Tuesday, January 15th, 2019
Stephan: On my island it is quite fashionable, particularly amongst women, to drop all gluten foods from their diet. It's quite a thing here, and perhaps where you live as well. Almost all of this is nonsense pedaled to them often by testing them using applied kinesiology, a muscle testing technique which I investigated in-depth and found to be also mostly nonsense. (See:
A Double-Blind, Randomized Study to Assess the Validity of Applied Kinesiology (AK) as a Diagnostic Tool and as a Nonlocal Proximity Effect)
Here is a very clear statement of the reality: "A
recently published study in the journal
Digestion found that 86 percent of individuals who
believed they were gluten sensitive could tolerate it. Individuals with celiac disease, a hereditary autoimmune condition that affects about 3 million Americans, or roughly 1 percent of the population, must avoid gluten."
What almost all of the people I know who go on gluten-free diets don't understand is that as a result of dropping gluten they are also eating a diet woefully inadequate in fiber, and that is a very big issue.
So let's look at some actual research on this issue. In the strongest terms I can, I counsel you to adjust your diet accordingly.
Credit: Getty
If I offered you a superfood that would make you live longer, would you be interested?
Naturally it reduces the chances of debilitating heart attacks and strokes as well as life-long diseases such as type-2 diabetes.
And it helps keep your weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels down.
I should mention it’s cheap and widely available in the supermarket.
What is it?
Fibre – it’s not the sexiest thing in the world but a major study has been investigating how much fibre we really need to be eating and found there are huge health benefits.
“The evidence is now overwhelming and this is a game-changer that people have to start doing something about it,” one of the researchers, Prof John Cummings, tells BBC News.
It’s well known for stopping constipation – but its health benefits are much broader than that.
How much fibre do we need?
The researchers, at the University of Otago, in New Zealand, and the University of Dundee say people should be eating a minimum of 25g of fibre per day.
But they call this an “adequate” amount for […]
Excellent comments on this article Stephan! Did you know that like celiac disease, where 1% of the population is intolerant, so it is with gluten intolerance, i.e., 1% of the population.
The corporations have been milking yet another urban myth related to food, with scant evidence to the contrary.
Keep up the good work, buddy. hahaha
Thank you, John, and I agree most of this is the result of corporate greed.
This article makes two claims for which there is evidence to the contrary. The first is that applied kinesiology is “mostly nonsense.” The basis for the use of applied kinesiology as a diagnostic tool comes from research at Johns Hopkins University, which was then developed for clinical use by Dr. George Goodheart. For a discussion of the use of applied kinesiology in diagnosis and treatment, see Robert Blaich, YOUR INNER PHARMACY.
Regarding gluten, which the author claims is an important source of fiber, the problem for many people may not be gluten intolerance itself, but rather sensitivity to the forms in which gluten enters the modern diet. For example, the wheat we eat today has been bred for higher yield and higher gluten content, it has typically been sprayed with pesticides and “hardened off” with glyphosate. This wheat is a very different food from what our ancestors ate. See Joanna Blythman, “Not Just a Fad: The Surprising, Gut-Wrenching Truth About Gluten,” THE GUARDIAN, August 7, 2018.
Sheila —
I am sorry but your comment is flawed, and I cannot let it stand lest it confuse readers. First, I have read every paper ever published about AK, including all the work of Dr. George Goodheart, and have published the research I myself carried out, which has been cited in other research papers over 150 times. I am afraid the general consensus is that the prior AK work was rather poor in terms of methodology and protocol. Read my paper — I provided the URL in my editor note — this is too complicated a subject for a comment. Second, I specifically said that the problem with dropping gluten is not the gluten so much as the loss of fiber that results for most people from adopting such a diet. I also said, as I have many times, that it is important to eat organic non-GMO food rather than processed GMO non-organic foods.