Gluten Free Eating

[LiquidTurbo]

Gluten free is the latest fad these days. What are your people's thoughts on it?

Wheat has been getting a lot of bad press lately.

For example.

Why you should probably stop eating wheat


Thoughts?

[SkinnyPupp]

I think most people would benefit from lowering it, since it is inflammatory by nature. The only people who need to completely eliminate it are those with celiac disease, where the inflammation can cause major issues.

For myself I don't think I have the disease, but I know how I feel after eating wheat products (bread, pasta especially) so I severely limit them for that.

Most people just follow the trends though, and by following this one they are going to be better off

This doesn't address the issue with modern wheat however, something some people say is very bad for you... Havent looked into that much myself, but if you google 'dwarf wheat' you might find some info. Just be wary of sources as usual

[dinosaur]

Think think one of the main benefits to this fade is the sudden abundance of "gluten free" food products and alternative for people with celiac disease.

To have food allergies must be one of the most frustrating things and to have more variety now, must be pretty damn awesome.

For the most part....I think it is a fad. Yes, I think modern diets are WAY TOO heavy in wheat products so it certainly wouldn't be bad to reduce the intake. Serving size is the key...

food_guide_bar_big_jpeg.jpg

cfg3.jpg

[gars]

my GF eats gluten free. She isn't Celiac - but she gets pretty bad stomach aches after eating gluten. It's surprisingly hard on a western diet to completely cut out gluten.

We found some gluten free Soy Sauce, some gluten free Oyster Sauce (yep, both those are normally made with wheat!)

But on an Asian diet or Mexican food - it's not as bad. Lots of things are rice or corn based.

[dinosaur]

Originally Posted by gars

But on an Asian diet or Mexican food - it's not as bad. Lots of things are rice or corn based.

Its a little the same for vegetarians, vegan, and pescatarians. A LOT more options within an Asian, Mexican, or Indian based diet...

[westopher]

It comes down to regional availability before the world was so connected, and genetic traits passed down. Canada and countries with similar climates/landscapes are rich in wheat, so people with that sort of background will have inherited traits to be able to process wheat/gluten better. I don't understand exiling items from your diet that aren't bad for you. The amount of people that self diagnose themselves as celiacs because they had the shits after eating pasta is hilarious. Yeah, I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact you just wolfed down 2.5 lbs of lasagna. People are such hypochondriacs nowadays. People need to put down the books, concentrate on eating fresh, minimally processed food, and they will better understand what is best for their body. I bet if some of these so called celiacs had a loaf of bread or fresh pasta from unbleached flour their stomach problems would cease as fast as cutting out gluten entirely.

[dinosaur]

Originally Posted by westopher

The amount of people that self diagnose themselves as celiacs because they had the shits after eating pasta is hilarious. Yeah, I'm sure it had nothing to do with the fact you just wolfed down 2.5 lbs of lasagna. People are such hypochondriacs nowadays.

[bcrdukes]

Gluten free diets are SO mainstream.

#Hipster

[wingies]

seems like another fad, like how everyone is jumping on the paleo diet LOL

everything in moderation and trying to minimize the intake of processed foods is best

[dinosaur]

Originally Posted by wingies

seems like another fad, like how everyone is jumping on the paleo diet LOL

hahahaha, my fb news feed has been lighting up the "paleo" diet shit in the last month....I find it amusing.

If people only knew what they true paleolithic diet was, they wouldn't go near the shit, LOL.

[SkinnyPupp]

The term paleo is misleading. The idea isn't to eat like we did in the Paleolithic era, but rather to eat the way our bodies were originally 'designed'. the diet itself is usually really good, especially for active people. Lots of good animal fat, protein, and veggies... Pretty much the way were meant to eat.

Physically, we haven't changed since then, but our diet sure did once civilization began. However you can still see 'true paleo' style eating when you go out to the isolated tribes around the world. This was one of the greatest things about Les Stroud's "Beyond Survival" series. These are people who are true hunter/gatherers, not following some whacky trend. And what do they eat? Meat, meat, more meat (especially the fat) along with whatever carbohydrates they can dig out of the ground (usually tubers of some sort). For sugary treats, they find bee hives and eat fruit when available. It's interesting to see how they react to eating pure sugar - it's really like a drug in some ways.

[SkinnyPupp]

What I find funny is when junk food is labeled gluten free, for things that never had gluten in it in the first place. Gluten free Rice Krispies, etc

Or when someone posts all these "healthy" gluten free cooking photos like pasta, cakes, and all sorts of crap. Bonus if its vegetarian and triple mega bonus if its ORGANIC

[LiquidTurbo]

Paleo diet makes a lot of sense.

The human body is an animal. You eat given the natural resources available..

[dinosaur]

Originally Posted by SkinnyPupp

The term paleo is misleading. The idea isn't to eat like we did in the Paleolithic era, but rather to eat the way our bodies were originally 'designed'.

From the internet bible:

"The paleolithic diet (abbreviated paleo diet or paleodiet), also popularly referred to as the caveman diet, Stone Age diet and hunter-gatherer diet, is a modern nutritional plan based on the presumed ancient diet of wild plants and animals that various hominid species habitually consumed during the Paleolithic era—a period of about 2.5 million years which ended around 10,000 years ago with the development of agriculture and grain-based diets. In common usage, such terms as "paleolithic diet" also refer to the actual ancestral human diet.[1][2]
Centered on commonly available modern foods, the "contemporary" Paleolithic diet consists mainly of fish, grass-fed pasture raised meats, eggs, vegetables, fruit, fungi, roots, and nuts, and excludes grains, legumes, dairy products, refined salt, refined sugar, and processed oils"

-Paleo diet as described by wiki

What diet our bodies are designed to eat:

chart.jpg

Also, between 2.5 million and 10,000 years ago, our bodies were built different...and were specifically built to sustain a hunter-gatherer nomadic lifestyle. To adopt a diet like this for a sedentary agricultural-based doesn't make sense to me.

However, any diet that encourages a healthy diet based fruits, veggies, unprocessed foods, etc. is good.

[SkinnyPupp]

OK here comes the ignorant vegetarian propaganda.. really don't want to get into it here.

[MindBomber]

I don't understand the animosity some people have towards vegetarianism.

Nothing personal, Skinny.

[dinosaur]

Woah man, its not ignorant veg propaganda.

My intentions are not to incite a debate over which is better, I was simply running with what you said about the paleo diet apparently being about what are bodies are meant to eat.

If people want to eat like a cave man, all I am saying is that the should probably live like one as well. Adopting a specific diet based on a lifestyle that few, if any, live is a little ridiculous, imo. I have studied dozens of mandibles where the tooth enamel was so worn that no buckles were present and the nerves were all exposed....all this from eating a paleolithic diet. People want to live and act like cave men, let them do it...have fun with the consequences, because its not going to be a long life.

I am not here to argue against meat eaters....eat all the meat you want...doesn't bother me. The only thing that bothers me is when people adopt these fad diets. If people are concerned about the food they are consuming, the only "diet" people should be on is that Canadian Food Guide diet. End of story.

[SkinnyPupp]

Originally Posted by MindBomber

I don't understand the animosity some people have towards vegetarianism.

Nothing personal, Skinny.

I have nothing against vegetarians at all. Do whatever you want with your life, it's great. But when someone puts up arguments supporting and promoting their personal views, I am going to retort. I have animosity towards bullshit of all kinds, most people are aware of that by now

Bullshit "facts" like the graph dino posted.. it is complete and utter bullshit, with hand picked "facts" to support one side of an argument. It's the same thing they ALWAYS do, bringing up colon length, teeth shape, etc, with some stats taken from some animals, other stats taken from others, all designed to make humans look like herbivores.

It's pretty much the same type of argument you see from people who don't believe in evolution or climate change. I have nothing against those people either, but their claims are still bullshit.

BTW if you really want to know where humans evolved from, it does you no good to compare them to random animals. Comparing humans to sharks or bears or dogs or even apes is pointless. Even comparing some animals within the same species will give you the same kind of argument, if you want. What you have to do is look at archaeological and anthropological evidence. Follow the line of where we came from. Nevermind cows and tigers and monkeys. And all that evidence points to us being meat eaters. Just like all the important evidence points to evolution and climate change. Yes, anyone can take certain "facts" to make an argument against any theory, but it's still bullshit.

So again, I have nothing against someone who doesn't want to eat meat. Plenty of meat eaters don't eat like humans should either. It's all personal choice. If you love animals so much that you can't stand the idea of them dying for your benefit, I get it.. I don't agree with it, but I get it. With modern knowledge and inventions you can now make adjustments to make vegetarianism work for you. Anyone with the same ideals who lived anywhere from the paleo era all the way up until modern history would not have lived very long or have been of much use to themselves or others though... hell, go survive in the wilderness for a while as a vegetarian and see how that goes...

[dinosaur]

You and I will just need to disagree with this.

But don't think I am dumb and naive to archaic vs modern diets and what the archaeological record indicates. I am actually well versed in the subject.

However, lets just leave it at that....my intentions were not to hijack this thread and clearly my posts have been mis-interpreted.

[SkinnyPupp]

Just don't post anymore idiotic charts like that, and we'll be cool forever

[dinosaur]

158 - (How David Could Write 42 Hours A Week) - Stupid Charts.jpg

Spoiler!

stop telling me what to do

[nabs]

I eat everything!

However...

A few friends I know have celiac disease and have had it diagnosed since they were very young, like elementary school age, and from talking to them I learned that celiac disease is a degenerative disease, it doesn't affect you right away as some people claim now that they got the shits from eating pasta a few hours later, it affects you years later if you continue to eat gluten.

Even though it's a current fad, I'm really glad about the sudden surge of gluten free products in the gluten/wheat free isles at the supermarkets. Gives my friends so many more choices that they did not have before. For the longest time one of my friends had to travel 30km to a specialty bakery to pick up gluten free produce and now she can just go to the safeway down the street. Since it was considered specialty before it way much more expensive as well, but now that it's a "thing" prices have gone down for these products because of the high demand for them.

[!LittleDragon]

Taken from my favourite podcast.

Gluten Free Diets

Today we're going to point the skeptical eye at the promoters of gluten free diets. Gluten comes from wheat and at some level, just about any commercially available food either contains wheat or has trace contamination from wheat, so a gluten free diet is much easier said than done. It's become one of the new fads in health food stores, and some claim that such a diet can treat autism or obesity or any of a wide variety of conditions. Is gluten really something that would be good for most people to avoid? What exactly is it, what's it used for, and how does it affect our bodies?

The history of human culture is closely tied to the history of bread. Bread was one of our earliest portable foods, which made it possible to take long journeys. Its carbohydrate content made it a high energy food, and combined with its light weight, bread was about the best food you could have with you. Bread made it possible for humans to migrate, for armies to march, and for history to be made.

The earliest breads made from crushed corn or plant roots were poor in quality; they were like crumbling wafers that were hard to carry or preserve. Paradoxically, it was the development of agriculture that both kept people in place and allowed them to move. Wheats and other grains began to be used for bread; and as it turned out, wheats and a few related cereals like rye and barley contain a protein called gluten. Gluten is a long, tough molecule, and it's what gives modern bread dough its sponginess and elasticity. Bread baked from wheat flour resulted in loaves that didn't fall apart, and could be transported great distances. Gluten built the bread that built the world.

And since then, gluten has been used in a good many other foods as well. It's handy as a protein supplement, and as an all-natural way to add elasticity to foods. Such products as ketchup and ice cream are commonly thickened with gluten. Some pet foods use gluten as a way to boost the protein content without adding meat. Almost all imitation meats and cheeses prized by vegetarians are based on wheat gluten. And gluten is not just limited to food. Its long, tough molecules make it a key ingredient in some new bio-plastic materials as an alternative to petrochemicals. Gluten is even commonly used in cosmetics such as lipstick to help firm it up.

But there's been a growing trend in recent years to view gluten in a negative light. It is true that a small number of people are born with gluten sensitivities that reduce their ability to tolerate it to varying degrees. Something of a non-sequitur line of reasoning has followed, that if some people can't tolerate it, it therefore must be generally bad for everyone. Gluten's increasingly ubiquitous application in a growing number of food products has triggered suspicion of the food industry's motives. As a result, some promoters of fad diets and various health schemes are now advocating gluten free diets.

Gluten free diets actually are necessary for some people, and advisable for others. Without going into too much detail, the gluten protein consists of two other proteins, a prolamin and a glutelin. The principal prolamins and glutelins in wheat are gliadin and glutenin. Generally, when we discuss gluten sensitivities, gliadin and glutenin are the specific culprits. So let's take a quick look at the three basic types of gluten sensitivity. These are all legitimate medical conditions. They're quite rare, but they are real and patients need to be aware.

The first is celiac disease (CD), or gluten-sensitive enteropathy. This is an autoimmune disease of the small intestine that occurs in people with a genetic predisposition. It's not caused by gluten and you can't develop it by eating gluten, but if you're one of the unlucky few born with the gene, and you develop CD (which not everyone does), eating gluten will cause an adverse reaction. The immune system inside the bowel tissue improperly reacts to the gliadin protein, which causes inflammation of the bowel tissue, and interferes with your body's ability to absorb nutrients from food. There's no cure for CD, and the only way to live with it is to adopt a gluten free diet for the rest of your life. Roughly one tenth of one percent of Americans have this (1 in 1,000), give or take; the number is not well known. [Addendum: The number may be as high as 8 in 1,000. - BD]

A wheat allergy is very different, and can be harder to track down since there are many different components of wheats and other grains that it's possible to be allergic to. A wheat allergy is not a single condition; it is any of a great number of possible allergies. The symptoms are similar to what we expect from most allergies: hay fever type symptoms, hives, asthma, and swelling. More serious effects in the worst cases can include anaphylaxis, palpitations, swollen throat, diarrhea, even arthritis. Unlike CD patients, sufferers of wheat allergies need not necessarily avoid all wheat products. The allergy is usually pretty specific and only some foods may need to be avoided. Standard allergy treatment with any of a variety of drugs such as histamine blockers or leukotriene antagonists may prove effective enough to allow the patient to live with a normal diet. You need not eat wheat to have an allergic reaction, many workers who contact wheat can experience allergies as well. It's very difficult to attach a number to how many people have some level of allergy to some type of wheat related protein, but it's probably somewhere in the single digit percentage points.

There's also a third type of gluten sensitivity, and that's gluten sensitive idiopathic neuropathy. Idiopathic means the exact cause is not known, and a neuropathy is a disease of the nerves. Symptoms can include numbness or tingling in the extremities, or problems with muscular coordination often evidenced when walking, or even spasticity resembling epilepsy. Diagnosing this neuropathy has been really problematic. First, a common blood test for anti-gliadin antibodies frequently produces false positives, since many people have this antibody. And sometimes, sufferers may actually have a subclinical celiac disease instead. (Subclinical means it doesn't yet show up on tests or symptomatically.) Good numbers are not known on how many people may have a gluten sensitivity neuropathy, but it's probably in the range of a small fraction of 1%.

Yet those whose business is the sale of gluten free products would often have us believe that many more of us should buy them. GlutenFree.com and GlutenFreeMall.com claim their products help people with autism or ADHD, which is completely untrue according to all the science we have. The autism claim in particular is broadly repeated across the autism activist community. The treatment of autism with a gluten free diet has been studied a number of times with varying results, but so far no well designed studies have shown any plausible benefit. A 2006 double blinded study published in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders tested children with and without autism, on gluten-free and placebo controlled diets, and found no significant differences in any group.

Do an internet search for "gluten free" and you'll find the term being misused by sellers of organic foods and other products, even vegan products and things sold as "cruelty free". Gluten is a purely vegetable, vegan substance that is, in every way, organic and all natural. So in many of these cases, the marketing boast "gluten free" exactly contradicts the vendor's claim of being vegan friendly. If you're a vegan, products containing gluten should be at the top of your list. It's an all-natural wheat protein.

Naturopaths routinely list gluten as a potential cause of disease in general. This is a medically bizarre claim. Proteins are essential for nutrition, and there is no evidence that incidence of disease increased worldwide once wheat grain became a staple. It's true that bread itself is a rich source of carbohydrates, which are not essential and can be safely minimized in the diet, but this is true of gluten-free breads as well. By no logic should the strategy of avoiding carbohydrates be misconstrued as avoiding gluten.
$2/mo $5/mo $10/mo One time

So even if gluten is not the cause of any specific disease, at least for the vast majority of us who were not born with a gluten sensitivity, might it not be wise to still leave it out of our diets anyway, better safe than sorry? Keep in mind that a gluten free diet is no trivial matter. Every meal needs to be rethought, and many ingredients you always considered basic kitchen necessities will have to be thrown out. Forget most restaurant meals. Forget most alcoholic beverages, and even many products labeled gluten-free, as many of these continue to be found to be contaminated with gluten-containing cereals.

The belief that a gluten-free diet is a good idea anyway has also been studied, and so far the only groups we've found that it may actually be somewhat helpful for are patients with Parkinson's disease, multiple sclerosis, and a few other conditions. As far as general wellness goes, there's neither a sound theory nor any evidence. The vast majority of people currently avoiding gluten for presumed health benefits are doing so for no nutritionally plausible reason. Gluten is not a fat or a carbohydrate that you might reasonably want to avoid; it's a protein that your body uses.

So think of gluten sensitivities in the same way you'd think of bee stings or peanut allergies: of great and very real concern to a small number of people, of some concern for a few more, and of no concern to the rest of us. Don't let anyone tell you that gluten is harming you in some way that's so far not supported by any science, or that you should avoid it for the purpose of general wellness. For most of us, gluten is our friend; but never forget that it is also, like many compounds, definitely harmful to some.

[H.Specter]

Originally Posted by !LittleDragon

Taken from my favourite podcast.

Gluten Free Diets

cliffs?

[SkinnyPupp]

Originally Posted by H.Specter

cliffs?

Cliffs is by the strict definition of gluten being literally harmful to your body, people without celiac disease need not be concerned.

Imo However, things like diet are not always black and white. so while it may not be harmful, removing inflammatory food from the diet benefits everyone. Every little but helps. Considering heart disease looks like it is an inflammatory issue than anything else, it is worth considering these changes.