Gee, I Am So Shocked!

[Canadian Karen]

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[ravenwoodglass]

Gee what a surprise . Most of us could have told them that already after enduring years of toxic drugs and not even having a doctor think our problems could be solved by a change in diet. I saw a bit on this on CNN this morning and I think they are doing an in depth story on it but unfortunately don't remember the day or time.

Karen, completely OT but I just wanted to say how much I enjoy your avatar. No matter how nasty my day is it always makes me smile.

[Canadian Karen]

I'm glad you like him. That's his sole purpose - to brighten people's day!

The more I think of the above story, the more my blood boils....... We are trying SO HARD to get the info out about the damage that gluten does and I swear sometimes it feels like we are trying to swim upstream. There are so many "behind the scenes" things going on, I feel we are fighting a losing battle. Between the pharmaceutical companies, government and the Wheat Board, they crush us at every turn.

Can you imagine if it ever came to light that today's wheat is so genetically modified to within an inch of it's life, that it is hardly recognizeable, how would that affect the world. It would open up governments to liability for allowing this to happen to our food chain, and also world economies would fall, wheat being a major economical commodity on the world market.

Remember this:

THE NATURAL HISTORY OF WHEAT

The Roman Empire was built on Egyptian wheat, which they called "korn". It was Einkorn, which is the ancestor of modern wheats. (In Latin, this was the earliest form of Triticum, not to be confused with what we call "corn", which is Zea.)

It had two sets of chromosomes like human beings and is described as 2N or diploid. There were also some naturally occurring wheat that had four sets of chromosomes, or 4N or tetraploid. This was the wheat that the Roman Emperor, Eqyptian pharoahs and Christ were eating.

But what is on our table has been selectively bred over time to increase the gluten content for baking or pasta-making. Most are hexaploid, octoploid, double hexaploid, or hexaploid-octoploid hybrids. This means that they have 6, 8, 12, or more sets of chromosomes. Some of this extra DNA is coding for amino acid sequences that human beings cannot break down, including a 33-amino acid sequence named 33-MER. This 33-MER is what is causing the problem for celiac. Our immune systems are attacking this chain as though it were an invader or parasite. But this sequence is also similar to human tissue, and this inflammation can progress into an auto-immune disease. This auto-immune phase is really damaging, and largely incurable. Control is the only treatment, and life-long gluten free diet is the only control.

[Centa]

Thanks for that last post, Canadian Karen. What's the link to the discussion of wheat that you posted? If there's more to the article, I'd like to read it.

Yes, it seems that eating unengineered food is getting to be impossible, and I agree that there's a combination of disregard, lack of information and (the news article you posted suggests) selling out within the food industry and medical establishment that works against what health we could obtain.

When I started label reading in earnest, it kept pecking in my mind that there is gluten in everything, everything! A lot of us have that epiphany, pretty quickly.

About that gluten, I found myself wondering if it were some kind of an ingredient that supported or facilitated other additives. It's an open question to me; I haven't gone researching.

About every time you have a long list of ingredients, there's that gluten. What, do those chemicals bond with gluten? Does it stabilize them? Why, for pete's sake, is there gluten in nearly every Campbell's soup (for example). You don't NEED gluten in chicken rice soup, unless it has something to do with plasticizing it so that it remains there on the shelf, embalmed, until someone buys it three years from now and neither the merchant nor the supplier nor the manufacturer are out money replacing chicken rice soup that lives an ordinary biological life, goes off and must be replaced with fresh.

Setting the chemicals with the peculiar names in the long additive lists aside and going for what you might call combinations of food-ingredient additives, I knew from critiques of the food industry that there has been research by the various food companies to come up with combinations of wheat, fat or oil, sugar, and salt and that (I'm speaking of the U.S.; you'd have to tell me about Canada) we've been weaned onto liking that taste. Those or two or three of them, are in just about everything that's got preservatives into them. We've gotten so that we like crispy coatings, and cookies, love the taste of salt plus wheat, or even salt plus sugar plus wheat. Anymore, something doesn't taste "rich" unless it's got some kind of fat, or fat and sugar, or wheat, fat and sugar in it. When we party, we want that wheat-sugar-fat-salt. Or we can take the sugar out and add meat: not grilled meat, deepfried meat. Not baked meat, battered meat, etc.

If that's the case: that people buying foods in stores and in restaurants have been weaned onto preferring and choosing wheat, or wheat & fats, or wheat & sugar, with extra salt, well I don't have anything printable to say about that, except that that's really immoral, considering what is done to people's health with those ingredients.

And then doctors want to stuff us with pills because our cholesterol's going crazy, the weight creeps up, we're depressed, etc. etc.

I'm not surprised that medical professors in teaching hospitals are being wooed by the pharmaceutical companies. They're all practicing physicians, and we can see all those calendars, clocks, notepads, samples and literature from pharmaceutical companies in our doctors' waiting rooms and examining rooms.

It's all industry that lives off other industries via our bodies and pocketbooks, I sometimes think.

This turned out to be somewhat of a rant, but I'm disturbed as you are about this steep uphill battle against what's hidden from us, the level of ignorance about what could make a difference in people's lives, and what I'd call the chemical-stuffing.

I never thought that I would ever think that gardening and cooking from scratch with ungassed, unmodified ingredients as often as I could was survivalist behavior, but I'm beginning to think so nowadays.

[Phyllis28]

Ummmm, I wonder if the sales reps for the companies that make gluten free food should start stopping by Doctor's offices and leave gluten free goodies.

[elye]

Unfortunately, pre-packaged gluten-free goodies aren't that much better for us. They often contain a lot more sugar, fat and simple carbohydrate than the gluten-filled alternative. For those people (few, I now believe) who can do gluten and insist on having processed, refined, prepackaged food in their diet, they are probably better to go with the gluten-filled stuff. The slightly lesser of two big evils...

BTW, a VERY interesting piece on our "new" wheat, Karen,...thanks for this.

[melmak5]

I was lucky enough, once, to see a nutritionist who has celiac disease and counseled patients with it.

She was in fact, given lots of gluten free "samples" that she had in her office.

It may not be widespread... yet.

[ravenwoodglass]

Ummmm, I wonder if the sales reps for the companies that make gluten free food should start stopping by Doctor's offices and leave gluten free goodies.

Even just seeing some celiac literature beside all the stuff for IBS, RSD, Depression etc in their offices would make me happy at this point.