From Mercola.com
Dangerous Grains
If you suffer from a condition such as osteoporosis, Crohn's disease, rheumatoid arthritis or depression, you're unlikely to blame your breakfast cereal. After all, intolerance of wheat, or celiac disease (CD), is a an allergic reaction to a protein called gluten, thought to affect only about one in 1,000 people.
But now two American clinicians, James Braly and Ron Hoggan, have published a book, Dangerous Grains, claiming that what was thought to be a relatively rare condition may be more widespread than was previously thought. Braly and Hoggan suggest that gluten intolerance does not just affect a few people with CD, but as much as 2-3% of the population.
They claim that gluten sensitivity (GS) is at the root of a proportion of cases of cancer, auto-immune disorders, neurological and psychiatric conditions and liver disease. The implication is that the heavily wheat-based western diet - bread, cereals, pastries, pasta - is actually making millions of people ill.
Your doctor, if asked about CD, would tell you that it involves damage to the gut wall, which makes for problems absorbing certain nutrients, such as iron, calcium and vitamin D. As a result, you are more likely to develop conditions such as osteoporosis and anemia, as well as a range of gastrointestinal problems.
Children who have it are often described as "failing to thrive". The proof that you have CD comes when gut damage shows up in a biopsy. The treatment, which has a high rate of success, is to remove gluten - found in rye and barley as well as wheat - from your diet.
But if Braly and Hoggan are right, the problem is far more widespread than the medical profession believes. Celiac disease, they suggest, should be renamed "gluten sensitivity" and, in an appendix to the book, they claim that no fewer than 192 disorders, ranging from Addison's disease and asthma to sperm abnormalities, vasculitis, rheumatoid arthritis and hyperthyroidism, are "heavily overrepresented among those who are GS".
Dangerous Grains contains more than a dozen case histories of people who have recovered from a wide variety of chronic conditions - back pain, chronic fatigue, the auto-immune disorder lupus - simply by following a gluten-free diet. Both authors claim great personal benefits from such a change. "After eliminating gluten grains," writes Hoggan, "I realized how uncomfortable and chronically ill I had been for most of my life."
If you are someone who has visited a clinical nutritionist or a naturopath, this will come as no great surprise. One of their most common suggestions is temporarily to remove wheat from the diet to see if it makes a difference. In fact, so widespread has talk of a wheat allergy become that last November the Flour Advisory Board felt impelled to issue a statement warning of the dangers of this idea. Professor Tom Sanders, head of nutrition and dietetics at King's College, London, was quoted as saying: "Unless you suffer from celiac disease, a very rare condition, cutting wheat out of your diet is extremely unwise."
Sanders certainly represents the mainstream medical view, but there is good evidence - such as the work of Dr Harold Hin, a GP from Banbury in Oxfordshire - to suggest that it may be in need of revision. Over the course of a year, Hin carried out a blood test on the first 1,000 patients who came to his surgery complaining of symptoms that might indicate CD, such as anemia or being "tired all the time". Thirty proved positive and a diagnosis of CD was confirmed by a biopsy.
This indicated that CD was showing up at a rate of three per 100 - 30 times more than expected. Significantly, all but five had no gastrointestinal symptoms. "Underdiagnosis and misdiagnosis of coeliac disease," Hin concluded in an article for the British Medical Journal in 1999, "are common in general practice and often result in protracted and unnecessary morbidity."
More recently, a large research program carried out by the University of Maryland Center for Celiac Research in Baltimore has confirmed Hin's findings. Scientists there tested 8,199 adults and children. Half the sample had various symptoms associated with CD and, of those, one in 40 of the children tested positive for CD and one in 30 of the adults.
But it wasn't just those who seemed ill who were having problems with wheat. Far more worrying was what the Maryland researchers found when they tested the other half of the sample, who were healthy volunteers, selected at random. Among kids under 16, one in 167 had CD, while the rate among the adults was even higher - one in 111.
If those proportions are true for the American population in general, this means that 1.8m adults and 300,000 children have undiagnosed CD - people who, sooner or later, are going to develop vague symptoms of feeling generally unwell, for which they will be offered various drugs that are unlikely to make much difference. Ultimately, they are at higher risk of a range of chronic diseases.
There seems, therefore, to be good evidence that CD is underdiagnosed. But Braly's and Hoggan's proposition is more radical than that. They believe that the immune reaction to gluten that damages the gut in CD can also cause problems almost anywhere else in the body. The evidence for this is a test involving a protein found in gluten called gliadin. When the body has an immune reaction, it makes antibodies. The test for anti-gliadin antibodies is known as AGA and people who test positive to AGA often have no sign of gut damage.
In fact, according to Dr Alessio Fasano, who carried out the University of Maryland research, "Worldwide, CD 'out of the intestine' is 15 times more frequent than CD 'in the intestine'." Braly estimates that between 10% and 15% of the US and Canadian populations have anti-gliadin antibodies, putting them at risk of conditions as varied as psoriasis, multiple sclerosis, jaundice, IBS and eczema.
The idea of gluten causing damage to parts of the body other than the gut is supported by another UK practitioner, Dr M Hadjivassiliou, a neurologist at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield. He ran an AGA test on patients who had "neurological dysfunction" with no obvious cause and found that more than half tested positive. What is more, only a third of the positive group had any evidence of CD gut damage. In other words, while the gluten antibodies can damage the bowels, they can also cause problems elsewhere. In this case, it was the cerebellum, or the peripheral nervous system.
So if a reaction to gluten can cause problems in the brain, might it also be linked to immune disorders? Braly and Hoggan certainly think so, and claim considerable clinical success in treating patients for conditions such as Addison's disease, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis and ulcerative colitis with a gluten-free diet. In fact, almost all the body's systems can be affected (see below). So if you suffer from a chronic condition that doesn't seem to respond to treatment, cutting out wheat for a while seems worth a try.
Are you gluten sensitive?
If you suffer from any of the following, the possibility that you are GS may be worth investigating.
Upper respiratory tract problems such as sinusitis, "allergies", "glue ear"
Symptoms related to malabsorption of nutrients such as anemia and fatigue (lack of iron or folic acid), osteoporosis, insomnia (lack of calcium)
Bowel complaints: diarrhoea, constipation, bloating and distention, spastic colon, Crohn's disease, diverticulitis
Autoimmune problems: rheumatoid arthritis, bursitis, Crohn's disease
Diseases of the nervous system: motor neuron disease, certain forms of epilepsy
Mental problems: depression, behavioral difficulties, ME, ADD
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DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:
As many of you know, one of the key components of my eating plan is vastly reducing to eliminating the grains in your diet for optimal health. I am glad to see this issue increasingly addressed in books and other media, and want to take this opportunity to make an announcement:
In the early spring of 2003, Putnam will be publishing my first major book called The No-Grain Diet, which will be available in bookstores throughout the U.S. and beyond. The No-Grain Diet will address the issues in the article above and more; even more important, it will provide you a comprehensive and practical approach to implementing an individualized dietary plan with the aid of Metabolic Typing that leads to your healing, ideal weight and optimal health.
In addition to its focus on my eating plan, what will set The No-Grain Diet apart from other dietary and health books is my focus on maintaining the healthy habits you adopt; whether people change their diet to lose weight, heal a disease, guard against illness, or simply improve their health, they are often successful at the start.
However, as time goes by, most fall right back into the old patterns that sabotaged their health in the first place. This is because there was only a focus on changing negative physical habits, not changing negative emotions contributing to those habits. In The No-Grain Diet, I will show you how, by using EFT, you can eliminate those negative emotions and far more easily maintain your healthy eating plan and lifestyle for good.
As for the gluten referenced in the article above, it is a protein in wheat, barley, rye, oats and spelt and can cause problems in many individuals that are completely independent of its disruption of insulin homeostasis.
As for grains in the human diet overall, there is fairly strong Paleolithic evidence that 10,000 years ago most humans did not consume many grains. They were hunter-gatherers who subsisted mostly on vegetables and meats. 10,000 years is a mere blip in a biological sense for humans: over 99% of our genetic make-up was in place, in fact, before we ever started consuming grains.
When considered from this perspective alone, it is not too surprising that grains can cause a wide array of health issues: contemporary humans have not suddenly evolved mechanisms to incorporate the high carbohydrates from starch- and sugar-rich foods into their diet.
Some of my patients ask me why, if grains "are bad," the Bible would reference them as acceptable. I am no biblical scholar and so cannot comment on whether the words used in the Bible (and translated from original sources) actually mean "grains" or food in some larger sense.
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Wheat Can Cause Poor Growth and Developmental Delay in Infants
A 15-month-old girl with celiac disease presented with microcephaly and developmental delay. Her head growth resumed when she was off of gluten and returned when she started it again. Additionally she developed a loss of reflexes.
All the symptoms resolved when she eliminated gluten.
Pediatrics 2001 April; 138(4):589-92
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DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:
Add yet another problem with wheat ingestion. Admittedly this is just a case report in a child with celiac disease. But what most of us don't realize is that sub clinical celiac disease is a HUGE issue.
If a child has developmental delay it would certainly seem prudent to apply a gluten free diet. One can apply the food choices I have already developed.
An earlier study in Pediatrics indicated that as many as one in 33 children may have celiac disease.
My experience is that the true incidence is probably much higher still, perhaps on the order of 1 in 10 people. The bulk of us however, even without celiac disease, do NOT benefit from having wheat. It is one of the primary reasons why people get sick in this country.
It is amazing how many people's chronic health complaints clear up once they stop the wheat. Some clinicians believe that no one can digest a protein in wheat called gliaden. Our body attempts to break this protein down by attaching an enzyme to it.
This gliaden enzyme complex in a high percentage of people actually stimulates an autoimmune reaction that can cause the full blown syndrome of celiac disease, or more commonly sub-clinical celiac disease which is generally characterized by a variety of chronic health complaints, most of which are intestinal.
However, I have seen many rashes disappear within days, once gluten was stopped. So, the moral of the story, is that if you have a chronic health complaint try avoiding gluten for two weeks and see if you improve. That approach is certainly far less expensive and more accurate than any diagnostic technique currently available.
But, anyway, I am not making an absolute blanket statement that grains "are bad;" instead, I am stating that most of us would definitely benefit by either drastically reducing or eliminating them from our diet, and throughout Mercola.com, and in my forthcoming book, The No-Grain Diet, I show you why.
--------------------------------------------- Wheat Can Cause Severe Headaches
According to the results of a small new study, some people may experience migraine headaches due to an unexpected culprit: wheat.
The investigators found that limiting gluten -- a protein found in wheat, oats, barely, rye and spelt-
Reduced symptoms of severe headache in seven out of nine patients.
Gluten sensitivity can include celiac disease, an inherited inability to digest gluten that results in abdominal distention, vomiting, diarrhea, muscle wasting and lethargy.
Other conditions can also develop, including neurological problems or dermatitis herpetiformis -- blister-like lesions on the elbows, buttocks and knees.
The only treatment is strict avoidance of gluten.
The study showed that these patients had a sensitivity to gluten, and magnetic resonance imaging scans suggested they had inflammation in the central nervous system.
Nine of the ten patients tried a gluten-free diet, and seven stopped having headaches. Two other patients had some -- but not complete -- success by switching to a gluten-free diet. One patient did not follow the diet.
Neurology February 2001;56:385-388
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DR. MERCOLA'S COMMENT:
Admittedly this is a small study, but out of ten patients 7 had their headaches stop completely. Two had them improved and I have to wonder about their compliance to the gluten. Only one did not improve and that was the person not following the program.
Absolutely amazing.
Wheat is not good for most of us. Some of us tolerate it, but most would benefit by avoiding it. The unfortunate problem is that most of us are addicted to it
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Wheat Sensitivity (Subclinical Gluten Intolerance) Linked To Repeated Miscarriages
Women who experience recurrent miscarriages or those whose fetuses show intrauterine growth retardation may have undiagnosed celiac disease.
Celiac disease is a genetic condition that causes those afflicted to experience difficulty absorbing gluten, as found in wheat, oats, barley, and several other grains. Symptoms include diarrhea, abdominal distention, and fatigue. And research suggests that more people may have a symptomless, milder form that may often go undetected. Recent studies have indicated that many people are found to have mild forms of the disease when their blood is tested for the condition, even though they were unaware that there was a problem.
Women who experience repeat miscarriages, also known as recurrent spontaneous abortions (RSA) or intrauterine growth retardation (IUGR)--a condition in which a baby is born significantly smaller than normal--may have celiac disease that has gone undetected.
Researchers, led by Dr. Antonio Gasbarrini, explain that they decided to look at celiac disease since it is a common cause of malabsorption of food in western countries. And for some time, miscarriages have been correlated with celiac disease.
Gasbarrini and colleagues conducted blood tests for the condition in 44 patients with RSA, 39 with IUGR, and 50 healthy women. None of the healthy women were found to have celiac disease, but the condition was detected in 8% of the women with RSA and 15% of those with IUGR.
Biopsy samples from the intestine confirmed diagnosis in eight of nine patients whose blood tested positive for the disease.
Women having recurrent miscarriages or intrauterine growth retardation could have subclinical celiac disease, which will usually go undetected.
Celiac disease has been correlated with infertility, and with other conditions, including birth defects in children whose mothers could not absorb folic acid while pregnant because they had undiagnosed celiac disease, she said. It makes sense that the condition could lead to other problems related to too little nutritional intake, she pointed out. Spontaneous abortions could feasibly result if the mother was failing to absorb vitamins and minerals required by the baby, researchers explained. If celiac disease is responsible for some of these problems, it is easily treatable by avoiding products containing gluten.
The Lancet July 29, 2000;356:399-400
COMMENT: Intolerance to gluten is a common condition, affecting a significant proportion of the population. Recent research has put the figure as high as 1 in every 33 people, but my experience tells me that it is more like 1 in every 10 people.
Wheat really does not serve most of us well, even the organic whole-grain types. It is best avoided or severely limited by most of us. For those who care for women with recurrent miscarriages wheat intolerance causing a subclinical celiac disease should be considered.
As far as miscarriages go, a very high percentage of them are due to progesterone deficiencies. Any woman who has had a miscarriage should be properly tested with salivary hormone tests by a physician who is experienced with this.
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If you are interested there is more info at mercola.com
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Fear is for...getting your confidence. -Steve Heller
