fast canopy, and can be sown late as an emergency crop after a spring planting is lost to frost or flood. For centuries it stood between mountain and northern communities and hunger — the food of Brittany, of the Russian and Polish countryside, of the Japanese uplands and the Himalaya. It fed people precisely where the good grains would not grow.

Its retreat from the Western table was an accident of economics, not a verdict on the food: once synthetic nitrogen made high-yield wheat and maize cheap on marginal land, buckwheat's advantage vanished. It survived where it was cultural rather than merely economic — Japanese soba shops, Eastern European kitchens, Breton crêperies, Appalachian pancake breakfasts. Russia, China and Ukraine grow most of today's crop.

Back to Table of Contents

A Pseudocereal, Not a Grass

Every food we normally call a grain — wheat, rice, maize, oats, barley, rye, millet, sorghum — belongs to a single botanical family, the grasses (Poaceae). Buckwheat does not. It belongs to the Polygonaceae, the knotweed family, whose other edible members are rhubarb and sorrel. That one fact explains most of what is distinctive about it.

Foods like buckwheat are called pseudocereals: seeds used culinarily as grains — milled to flour, boiled to porridge, made into noodles and flatbreads — that come from broadleaf plants outside the grass family. The word describes a kitchen role, not a botanical group; amaranth belongs to the same loose category. The seeds are starchy and store well, so the culinary convergence is real, but the chemistry underneath is different.

Two consequences follow immediately; a third, its unusual amino-acid balance, has its own section below.

  1. No gluten, and no relation to gluten. Gluten is not a general term for "protein in grain". It refers to a specific family of storage proteins, the prolamins, found in wheat (gliadin), rye (secalin) and barley (hordein). Those are grass proteins, and buckwheat has essentially none of them — its storage proteins are globulins and albumins instead. Buckwheat is not processed to remove gluten and is not engineered to imitate wheat; it simply never had the protein.
  2. Flavonoids a grain does not make. The knotweed family produces rutin and related flavonol glycosides in quantity. Wheat, rice and maize essentially do not.

Two species are eaten. Common buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) is the mild, nutty one that makes up the great majority of the world crop and virtually all of what Western shops sell. Tartary buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum), sometimes sold as bitter buckwheat, is a hardier high-altitude species grown mainly in China, Bhutan, Nepal and northern India; it is markedly more bitter and dramatically higher in rutin. If a package simply says "buckwheat", it is the common species.

Back to Table of Contents

Nutritional Profile

The figures below are for 100 g of raw hulled groats, from standard food-composition data. That is a little over half a cup dry and swells to roughly three cups cooked, so read it as a description of the food's density, not a portion.

Macronutrients per 100 g, raw groats

Minerals per 100 g, raw groats

Vitamins per 100 g, raw groats

Cooked groats and flour

Boiled groats absorb a great deal of water, diluting everything roughly three-fold. Per 100 g cooked, expect approximately 92 kcal, 3.4 g protein, 0.6 g fat, 20 g carbohydrate, 2.7 g fibre and around 50 mg magnesium.

Whole-groat buckwheat flour keeps the profile of the groat almost intact: roughly 335 kcal, 12.6 g protein, 10 g fibre and about 250 mg magnesium per 100 g. Light or "white" buckwheat flour is milled from the endosperm only and drops considerably in fibre, minerals and flavonoids. Dark flour flecked with fine hull fragments is the nutritionally richer choice.

Back to Table of Contents

Complete Protein and Lysine

"Complete protein" means a food supplies all nine amino acids the body cannot manufacture — histidine, isoleucine, leucine, lysine, methionine, phenylalanine, threonine, tryptophan and valine — in amounts that are useful rather than merely detectable. Buckwheat does. That is rare among plant staples, and it is why buckwheat historically supported populations that ate very little meat.

Approximate essential amino-acid content per 100 g of raw groats:

The number to notice is lysine. As a share of total protein, buckwheat runs around 5 g of lysine per 100 g of protein; wheat protein manages roughly half that, and lysine is the single amino acid that limits the usefulness of wheat, rice and maize protein — you can eat a great deal of bread and still be short of it. The traditional pairings make sense in that light: buckwheat with a cereal, with eggs, with whole-milk yogurt or a hard cheese, with meat or fish. The Japanese soba shop serving noodles in dashi with an egg, and the Eastern European kitchen serving kasha with onions, butter, eggs and mushrooms, both arrived at a complete meal by taste alone.

The honest caveat: digestibility

Amino-acid content is not amino-acid delivery. Buckwheat's protein digestibility is moderate — reported figures generally sit in the 70–80 per cent range, below egg, dairy or meat — because of the protease inhibitors and tannins in the seed. Cooking improves matters, and sprouting or fermenting improves it further. Buckwheat is a genuinely good protein source for a starchy food, but it is a whole food, not a protein supplement.

Back to Table of Contents

Rutin, Quercetin and the Flavonoids

Buckwheat is the only staple food in ordinary Western use that supplies meaningful amounts of rutin. Rutin is a flavonol glycoside — chemically, quercetin with a sugar (rutinose) attached at the 3-position, hence its other name, quercetin-3-O-rutinoside. It was isolated from buckwheat in the 1940s and studied for decades under the old label "vitamin P", a designation long since abandoned: rutin is not a vitamin, no deficiency disease exists, and the body makes no specific demand for it.

Where rutin sits in the plant matters enormously for what reaches your plate. Concentrations run highest in the leaves, flowers and sprouts and are far lower in the seed. In common buckwheat groats the content is modest, typically a few tens of milligrams per 100 g, with dark whole-groat flour higher than light flour because the flavonoids concentrate near the seed coat. In Tartary buckwheat groats it is a different order of magnitude, with published values running into the hundreds and sometimes beyond a thousand milligrams per 100 g — tens of times the common species. That is precisely why Tartary buckwheat is grown and sold as a functional food in China and the Himalaya despite its bitterness.

Which brings up a neat piece of food chemistry. Tartary buckwheat also carries high activity of the enzyme rutinosidase, which snips the sugar off rutin to yield free quercetin the moment the flour is wetted. Free quercetin is bitter — this is the source of "bitter buckwheat" — so the traditional heat treatment that knocks the enzyme out is simultaneously a flavour decision and a decision about which flavonoid form you eat. Common buckwheat has far less of the enzyme, so its smaller rutin load stays largely intact. Quercetin is the more readily absorbed form; rutin must be deglycosylated by gut bacteria first, so a good deal of what buckwheat delivers is absorbed low in the intestine after microbial processing rather than high up.

Buckwheat's other phenolics matter too, because the seed is not a one-compound food. Quercitrin and isoquercitrin are related quercetin glycosides, prominent in Tartary buckwheat, as are the flavone glycosides vitexin and isovitexin. The seed coat carries catechin and epicatechin — the same flavan-3-ols found in tea and cocoa — along with proanthocyanidins and tannins, which is part of why dark flour is more astringent and part of why protein digestibility is moderate. The embryo concentrates fagopyritols, soluble carbohydrates unique to buckwheat and built around D-chiro-inositol; they attract research interest because D-chiro-inositol participates in insulin signalling, but the work is early and supports no clinical claim.

What rutin actually does in the body is a more modest story than the supplement aisle suggests: in laboratory work it is an antioxidant and a metal chelator and it inhibits aldose reductase, an enzyme in the polyol pathway relevant to diabetic complications. Human trials of buckwheat foods have been small and short. Buckwheat supplies a flavonoid class most starchy foods do not, as part of a whole food — a good reason to eat it, a poor reason to buy a rutin capsule.

Back to Table of Contents

Starch, Resistant Starch and Blood Sugar

About 70 per cent of dry buckwheat is starch, and how it behaves in the gut is among the more useful things about the food. Buckwheat starch is comparatively rich in amylose, the straight-chain form. Amylose-rich starches gelatinise less completely, digest more slowly, and — crucially — retrograde readily on cooling: the loosened chains re-associate into tight crystalline structures human amylase can no longer break down, and that starch passes into the colon undigested. That is resistant starch, the retrograded type being classified RS3.

The practical consequence is that buckwheat cooked and then cooled contains more resistant starch than buckwheat eaten hot. Cook a batch of groats, refrigerate it overnight and eat it as a cold salad, or reheat it gently the next day — retrograded starch is fairly heat-stable and much of it survives a modest reheat — and a greater share of the carbohydrate reaches the colon intact. Published figures vary widely with measurement method and product, so a precise number is not worth quoting, but the direction is consistent and well established. Whole intact groats also resist digestion better than flour, because the more finely a starch is ground the faster amylase gets to it. A buckwheat pancake and a bowl of whole boiled groats are not metabolically the same food.

Resistant starch matters because it behaves like fibre rather than like sugar: colonic bacteria ferment it into short-chain fatty acids, principally butyrate, the preferred fuel of the cells lining the colon. Between roughly 10 g of fibre per 100 g of dry groats and the resistant-starch fraction, buckwheat is a better prebiotic food than its calorie count suggests.

On glycaemic response, whole groats test in the low-to-moderate range on the glycaemic index, generally reported around the mid-40s to mid-50s, and buckwheat noodles test similarly. Controlled feeding work has found buckwheat products producing lower post-meal glucose and insulin responses than matched wheat-based products, attributed to the slowly digestible starch, the fibre, and possibly a flavonoid effect on carbohydrate hydrolysis. The effect is real and reproducible, but read it for what it is: buckwheat is a carbohydrate food that raises blood glucose more gently than refined starch. It is not a blood-sugar treatment, and anyone managing diabetes with medication should treat a switch to buckwheat as a dietary change that may move their numbers, and monitor accordingly.

Back to Table of Contents

Naturally Gluten-Free

Buckwheat contains no gliadin, no hordein and no secalin. It is not a grass, so the proteins that trigger coeliac disease are not part of its biology. For people with coeliac disease, dermatitis herpetiformis or non-coeliac gluten sensitivity it is one of the most substantial gluten-free staples available — porridge, pilaf, noodles, pancakes and flatbread, with far more protein, magnesium and fibre than the refined starches that dominate commercial gluten-free products. There are three genuine traps.

1. Most soba noodles are not gluten-free

Buckwheat flour has no gluten to form an elastic dough, which makes 100 per cent buckwheat noodles technically demanding to produce, so the overwhelming majority of commercial soba is blended with wheat flour, often heavily. Japanese naming conventions help once you know them: juwari soba is 100 per cent buckwheat, while hachiwari or ni-hachi indicates roughly 80 per cent buckwheat and 20 per cent wheat. Many supermarket "buckwheat noodles" are mostly wheat with enough buckwheat for colour and name. Read the ingredient list, in order, every time.

2. Cross-contamination in the supply chain

Buckwheat is frequently grown in rotation with cereals, harvested with shared equipment, and milled in facilities that also mill wheat. Product testing has repeatedly found gluten in unlabelled buckwheat products above the 20 parts-per-million threshold used for gluten-free labelling. For anyone with diagnosed coeliac disease this is not theoretical: buy buckwheat that is certified gluten-free, not merely buckwheat that is naturally gluten-free.

3. Mixed flour blends

Buckwheat flour is a common component of multi-flour baking blends, and the other components may not be gluten-free. Again, the ingredient list settles it.

Back to Table of Contents

Soba, Kasha and Traditional Dishes

Buckwheat has two great culinary traditions on opposite sides of Asia, plus regional dishes worth knowing because they are the best-tested ways of making the food taste good.

Soba — Japan

Soba are thin, square-cut, grey-brown noodles of buckwheat flour, water and usually some wheat flour, a Japanese staple of roughly four centuries' standing. Because buckwheat flour has no gluten the dough is fragile and the noodles short-lived, so a soba shop mills fine, kneads, rests, rolls and hand-cuts them the same day. They are eaten hot in a dashi-based broth, or chilled on a bamboo tray with concentrated dipping sauce, scallion and grated daikon. The cooking water, sobayu, is often drunk at the end of the meal, recovering the water-soluble rutin and B vitamins that leach out during boiling. If the nutrition matters as much as the meal, seek out juwari soba and drink the broth.

Kasha — Eastern Europe

Kasha is the buckwheat groat with its flavour transformed by dry heat. Toasting drives the Maillard reaction, turning the pale groat reddish-brown and its mild taste into something deep, nutty and slightly smoky. In Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Ashkenazi Jewish cooking it is the everyday grain dish: simmered in water or broth, finished with butter, served with slowly browned onions, mushrooms, or the pan juices from a roast. Kasha varnishkes — kasha with bow-tie pasta and onions — is the best-known Jewish-American version. It is also common as a breakfast porridge with whole milk.

Elsewhere

Back to Table of Contents

What the Research Shows

Population data and blood lipids

The most-cited human observation comes from a large cross-sectional study of the Yi people of southwestern China published in the mid-1990s, comparing groups within one ethnic population who ate different staples. Higher buckwheat intake was associated with lower total and LDL cholesterol and more favourable blood pressure. Cross-sectional data cannot establish cause, but the finding was consistent and set the direction for later work. Small controlled trials feeding buckwheat noodles, breads and Tartary buckwheat preparations have generally found modest reductions in total and LDL cholesterol against wheat-based controls; those trials are short, small and heterogeneous, so the effect size is not well pinned down. Plausible mechanisms are the soluble fibre, the resistant starch and the flavonoids. The honest summary: replacing refined-flour foods with whole buckwheat foods likely nudges cholesterol in a helpful direction, much as other whole-food carbohydrate swaps do.

Glucose, insulin and inflammatory markers

The postprandial data are the strongest part of the picture: buckwheat meals reliably produce lower glucose and insulin excursions than matched wheat meals, and whole groats do better than flour. Longer-term glycaemic-control trials in people with type 2 diabetes exist but are small and inconsistent, and the fagopyritol work remains mechanistically interesting and clinically unproven. Separately, a double-blind crossover study fed buckwheat cookies to adult volunteers and reported reductions in serum myeloperoxidase — a neutrophil enzyme used as an inflammation marker — alongside a fall in cholesterol. One small study of one product is not a demonstration that buckwheat is anti-inflammatory, but it does establish that the compounds do something measurable after being eaten as food.

Buckwheat honey

Distinct from the seed, but the one buckwheat product with a well-known clinical trial behind it: a randomised study in coughing children found buckwheat honey given before bed outperformed both dextromethorphan and no treatment for nocturnal cough and sleep quality as rated by parents. It is still sugar, and honey must never be given to infants under one year because of the risk of botulism.

What is not established

Buckwheat does not treat anything. Claims that it lowers blood pressure on its own, reverses diabetes or cures varicose veins are not supported at the level of evidence those statements imply. The defensible claim is the plain one: buckwheat is a nutrient-dense, slowly digested, gluten-free whole food and a better staple than refined starch.

Back to Table of Contents

How to Buy and Store It

The forms on the shelf

What to look for

Groats should be dry, uniform, free of dust and chaff, and should smell clean and faintly nutty. If a bag smells sharp, sour or musty, the fat has oxidised — that is rancidity, and it does not improve with cooking. Certified gluten-free labelling matters if you have coeliac disease, but a shop with quick turnover matters more than any label, because buckwheat's problem is age, not adulteration.

Storage

Buckwheat's 3.4 g of fat per 100 g is dominated by unsaturated fatty acids, which oxidise, making it noticeably less shelf-stable than rice or wheat. That is the single most common reason people decide they dislike buckwheat — they have been eating stale buckwheat.

Back to Table of Contents

How to Cook It

Buckwheat is quick to cook and even easier to ruin. Almost every complaint about it — mush, bitterness, sliminess — comes from too much water or too much time.

Whole groats, the basic method

  1. Rinse. Fifteen or twenty seconds in a fine sieve under cold water removes dust and some of the surface tannins that read as bitterness.
  2. Toast, if you want depth. Dry the groats briefly, then stir them in a dry pan over medium heat for three to five minutes until they smell nutty and darken a shade. This is the step that turns raw groats towards kasha, and it firms the outside so the grains hold their shape. Skip it for a milder dish.
  3. Use less water than you think. One part groats to one-and-three-quarter parts water by volume, plus salt — not the two-and-a-half or three parts a package sometimes suggests, which is a recipe for porridge.
  4. Simmer briefly, covered. Bring to a boil, drop to the lowest simmer, cover and leave it ten to twelve minutes. Do not stir; stirring breaks the grains and releases starch.
  5. Rest off the heat. Five to ten minutes covered, then fluff with a fork. The residual water finishes the job without further cooking.

The egg-coated method for separate grains

The traditional kasha technique, and the most reliable way to get distinct grains rather than a mass: beat one egg per cup of dry groats, stir the groats through it until coated, then dry the mixture in a hot dry pan, stirring constantly, until the coating sets and the grains separate freely. Add hot liquid and proceed as above. The egg forms a thin barrier that stops starch leaching out, and it raises the protein content of the dish.

Flour and noodles

Buckwheat flour needs no kneading and cannot be over-worked, but it also cannot stretch or trap gas, which makes it excellent for thin batters and poor for lofty loaves. For crêpes and galettes, whisk flour, water and salt smooth and rest the batter at least an hour and preferably overnight, then cook thin on a hot, lightly buttered griddle. Buckwheat flour alone gives a dense, deeply flavoured pancake; cut it with an equal weight of another flour for something lighter, and prefer sourdough or yeast leavening to baking powder. Fermentation softens the bitterness, breaks down phytic acid and improves gluten-free texture more than any additive. Cook noodles in plenty of unsalted boiling water and taste early — they go from firm to soft quickly, and 100 per cent buckwheat noodles are especially fragile. Drain and rinse under cold water immediately, even for a hot dish; that stops the cooking and washes off the surface starch that makes them clump.

What to serve with it

Buckwheat wants fat, alliums and savour. Butter, whole-milk yogurt, sour cream, a hard cheese, olive oil. Onions cooked slowly until sweet and brown. Mushrooms, eggs, and broth instead of water as the cooking liquid. Root vegetables, cabbage, kale, walnuts. Herring, salmon or sardines. Black pepper, caraway, dill, parsley. Buckwheat honey, or fruit and nuts, for the sweet direction.

Back to Table of Contents

How Much to Eat

Buckwheat is a starchy staple and belongs in the slot a whole grain would occupy — one of several rotating sources of whole-food carbohydrate, not a daily obligation.

A practical serving is 40–50 g of dry groats, a scant quarter-cup, which cooks up to roughly three-quarters of a cup to a cup. That delivers about 140–170 kcal, 5–7 g of protein, 4–5 g of fibre and 90–115 mg of magnesium. For a main-course portion, 60–80 g dry is reasonable.

A reasonable frequency is three to five servings a week, rotating with oats, barley, brown rice, beans, lentils and potatoes rather than displacing them. Variety across staples is worth more than optimising any single one: each brings a different mineral profile, fibre type and set of phytochemicals.

If you are increasing fibre, ramp up. Going from a low-fibre diet to several buckwheat servings a week is a real jump in fermentable material, and the predictable result of doing it abruptly is gas and bloating. Start with half portions, keep fluid intake up, and give the microbiome two or three weeks. That discomfort is not an intolerance.

Upper limits. There is no established toxic intake of buckwheat groats — the Himalaya and Eastern Europe have used it as the principal daily staple for centuries. Buckwheat sprouts, leaves and herb preparations are a different matter, discussed next.

Back to Table of Contents

Who Should Be Careful

Buckwheat allergy — the one serious risk

Buckwheat is a significant food allergen, and this is not a minor footnote. It is among the more important causes of IgE-mediated food allergy in Japan and Korea, where consumption is high and soba is eaten from childhood, and it is recognised across Europe and increasingly elsewhere. The principal allergens are the seed storage proteins identified as Fag e 1 (a 13S globulin), Fag e 2 (a 2S albumin) and Fag e 3.

What makes buckwheat allergy notable is its severity. Reactions are frequently systemic rather than confined to the mouth, and anaphylaxis is well documented, including fatal cases. Symptoms range from urticaria, swelling and vomiting to wheezing, throat tightness and cardiovascular collapse — which is why buckwheat is a mandatory-labelling allergen in Japan and Korea. Two exposure routes catch people off guard: buckwheat-hull pillows, which can cause respiratory sensitisation and asthma from inhaled hull dust, and occupational exposure among bakers, millers and soba makers. Cross-reactivity has been reported with latex, rice and poppy seed. If you have had any systemic reaction after eating buckwheat, do not experiment: see an allergist for specific IgE testing, and if the allergy is confirmed, avoidance must be strict and include hull-filled bedding.

Fagopyrin and photosensitivity

Buckwheat leaves, flowers and sprouts contain fagopyrin, a naphthodianthrone chemically related to hypericin in St John's wort. Fagopyrin is a photosensitiser: in livestock grazed heavily on flowering buckwheat it causes "fagopyrism", with skin inflammation and blistering on unpigmented, sun-exposed areas. Human cases are rare, but the mechanism is the same and reports exist of photosensitivity after heavy consumption of buckwheat sprouts or buckwheat herb products. Groats and flour contain essentially none of it, so ordinary buckwheat food is not a concern. The caution applies specifically to sprouts eaten in quantity and to leaf or flower preparations — which are also the products marketed for high rutin content, since the same plant parts carry both. If you eat buckwheat sprouts, treat them as a garnish rather than a salad base, and take unusual sun sensitivity seriously.

Phytic acid, tannins and protease inhibitors

Like all seeds, buckwheat contains phytic acid — roughly one per cent of the groat — which binds iron, zinc, calcium and magnesium and reduces their absorption. This is mild in a varied diet and real for someone eating almost nothing but unprocessed seeds and legumes. It is easy to reduce: soaking, sprouting and especially sourdough fermentation activate phytase and break phytate down, and pairing buckwheat with vitamin C, meat, fish or eggs improves iron absorption from the same meal. Separately, the seed coat's tannins and the seed's trypsin inhibitors reduce protein digestibility and account for part of buckwheat's astringency; cooking inactivates most of the protease inhibitors, which is why raw buckwheat flour is a bad idea and why every traditional preparation involves heat.

Kidney disease

Buckwheat is high in both potassium (about 460 mg per 100 g dry) and phosphorus (about 347 mg per 100 g dry). Anyone with chronic kidney disease on a potassium- or phosphorus-restricted diet needs to count it, and should work the portion out with their renal dietitian rather than treating "whole food" as a free pass.

Medication interactions

There is no well-documented interaction between buckwheat as food and any medication, but three points deserve mention. Buckwheat's fibre and resistant starch can slow the absorption of medicines taken at the same time — a general property of high-fibre meals; if a drug requires an empty stomach, respect that. High-dose supplemental rutin and quercetin have theoretical antiplatelet activity and are flagged as a caution alongside anticoagulants such as warfarin; food amounts are not the same exposure, but anyone on an anticoagulant who takes flavonoid supplements should tell their prescriber. And because buckwheat meals blunt post-meal glucose relative to refined starch, someone on insulin or a sulfonylurea who switches staples may need doses reviewed — a good problem to have, but one to monitor rather than discover.

Infants and young children

Buckwheat is a suitable early food in principle: gluten-free, mineral-dense and easy to cook soft. Given its allergenic potential, introduce it as a single new food in a small amount and watch, following your paediatrician's guidance. Buckwheat honey, like all honey, must not be given to children under one year.

Back to Table of Contents

Connections

Back to Table of Contents

References & Research

  1. He J, Klag MJ, Whelton PK, Mo JP, Chen JY, Qian MC, Mo PS, He GQ. Oats and buckwheat intakes and cardiovascular disease risk factors in an ethnic minority of China. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 1995. Search PubMed
  2. Giménez-Bastida JA, Zieliński H. Buckwheat as a Functional Food and Its Effects on Health. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2015. Search PubMed
  3. Zhu F. Chemical composition and health effects of Tartary buckwheat. Food Chemistry, 2016. Search PubMed
  4. Fabjan N, Rode J, Košir IJ, Wang Z, Zhang Z, Kreft I. Tartary buckwheat (Fagopyrum tataricum Gaertn.) as a source of dietary rutin and quercitrin. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2003. Search PubMed
  5. Skrabanja V, Liljeberg Elmståhl HGM, Kreft I, Björck IME. Nutritional properties of starch in buckwheat products: studies in vitro and in vivo. Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, 2001. Search PubMed
  6. Wieslander G, Fabjan N, Vogrinčič M, Kreft I, Vombergar B, Norbäck D. Eating buckwheat cookies is associated with the reduction in serum levels of myeloperoxidase and cholesterol: a double blind crossover study in day-care centre staffs. Tohoku Journal of Experimental Medicine, 2011. Search PubMed
  7. Sohn MH, Lee SY, Kim KE. Prediction of buckwheat allergy using specific IgE concentrations in children. Allergy, 2003. Search PubMed
  8. Paul IM, Beiler J, McMonagle A, Shaffer ML, Duda L, Berlin CM. Effect of honey, dextromethorphan, and no treatment on nocturnal cough and sleep quality for coughing children and their parents. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 2007. Search PubMed

Back to Table of Contents