Stephan: I must know a dozen women whose diet is guided by their gluten issues. It is impossible on my island, or at least in the circle of people we know, to give a dinner party without taking gluten into consideration.
For more than half a century I have been actively researching, writing research papers and articles about, and practicing a lifestyle based on holistic healthcare, eating and exercise. I know that there are things dismissed by mainstream allopathic medicine, such as homeopathy, that can in fact be very effective. Gluten, like the Atkins diet, however, is something quite different. There is no point in these friends that the research data strongly suggests that most of this gluten obsession is nonsense. It just makes them cranky and one has to listen to their gluten stories.
There is an issue here, but gluten is not it. This article gives an excellent assessment of reality.
Credit: Bruno Zocca
As many as one in three Americans tries to avoid gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley and rye. Gluten-free menus, gluten-free labels and gluten-free guests at summer dinners have proliferated.
Some of the anti-glutenists argue that we haven’t eaten wheat for long enough to adapt to it as a species. Agriculture began just 12,000 years ago, not enough time for our bodies, which evolved over millions of years, primarily in Africa, to adjust. According to this theory, we’re intrinsically hunter-gatherers, not bread-eaters. If exposed to gluten, some of us will develop celiac disease or gluten intolerance, or we’ll simply feel lousy.
Most of these assertions, however, are contradicted by significant evidence, and distract us from our actual problem: an immune system that has become overly sensitive.
Wheat was first domesticated in southeastern Anatolia perhaps 11,000 years ago. (An archaeological site in Israel, called Ohalo II, indicates that people have eaten wild grains, like barley and wheat, for much […]
It couldn’t possibly be all the herbicides and pesticides that are saturating our grain crops. And of course, there’s not letting the wheat ripen as well as the effect of monoculture. We need variety of grain crops, let ripen in the sun and no chemicals. That is what people ate a long time ago before many of these ailments arose and increased in number.