The Gluten Connection: How Gluten Sensitivity May Be Sabotaging Your Health - And What You Can Do to Take Control Now - Softcover

Shari Lieberman

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1594863873 ISBN 13: 9781594863875

Publisher: Rodale Books, 2006

Synopsis

One of the nation's top clinical nutritionists presents her 14-day program for treating and reversing gluten sensitivity, a condition that affects as much as 35 to 50 percent of the U.S. population and is a major contributing factor to an array of chronic illnesses

Struggling with weight gain? Plagued by fatigue? Suffering from joint pain? According to preeminent clinical nutritionist Dr. Shari Lieberman, these symptoms are among the hallmarks of a little-known but surprisingly common sensitivity to gluten, a protein in certain grains. Dr. Lieberman has been investigating gluten sensitivity for more than 20 years. In her experience, eliminating gluten can alleviate many troubling symptoms for which doctors often can't find a cause, as well as chronic conditions for which mainstream medicine offers little hope of relief—including rheumatoid arthritis, ulcerative colitis, psoriasis, fibromyalgia, lupus, and irritable bowel syndrome.

In fact, 85 percent of Dr. Lieberman's clients who follow a gluten-free diet report dramatic improvement in their health—and scientific studies support her results.

In The Gluten Connection, Dr. Lieberman presents a simple questionnaire to help readers assess their risk for gluten sensitivity and provides a 14-day eating plan to start them on the path to improved health and vitality. She also recommends nutritional supplements to support and maximize the therapeutic potential of a gluten-free diet.

About this title

About the Author:

SHARI LIEBERMAN, PhD, CNS, is a well-known, widely respected clinical nutritionist who is an expert in identifying and treating gluten sensitivity. She is the author of several books, including the best-selling Real Vitamin and Mineral Book, released in its third edition in 2003. A frequent speaker at medical and scientific conferences throughout the world, she resides in New York City.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

CHAPTER 1

GRAIN DANGER

We Americans love food. We love food so much that we make sure we are never far from it.

In every strip shopping center, you'll find at least one fast-food restaurant. In most grocery stores, there is a deli counter. Every 15 minutes on television, commercials for McDonald's, Burger King, Pizza Hut, and Kentucky Fried Chicken bombard viewers. Saturday morning cartoons tempt children with sweet treats and breakfast cereals.

And if viewers fail to satiate their visual appetites with the commercials, they can turn on TV's Food Channel to drool over all types of concoctions, from pastas to French pastries.

Years ago, our grandparents ate a basic diet of meat, poultry, and fish; potatoes and other root vegetables; and a variety of garden-fresh vegetables. Their meat was free from hormone enhancements. The fish came directly from the ocean or from crystal-clear lakes and rivers, which did not experience fertilizer runoff. And their vegetables were exposed to few (if any) pesticides and herbicides.

They ate bread, cake, and pie, of course. But they baked these goods in their own kitchens, using wheat that had not been genetically altered.

What a difference a few decades have made! Today, we eat out more often than we cook in. And we eat fast food more than well-balanced meals.

Food-manufacturing companies have made sure that we can open a box or a can, or pop a frozen entree into the microwave oven and enjoy, within minutes and without any cooking skill, whatever type of delicacy turns our fancy.

Food nourishes. It comforts. When it tastes good, it makes us feel good.

But the same food that you enjoy putting into your mouth may be making you sick!

The culprit? Gluten.

If you have heard the word gluten, it was most likely in context with baking, as in "kneading dough to develop the gluten." Gluten--a protein--is the stuff that makes dough sticky.

Unfortunately, this chewy, gluey protein that makes bread and bagels taste so good is poison to a large segment of the population who cannot tolerate it. These people are gluten sensitive. They suffer from a systemic autoimmune disorder. When they eat anything with gluten in it--and that is virtually all processed and prepared foods!--their immune system reacts.

For more than 50 years, doctors have pointed to gluten as the cause of celiac disease (CD)--an autoimmune disorder centered in the gastrointestinal system.

Worldwide, celiac disease has been studied extensively, almost since it was discovered and named. As testing became more sophisticated and as the definition of celiac disease was expanded to include more than individuals who had overt symptoms, researchers have shown that celiac disease afflicts approximately 1 percent of the world's population, or anywhere from 1 in 100 to 1 in 200 worldwide,1 with much higher rates in some countries.2

In the general populations of Western Europe, the prevalence ranges from 0.5 to 1.26 percent (1 in 200 to 1 in 79).3

For example: A report published in 2001 said that the prevalence of CD (identified through screening methods) in the United Kingdom was 1 in 112 people; in Finland, it was 1 in 130; in Italy, 1 in 184; and in the Sahara, an astonishing 1 in 70.4

In this country, medical researchers and practitioners had believed this disease was confined to a relatively small number of people, primarily children. Within the past several years, those beliefs have been put down.

Researchers have discovered that celiac disease afflicts just under 1 percent of the population in the United States. A large-scale study of 13,145 individuals5 showed that 1 out of 133 people in the general population has CD.

The odds are even worse that you have this disease if you have a first- degree relative with CD (1 out of 22), if you have a second-degree relative with it (1 out of 39), or if you have digestive-disorder symptoms (1 out of 56). If you are one of these unfortunate individuals and continue to eat gluten, you can waste away from malnutrition and may suffer premature death.

But the gluten problem touches far more of the U.S. population than the 1 out of 133 who have celiac disease. Some researchers now speculate that as many as 29 percent6--almost 3 out of 10 people--are gluten sensitive! And approximately 81 percent7 of Americans have a genetic disposition toward gluten sensitivity. That's a tremendous number of people in the United States who are gluten sensitive or have the propensity to become gluten sensitive.

If you are gluten sensitive, you can have a low level of intolerance and function for years--perhaps your entire life--without any identifiable symptoms or with symptoms so mild that you pay no attention to them. Feeling less than 100 percent is so normal that you don't know you can feel better.

But many people (most of the 2.9 out of 10 who are gluten sensitive) suffer from a variety of physical problems that you and your doctors have not linked to the "killer cause," gluten--problems such as diabetes, multiple sclerosis, lupus, arthritis, osteoporosis, chronic fatigue syndrome, and some forms of dermatitis and psoriasis, to name a few. (Part 2 of this book details the variety of problems that gluten can cause.)

Gluten sensitivity is a huge problem contributing to the chronic diseases that plague American society today and cost us trillions of dollars. We are only now discovering its extent.

But, like any other problem, if we understand its origin and its cause, we can fix it. All problems, after all, have a solution. Gluten sensitivity is no different.

AN EVOLUTIONARY PROBLEM

The problem with gluten can be traced back to the agricultural revolution and the cultivation of grains more than 10,000 years ago. Until that time, Paleolithic man subsisted off the land: He was a hunter-gatherer--getting his needed protein, fat, and carbohydrate requirements by hunting game and fish and gathering fruits, nuts, and vegetables. Nature provided him with all of his needed nutrients; all he had to do was find them.

Although the life span of early Homo sapiens was short (his life expectancy was only about 20 years), his health was relatively good, especially when food was plentiful. When food was scarce, early man did suffer from nutritional deficiencies, which contributed to early demise, but death was caused largely by infection, parasitic infestation, and accident.

Enter the age of agriculture. When Neolithic man, a successor to Paleolithic man, discovered how to cultivate and mill grain and how to use fire to cook his food--which destroyed toxins in otherwise inedible foodstuffs--his life changed. No longer dependent on the abundance of nature, he could now control much of his food source. This resulted in allowing more people to exist on a smaller amount of land--a good consequence of agricultural technology.

A bad consequence was that with the planting, harvesting, and milling of grain--particularly wheat, but also barley and rye--man introduced a new plant protein into his digestive system. That protein was gluten.

Many nutritional scientists trace the cause of today's chronic health problems to the advent of the agricultural revolution. Two researchers, James H. O'Keefe Jr., MD, and Loren Cordain, PhD, observed, "Humans evolved during the Paleolithic period, from approximately 2.6 million years ago to 10,000 years ago. Although the human genome has remained largely unchanged...our diet and lifestyle have become progressively more divergent from those of our ancient ancestors. These maladaptive changes began approximately 10,000 years ago with the advent of the agricultural revolution and have been accelerating in recent decades. Socially, we are a people of the 21st century, but genetically, we remain citizens of the Paleolithic era."8

Our genetic similarity to Paleolithic man--and our inability to tolerate gluten--began to create a serious problem when we left our agricultural society behind and entered into another significant stage of human development: the Industrial Revolution.

Technology stimulated a change in grain consumption in the United States with two significant inventions:

The mechanical reaper. Through Cyrus McCormick's invention of the mechanical reaper in 1831, wheat could be harvested more efficiently than by hand--eight acres a day by the reaper, only two by hand. That resulted in the greater abundance of grain to feed the growing populations of the Western world.

The roller mill. Until the Industrial Revolution, milling had been done through stone grinding in a process not dissimilar to that used by Neolithic man (although on a larger scale): The heads of grain were crushed between two big stones to make flour. The flour that resulted was whole- grain flour that included all parts of the wheat kernel.

In 1873, the milling process changed. At that year's World's Fair, the world was introduced to the roller miller,9 which used steel rollers to mill grain and refined flour better and more cheaply. With the adoption of this technology throughout the United States, the majority of the U.S. population suddenly could afford to buy refined flour. And they quickly acquired a taste for white bread.

Because of the availability of refined flour, as well as the invention of new types of mechanizations, people no longer had to live off the land; the "land" came to them through processed meats, vegetables, and grains. Their hunting and gathering consisted of finding a market and putting cans into a grocery bag.

In the United States, as the 20th century began and the emigration of Americans from the land to the cities intensified, the demand for more- processed foods continued to increase, initially for canned goods, later-- once households had electric refrigeration--for frozen goods. In the 1950s, TV dinners became popular, along with frozen bakery treats.

Today, of course, every type of food you desire is available in a convenience form, ready to be popped into a microwave or an oven.

This demand for convenience caused grain consumption to escalate. Records from the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture show that in 1967 (the earliest complete records available), per capita annual consumption of gluten-containing grains (wheat, barley, and rye) was 115 £ds. In 2003, this figure had grown to 139 £ds. That's an increase of 24 £ds of gluten-containing grain per person per year in the United States--a lot of gluten.10

If you think that you don't eat that much grain (and gluten), think again: Much of the gluten that you consume is hidden. You don't know you are eating it! For example:

. Food manufacturers add "vital gluten" (gluten that is specifically processed from high-gluten-containing wheat) to wheat flour to give it more binding power. . Gluten is used in the manufacturing of virtually all boxed, packaged, and canned processed foods to create textures that are more palatable to our taste buds, or is used as binders, thickeners, and coatings. It is even used as glue on envelopes and stamps! . Even if you were consuming the same amount of grain today as you did last year or 10 years ago, you would be ingesting more gluten. That is because bioengineers continually work to "improve" gluten and make it a larger and more potent part of edible grain. It is estimated that today's wheat contains nearly 90 percent more gluten than wheat did from a century ago!

To get an idea of how much hidden gluten you consume, take a walk down the aisles in your grocery store. Stop to read the labels. You'll find wheat, barley, or rye in products such as:

. Barbecue sauce . Breaded fish, chicken, and shrimp . Bread--even "potato bread" or "rice bread" . Canned and dried soups . Cereal . Cookies and cakes . Couscous . Crackers . Flavored potato chips . Frozen dinners . Pasta . Pies . Rice mixes . Sauces and gravies . Some ice creams . Some salad dressings . Soy sauce . Teriyaki sauce . And many, many more items

INCREASED JEOPARDY

Have you heard the expression, "Just because you can, doesn't mean you should"? The expression may well apply to the consumption of grain, especially wheat, barley, and rye.

The danger that grains present to us is probably best evidenced by looking at the effect that modern diet has had on modern-day hunter-gatherers, whose diet is significantly different from ours.

All people require foods that provide energy. According to ERS,11 the energy sources of Americans in 2000 came from:

. Fats and oils (22 percent) . Grains (24 percent--that's one-quarter of our diet!) . Meat, poultry, and fish (14 percent) . Processed foods (21 percent) . Sugars and sweeteners (19 percent)

Our diet is considerably different from hunter-gatherers (yes, some tribes still exist today), who consume:12

. Fruits, vegetables, nuts, and honey (65 percent) . Lean game, wild fowl, eggs, fish, and shellfish (35 percent)

Noticeably absent from the hunter-gatherer diet are three types of foods:

. Dairy (Typically, they use only mother's milk, fermented dairy products, or dairy straight from their own livestock--more often goats than cows.) . Processed foods (They eat off the land.) . Refined grains (If they eat grains, they eat them as whole grains and in moderation.)

A number of nutritional anthropologists have studied the danger of grains (and remember--grains are the source of gluten!) on society.

A Dentist's Observations

In the 1930s, Dr. Weston A. Price,13 a dentist with a passion for nutrition, roamed the globe to study primitive hunter-gatherer cultures. Dr. Price suspected that poor nutrition played a part in physical degeneration, manifested in dental caries and deformed dental arches. To test his hypothesis, he decided to travel the world and observe isolated primitive peoples--those who were largely (although not exclusively) hunter- gatherers.

His travels took him to sequestered villages in Switzerland and Gaelic communities in the Outer Hebrides; Eskimos and Native Americans; Melanesian and Polynesian South Sea islanders; African tribes; Australian Aborigines; New Zealand Maori; and Indians of South America.

Dr. Price observed that people who ate native diets had beautiful, straight teeth; no caries; strong bodies; and a high resistance to disease. One of the key characteristics Dr. Price noted about traditional diets: These diets did not include refined or denatured foods, such as refined sugar, white flour, and canned foods.

He contrasted these healthy native people with those who no longer lived in complete isolation but had been introduced to modern diets that included sugar, white flour, pasteurized milk, and convenience foods filled with extenders and additives.

About this edition

• Publisher: Rodale Books
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1594863873
• ISBN 13: 9781594863875
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304