Were almost always working off of correlations when we claim to know what something does in the body. A term for it is parking lot science which is like if you lost your keys in a parking lot and started looking under all the streetlights, not because thats the best place to find them, but because thats the easiest place to look. We like simple stories with as few variables as possible and fixed rules. They allow us to replace understanding with memorization. When many people started ditching wheat and feeling better, gluten was the easiest thing to isolate and position as the reason for this. More likely, its something else associated with wheat (as gluten is) and probably a combination of things (which may include gluten, sometimes) that matter. Not just the simple answer. Taken a step further, the way wheat (thus gluten and everything else in it) is processed into food matters a good deal. Handmade sourdough bread thats been fermented slowly for days by wild yeast before being baked is a different thing to your body than industrially-produced bread that goes from grain to loaf in a few hours with the help of a bunch of chemicals. Thinking like this is why everyone has heard of vitamin C. Its not that vitamin C is uniquely amazing, its that many of the foods that contain it can do amazing things and C is one of the first things we figured out how to isolate from those foods. So when we realized that people who ate a lot of, lets say, blueberries, had particularly good health outcomes, we started looking under the streetlights at the only thing we could isolate and tell a story about. Blueberries contain vitamin C, eating more vitamin C in the form of blueberries is good for you, therefore vitamin C is good for you. Now lets all take vitamin C pills and wonder why they dont do all that much. Rather than focusing on the simple stories we can tell ourselves from correlation, how about we focus on the outcomes that we can directly observe (and over a long-term period of time). Eating blueberries seems to work out well for many people. So does cutting out wheat, especially the industrially processed version. Does it really matter what story we tell ourselves to explain why? If you stop eating wheat and look and feel better as a result, does it matter that you arent in the tiny percent of the population that has Celiac? Personally, I feel best when I avoid grains most of the time, and most of my clients do as well. I also tolerate well-prepared bread without issue and have a batch of dough for sourdough pancakes fermenting on my kitchen counter right now. When I eat something like that occasionally, I also feel good. For me, its industrially made shit quality bread that wrecks my stomach. ow.ly/xwXS3
Posted on: Fri, 20 Jun 2014 18:39:12 +0000