Health & Fitness
Why Grains Inflame
If headaches, fatigue or digestive problems are an issue for you maybe you should TRY eliminating gluten from your diet for 30 days and see if your symptoms don't resolve.
Grain consumption is a sensitive subject for many individuals. Most people have eaten bread, pasta, and cereals for their entire lives, and giving up this food can be psychologically traumatic, which illustrates the strong and often inappropriate emotional connection that we have with food. However, if you view eating as a mechanism to fuel the precious vehicle [your body] that conveys you throughout life, then you would not be opposed to making any changes that would benefit the vehicle.
Remember, you can only trade in your motor vehicle, not your body vehicle. You should first be aware that grains have been consumed for only a short period of time during man’s sojourn on earth. Our genetic code is not dissimilar from the human-like mammals that inhabited the earth some 2 million years.
In other words, for the 1,990,000 years that human-like mammals have populated the earth, the following foods were never consumed: grains, pasta, cereal, soy, beans, dairy, refined sugar, partially hydrogenated fats, and seed oils, such as corn, safflower, cottonseed, sunflower, canola, and soybean oil. Humans are genetically adapted to eat fruits, vegetables, nuts, fish, fowl, and meat. Consider also, that there are no chronic diseases caused by eating these foods. No matter what disease you may suffer from, none of these foods must be eliminated from the diet. The same cannot be said for grains in particular.
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Gluten
Many different biochemical components and properties make grains an inflammatory food; the most notorious is a protein called gluten. Celiac disease is a disabling digestive disease, and is caused by the gluten found in grains. Most notorious on the list of gluten grains is wheat; others include couscous, spelt, kamut, rye, barley, and oats.
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Among the non-gluten grains are rice, wild rice, millet, and corn. A detailed list of gluten foods can be found at Celiac Sprue Association’s website (www.csaceliacs.org).
It is not only those suffering from celiac disease who need to avoid grains. Gluten can cause many other symptoms and conditions, ranging from schizophrenia to more common conditions such as headaches.
For example, researchers randomly selected 200 disease-free individuals for the purpose of assessing anti-gluten antibody levels, which is a way to measure gluten sensitivity. A comparison was made of the health complaints between the subjects with the highest antibody levels, and those with the lowest levels…the results were shocking. Fifteen percent of the subjects who had the highest antibody levels suffered from headaches, chronic fatigue, regular digestive complaints, subtle anemic changes, and NO signs of celiac disease. You should understand that headaches, fatigue, and digestive problems are three of the most common symptoms reported by patients to doctors.
If these are issues for you maybe you should TRY eliminating gluten from your diet for 30 days and see if your symptoms don't resolve...it won't cost you anything, but you could gain everything back!
A great resource for information on how to implement a gluten free lifestyle in seven easy steps can be found here (completely free!)