No Medically Or Scientifically Sound
Reason To Avoid Gluten
I've never been a dietary faddist. When
the cholesterol bandwagon rolled through town, I kept right on eating
eggs. When everybody started touting the health benefits of margarine
over butter, I continued to slather on the real dairy product. When
carbohydrates were being crucified, I baked bread and made pasta.
When it seemed that every package in the supermarket sported a
“fat-free” or “low-fat” or “reduced fat” label, I ignored
them all in favor of real “full fat” food. And in every instance,
I've been proven right. Modern food science has been issuing
apologies for past mistakes at a furious rate lately, exonerating
eggs and butter and carbs and fat and lots of other previously
demonized and denigrated substances. Is it too much to hope that
maybe it's finally gluten's turn?
Actually, science doesn't really have a
lot for which to apologize in the current gluten fad. Few if any
reputable scientific studies have ever pointed fingers at gluten as a
culprit in any dietary or digestive disorder other than the
legitimate case of celiac disease. No, we owe those honors to
fad-mongering celebrity types. I honestly don't know what's wrong
with our culture that we willingly accept the opinionated
pronouncements of airheaded, vacuous, blinkered and benighted music,
movie, and/or television “stars” over the studied and documented
facts presented by doctors, scientists, and other experts. Line up a
hundred people with lots of letters after their names on one side of
a room and put somebody like Oprah on the other side, and guess who
the great majority of sheeple will choose to believe. It's
unbelievable. But there it is.
Aiding and abetting these ridiculous
celebrity shenanigans are the enablers in the media who keep ginning
up the publicity because it's great feature fodder for slow news
days. And then factor in the opportunistic advertising agencies who
all know a good marketable gimmick when they see one. I'll tell you
right now, ingesting gluten does not make me sick. What makes me sick
is seeing the words “gluten free” screaming at me from every
package in every aisle of every supermarket in America. I get
especially ill when I see it tacked on to products that, by their
very nature, are physically, chemically, scientifically incapable of
actually ever containing gluten in the first place. I saw something
the other day that almost made me pass out: I picked up a bottle of
“gluten-free” water! Things are labeled that way just to be part
of the fad.
You know what a “fad” is? Here's
what the dictionary says: “an intense and widely shared
enthusiasm for something, especially one that is short-lived and
without basis in the object's qualities; a craze.” Yep. That
about sums it up.
It is said that when Clark Gable took
off his shirt onscreen and revealed that he was not wearing an
undershirt, undershirt sales plummeted. Why? Blame it on the cult of
celebrity. Everybody wants to be like somebody famous. So somebody
famous says, “I stopped eating gluten and I lost a hundred pounds
overnight. I feel so much better, my sex life is fantastic, and darn
if I'm not taller, too!” Blammo! Celebrity cultists in their
millions start vilifying a perfectly good, perfectly innocent
naturally occurring protein. There's no science behind it. Just
uninformed idiots with a platform and a gullible audience. The
perverse logic, such as it is, seems to be, “well, they're on TV so
they must be smarter than I am.” And if you're an easily led person
prone to the influence of the siren song of celebrity, if Dr. Oz
tells you that you can keep your hair by rubbing horse manure on your
head, you're gonna go out and find a stable.
H.L. Mencken is (mis)quoted as saying,
“No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the
American public.” And I swear they must have that engraved on a
plaque somewhere in every ad agency in the United States. If tomorrow
some celebrity goofball were to stand up in front of a camera and
aver that pig snouts were the answer to all your health and wellness
issues, I promise you it would be about two weeks before every
product in every store would feature a picture of a pig and the words
“made with real pig snouts” on the package. If you believe for
one skinny second that ConAgra and Kraft and Pepsico and the like are
concerned about your health and well being when they slap
“gluten-free” on everything from apples to zwieback, you are
seriously deluded. Big Food and its marketing machinery can play a
food fad like a flute and they just sit back and watch the bucks
inflate their coffers as the idiots dance to their tune.
I'm not going to go into a lengthy
discussion of gluten here. Simply put, gluten is a general name for
certain proteins found in wheat, rye, and barley, proteins that help
foods maintain their shape and structure by acting as a sort of
natural glue. There is nothing intrinsically or inherently
“unhealthy,” “bad”, or “evil” about gluten. And unless
you have a specific disorder called celiac disease, a condition
wherein the ingestion of gluten leads to damage in the small
intestine, there is no medically or scientifically sound reason to
avoid the substance.
“Well, I don't have celiac, but I'm
gluten intolerant.” No, you're probably not. Because research
indicates there ain't no such thing. A study conducted by the
Department of Gastroenterology, Eastern Health Clinical School,
Monash University, Box Hill, Victoria, Australia concluded: “In
a placebo-controlled, cross-over rechallenge study, we found no
evidence of specific or dose-dependent effects of gluten in patients
with NCGS [non-celiac gluten sensitivity] placed diets low in FODMAPs
[fermentable, oligo-, di-, monosaccharides, and polyols].” In
non-scientific terms, it's all in your head.
One of
the authors of the study, Professor Peter Gibson, says the
real reason many people who have eliminated gluten from their diets
claim to feel better or sexier or healthier or whatever is simply
because they've changed their diets. People hear about “going
gluten-free” from some talking head or another and they go out and
start buying fresh vegetables. They stop eating processed crap and
they just start cooking and eating a lot better in general. So while
it may seem on the surface that cutting out the gluten is what helped
them lose the weight, or cleared up their complexion, or made them
taller, or whatever the ridiculous claim might be, in reality, as
Gibson says, “Blaming the gluten is easy, but you could point to
about a hundred things they're doing better.”
Imagine a man standing in a pouring
rain getting soaking wet. Another man comes along and hands him an
umbrella and a packet of magic powder. The second man tells the first
that he will stay dry if he raises the umbrella and stands under it
while throwing the magic powder into the air. The first man does as
he is instructed, and upon finding himself staying dry as promised,
he proceeds to go out and tell everyone he knows about the wondrous
magic powder. Far-fetched? No more so than the miraculous claims of
the “gluten-free” crowd. When it comes to dietary health and
wellness, there are no magic powders. That's a hard-sell in this day
and age, because nobody likes to think that all the alleged benefits
they reap from listening to some celebrity spokesperson about the
glories of going gluten-free might just be psychological.
Here's some more food for thought: the
“gluten-free” craze may actually be damaging to your health. It's
a basic premise of food science that everything is a trade off. When
you make something “low fat” or “sugar free,” you take
something out of a food that you have to replace with something else.
Often that something is an artificially, chemically produced additive
that is far worse for you than the original natural substance ever
was. Or it could be something like salt. Take a gander at the label
of your favorite “fat-free” snack. Yeah, they took out the fat,
alright, but they doubled down on the sodium to make up the flavor
difference. Same thing happens with “gluten-free” products.
They've got to replace the gluten with something else for texture or
taste. According to research conducted by places like Columbia
University Medical Center, many gluten-free products contain higher
amounts of fat and sugar and lack fiber, protein, and a lot of
nutrients such as folate, iron, and B vitamins. That leaves us with a
whole line of products on grocery store shelves that have less fiber,
protein, and vitamins and more sugar and sodium in their gluten-free
formulations than they have in their supposedly less healthy ones.
This is especially problematic for
kids. Okay, moms. Maybe it's alright for you to risk your health
based on the wisdom of some “personality” who couldn't even
qualify for the low “star” standards of “Dancing With The
Stars”. But does that mean you have the right to inflict your
gullibility on your growing and developing children? Why don't you
try getting your health advice from the Journal of the American
Medical Association rather than from People Magazine? Or
maybe you could check out the Journal of Pediatrics, where
it was recently published that “increased fat and calorie
intake have been identified in individuals after a GFD [gluten-free
diet]. Obesity, overweight, and new-onset insulin resistance and
metabolic syndrome have been identified after initiation of a GFD.”
Here's the science, not the gossip: for
people who don't have a medical condition like celiac disease, there
are no proven health benefits to a “gluten-free” diet. Period.
Furthermore, without proper nutritional guidance, cutting out foods
with gluten can lead to nutritional deficiencies and increased fat
and calorie intake, especially among children.
I'm not going to reach everybody with
this message. I'm a realist and I understand that many of the rabid
gluten-free dieters out there will say something along the lines of,
“Stuff it, bozo. I know what I feel so you can just take your
opinion and sit on it.” To them I say, “more power to you.” To
everybody else I would plead stop the craziness and stop listening to
the crazies. Get off the bandwagon and into the kitchen. Get rid of
the packaged chemistry sets that masquerade as processed foods and
start cooking with fresh, natural ingredients. Practice balance and
moderation in your diet and before you know it you'll lose weight,
feel better, be sexier, have clearer skin, keep your hair, make more
money, and maybe even be taller. Who knows? It won't be a matter of
being gluten-free or fat-free or carb-free or anything else that
requires being brain-free. It's just common sense, a commodity
unfortunately uncommon among the senseless followers of celebrity
fads.
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