I attended an online summit recently centered around all things paleo & anti-inflammatory. It was nothing short of incredible – with many of the top industry leaders giving presentations on the latest evolutionary nutrition news, and doing so for free, it was like college but so much more awesome. I took notes on the gluten intolerance lecture that gluten intolerance expert, Dr. Tom O’Bryan gave so that I could share the latest info on gluten intolerance with you.

As many long-time readers know, I was diagnosed with non-Celiac gluten intolerance in May of 2009. That means that I’m not in the end-stages of gluten intolerance – Celiac Disease – which is the very last stage of devastation caused by continued ingestion of gluten when intolerant. (Full-blown Celiac Disease is diagnosed by a flattening of the finger-like surfaces within the gut, this occurs after someone has been eating gluten for long enough to wear down their gut lining, making absorption of nutrients extremely difficult from that point forward.)

Just because I do not have Celiac Disease does not mean my gluten intolerance is any less severe – I just caught my intolerance early enough to stop the breakdown of my gut before it got to that point. I cannot stress this enough: if you are diagnosed with gluten intolerance, there is NO more severe/less severe diagnosis – the only concern is how soon was it caught & what symptoms are associated with that stage of health breakdown due to gluten. And as you’ll discover in Dr. O’Bryans’ talk, just because you had some test done for gluten and it came back as ‘not a problem for you’ doesn’t tell the entire story!

As a reminder to folks diagnosed with any level of gluten intolerance: THERE IS NO SAFE EFFECTIVE DOSE OF GLUTEN for someone intolerant to it. Consuming gluten when you know you have a sensitivity to it equates to speeding up the day you’ll meet your Maker. Gluten intolerant individuals die 20% earlier, mostly from cancer and heart disease, than any other person when they continue consuming gluten post-diagnosis. Why, oh why, would you do that to yourself?! Lest we digress into a full-blown discussion on the “why’s” behind people’s food and life choices, let’s get on with the notes that I took from Dr. Tom O’Bryan, leader in gluten intolerance, Celiac Disease, and the care for individuals with gluten intolerance.

Gluten & Gluten Intolerance:
Going Mainstream (or was it always here & just getting overlooked)

Presentation by Dr. Tom O’Bryan

“Let’s be clear about how gluten intolerance can manifest….it can manifest as Celiac Disease (in the gut), as myocarditis (in the heart), as autism or ADD (in the brain), as PCOS or infertility (in the reproductive organs)…gluten sensitivity can manifest anywhere that the immune reaction occurs. You see, gluten is a gnarly protein that loosens up the gut lining so it can slip through, taking other food particles with it to various places in the body. The immune system catches that & says, “woah, send immune responders over to the brain/ovaries/joints/pancreas/any place the food and gluten end up”, and the immune carries out its response on the cells in that area – including the cells of that organ or tissue. As those cells get broken down, strange things happen to that organ or tissue – it develops problems like ADD or autism, it stops working correctly thereby creating pain, dysfunction & disease in that area of the body. Gluten sensitivity is on a spectrum – you can be majorly reactive to it, or very minor-ly reactive to it. But make no mistake, everyone reacts to gluten. “

“Let’s back up a minute…there is something about calling it “gluten intolerance” or “gluten sensitivity” that makes it sound ‘less bad.’ In fact, people will say, ‘do you have a gluten allergy’ and it’s often easiest to say “yes!” even though that is actually not true. You see, when the skin-prick allergy testing first began, this was the very first method used for testing if someone had an immune-response to foods, environmental things, or chemicals. And so if you got a positive response from that skin-prick test, you were told you had an ‘ALLERGY’ to it. Even though, the skin-prick test is only testing for 1 FORM of immune-response…

Let’s back up again…think of your immune response as the Armed Forces. You’ve got the Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and so on. In your body, you also have several divisions of armed force immune responders – they are called IgE, IgA, IgG, and so on – there are actually 5 types of immune response, and only ONE is measured by doing a skin-prick. Similarly, only  ONE type is measured when you do a blood-allergy test (thus why those tests are only 30% effective)……

So we’ve got these skin-prick immune responses as the 1st kind ever tested for & so the flag was struck in the ground naming those as “allergies.” It’s kind of like “Kleenex” ‘will you get me a Kleenex,’ we all know that it may not be an actual Kleenex-brand tissue that we are requesting, in fact, we’re just requesting a tissue, but it’s so tied into our lexicon, that getting everybody to change and call it by its’ correct name, ‘a tissue’ instead of saying ‘Kleenex’ and everyone knowing what you mean – it’s just not going to happen. Well, the same is true for “allergy”. Many scientific papers were written using the term ‘allergy’ & then later on, we discovered we could test for these other immune responders, the other divisions of the armed forces within us, and it was just too late to go back & change the lexicon, so discovering an immune-response that uses other divisions of the armed forces in our body had to be called something else, and so we got “intolerance” and “sensitivity”. They are no less worse than “allergy” but they simply must be called something different.”

“A food sensitivity is when you have an immune response to that food. A food intolerance is when you don’t have enough of that enzyme to break down that food i.e. ‘lactose intolerance.’ Far more people have food sensitivities than realize it. This is not a rare problem, and it is not exclusive to gluten, although that is one of the worst immune-producing responders out there.’

“Autoimmune disease is the #1 cause of morbidity(meaning; you die)/mortality(meaning: you get sick & it leads to death) in the industrial world. We thought it was heart disease for a long time, but we are now seeing a strong auto-immune connection in the progression of heart disease. Heart disease, remember, begins with inflammation in the heart walls.”

“Almost all of us have an autoimmune condition within us already, it’s just not bad enough to make us sick yet. No one gets Alzheimers’ in their 70s. It begins in their 30′s and 40′s & progresses….

There are 3 components to developing an autoimmune condition into something that produces major symptoms:
1) genetic variability – do you have the genes for it AND did you up-regulate those nasty genes by your lifestyle choices
2) environmental trigger – gluten is the most common trigger that leads to #3
3) intestinal permeability – we find in patients with end-stage autoimmune conditions, many have long-standing leaky gut syndrome”

“Every bit of food is either inflammatory or anti-inflammatory.”

“If gluten gets through your gut, your immune response goes after it. It becomes trained to fire bullets at the gluten wherever it finds it (blood vessels, thyroid, brain, etc.). Regularly consuming gluten brings a regular onslaught of bullets at the gluten floating around your body. You have then successfully developed your autoimmune condition.”

“In the Annals of Internal Medicine Journal in 2006, there was such a strong correlation found of osteoporosis patients that were ALSO carrying a gluten sensitivity that the researchers of the study confidently wrote in the Journal that ALL osteoporosis/osteopenia patients SHOULD be checked for Celiac/gluten sensitivity….when you ingest gluten, it binds to the minerals in your diet, and since your body needs those minerals to function correctly, in an effort to save itself, it leaches the minerals from your bones, thereby creating weak & brittle bones – osteoporosis. Interestingly, the greater the degree of osteoporosis, the greater the degree of improvement on a gluten-free diet!”

“Another very common symptom of patients with a gluten sensitivity is terrible muscle pain, aches, and weaknesses. The reason? Sometimes, when the body makes antibodies to gluten to fight it off, it also makes antibodies to actin, myosin & endomysium. Every muscle in your body is made of actin, myosin & is covered by a sheath of endomysium. Now you have created a system where the immune response thinks it should be attacking the very things that make-up your muscles! This not only can make a person sore, but it can make them feel overly fatigued because their muscles are being torn down continuously.”

“Fatigue is the #1 symptom of people with allergies/sensitivities.”

“Athletes on a non-inflammatory diet consistently improve their performance.”

“The gut biopsy is no longer the gold-standard for testing for a gluten sensitivity. Other tests are catching Celiac and gluten sensitivity much earlier. If you have damage in your intestines, it’s already gotten bad. You want to catch an immune response to gluten early – before your gut is permanently damaged.”

CYREX LABS {cyrexlabs (dot) com} offers the best early testing.

“There are 2 steps to addressing gluten sensitivity: 1) stop throwing gas on the fire. You must eliminate gluten from your diet. Entirely & forever. 2) Heal the damage caused to your body (rebuild the brain cells that have been damaged, heal the gut wall that has been torn apart, fix the adrenals from all the stress your body has dealt with from constantly fighting the foods you’re eating)…

Many people eliminate gluten and begin to feel better. But many miss the 2nd step – you’re going to need to supplement with natural vitamins, minerals, and possibly herbs & nutrients in order to repair the damage. This is where a well-qualified naturopath or integrative physician/functional medicine doc can help you. Unfortunately, conventional doctors are not well-trained in this arena, and are often of little help in diagnosing or recovering from this. It can take 1-2 years of work on this issue to begin to fully heal the body. But don’t give up, your life will get better & better as you look, feel, and perform better & better!”

And the Doc’s final words of the presentation, which I love:
“Just think rationally & ask the question: Are there things that could be keeping me from truly being optimally healthy?”

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A quick update before we decide today if being gluten-free is ‘enough’! Since last post – I moved! I didn’t kill Drew or anyone else, although they likely wanted to end me at a few points along the way – but I’d say it was a reasonable success! We now live about 20 mins drive from our gym & very close to amazing running paths (perfect timing since it’s now time to turn these legs back into ‘running legs’!)

Ok, so let’s figure this out – is there ‘enough’ benefit from just going gluten-free? Last post, we determined that the food journal I’d kept was showcasing insulin-spiking foods, a lower amount of protein & very little fat. Here’s the food journal again to refresh your memory:
Bfast: Oats (steel cut) with berries and honey
Snack: Apple with almond butter, nuts (probably almonds or cashews)
Lunch: Caprese salad, asparagus
Snack: Gluten free crackers

To recap why I could have been doing much better than that: insulin-spiking foods make you perpetually hungry, they certainly don’t help you to lose weight, and they increase inflammation in your body. Eat enough insulin-spiking foods for long enough, and you break your signaling system (hello, type-II diabetes & metabolic syndrome).

Reason #2 that my food journal looked less-than-optimal: It contained foods with pro-inflammatory compounds in them.

I just wasn’t tuned in to this a few years ago. I’d stumbled across an anti-inflammatory diet once or twice, but never really looked at it or understood what the purpose of it was. So let me save you the time and mistakes that I went through, & let’s get you applying this information to your life right away.

We’re all united by “fight or flight”. Except plants. They just fight.

Every thing on this earth is fighting for survival so that it can reproduce and its genes can carry on for generations to come. For instance: if you come across a tiger, it will either run away or kill you. It’s instinctual to that tiger that it must protect its’ survival somehow – either by fleeing or by fighting. Plants are no different. Except that plants can’t flee. So what does a plant do to ensure that you or some other animal doesn’t eat it into extinction? It fights.

To fight for survival, it creates chemical compounds that, inside you, act like the drunk jerk-off at your party. They break the lamp, they instigate bad behavior from other guests, & they leave their mark after the party’s over.

If you’re eating gluten free, you already know about how gluten is one of the biggest jerk-off’s there is – every person on the planet reacts to gluten, those who react more significantly are the ones who test positively for gluten intolerance or Celiacs’. But be clear!…gluten does not break down in anyone’s body well. It unlocks the tight junctures of your stomach lining, allowing for tiny food particles to slip through into your bloodstream. These food particles go places they shouldn’t – like your joints, your ovaries, your pancreas, etc. Your immune system goes after them because, well, they’re not supposed to be there. And there you have rheumatoid arthritis, PCOS/infertility, cancer, and so on.

I can’t stress it enough. You do not function your best with gluten in your life. Period. 

Now, looking beyond gluten – there’s another jerk-off who broke your lamp at your party.

Who Invited The Jerk-Off?

Grains contain chemical compounds aptly called “antinutrients” because they are just that – anti-nutritional/opposite of nutritional. These chemical defenses include gluten, but also include lectins & phytic acid, which disrupt your digestion, cause inflammation, and prevent you from absorbing vital nutrients and minerals.

Mark Sisson clarifies: Lectins’ stickiness allows them to bind with the lining, particularly the villi, of the small intestine. The result? Intestinal damage(with impaired cellular repair potential), cellular death as well as compromised intestinal villi, which means reduced absorption of other nutrients, including minerals and protein.

Add to this altered gut flora, which can allow certain harmful bacterial strains like E. coli to run rampant. Furthermore, because the body is now responding full-time to the needs of the injured gut lining, proteins and other resources are redirected from other basic growth and repair processes. In addition, lectins have been associated with leptin resistance, a pre-diabetic condition linked to obesity.

If  we lost you in there, know this…lectins eff things up in your gut. Why would you invite that jerk-off into your gut? Your immune system is mostly housed in your gut, which lectins are messing with. Lectins, like gluten, open up your gut a la ‘leaky gut syndrome’ – setting the stage for autoimmune mayhem<–es no bueno. Antinutrients take up your body’s attention so that it can’t do growth & repair – growth & repair applies to how you recover from workouts, but even more so, it applies to aging. You look & feel old when your cells are no longer regenerating at the rate they were in your very young youth.

Maybe you’ll never develop these serious conditions…but sadly, at the rate of development in the US (like obesity) it’s likely you’ll end up in the sick & fat camp if you don’t do something about it now. But let’s just say you don’t get really fat or really sick. How can lectins bug you? Maybe, like gluten, you’re less sensitive to lectins than others – the cold you hang on to for 3 months…the excessive soreness in your body…the head fog you can’t shake some days…the menstrual issues that are painfully irritating…the ADD-like attitude of you or your child…maybe that’s all that will happen to you. But what if eliminating or significantly reducing your antinutrient intake allowed you to experience none of those things?

And if none of that gets you, maybe there’s vanity in you that doesn’t want to look like an old fart even though you are one! People who live a healthy lifestyle look younger. Period. No cream or potion is better than the effects of a good diet on your skin. 

But here we go gang, we’re bringing it home, here’s my plea to you:

How awesome do you want your health, wellness & performance to be? Do you want your life to be ‘fine’ or ‘optimal’? Do you want to be pro-active in fending off disease potential? How fit & healthy do you want your later years to be?

If you want to be as awesome in your health as possible, if you want to rise above ‘fine’ to be ‘optimal’, if you want to fight like hell to have a body that disease simply can’t live in, if you want to be 90 and rockin’ out to the Foo Fighters while driving your car around town, then you need to keep striving to make your exercise & nutrition more healthy.

As you learn new things about achieving optimal wellness, you need to apply them, so that you continually step up to greater heights of optimal health. And if that means taking another look at exactly what those ‘heart healthy whole grains’ are (not) doing for you, you should do it. What have you got to lose? And if you absolutely hate what going grain-free does for you, you can always go back to them.

If Not Grains, Then What?

If you’re a sedentary to slightly active person, you’re capable of sustaining your energy almost entirely from protein, fat & vegetables. General carb needs are less than 70g of carbs/day.

If you’re a into mid-length endurance activities, you’ll also do fine mostly running on protein, fat & veggies – but you’ll also have the room and the need for some starchy vegetables like sweet potatoes, and a bit of fruit. General carb needs are 100-150g of carbs/day.

If you’re a marathoner or Ironman-type triathlete, you’ll absolutely need starchy vegetables as a big source of carb energy to fuel training and recover from the calorie depletion. There are athletes doing these distances entirely grain-free- if you still insist of some kind of grain, consider significantly limiting the amount of grains you eat in favor of a greater consumption of sweet potatoes and other starchy vegetables. General carb needs are 150-200g of carbs/day.

For ideas on how to create meals that do not include grains, search through the archives of my Paleo category, as I have 30 days of meals listed there as part of the 30-day challenge I did in May of this year (while training for & PRing a 10mile race totally grain-free). There may be days that are uncomfortable as you transition from insulin-dependent grains to protein, fat & vegetables but keep in mind. As you’re taking out the grains, you’ll need to add in more of the other stuff. Getting more protein, fat & vitamins from veggies & fruits is a good thing!!

I’d love to hear what hurdles you overcome as you figure out how to eat grain-free! Please share your experience so the rest of us can possibly get some new ideas on great meals for living grain-free!

In addition to the busy-ness of the gym, I’m moving! And yes…getting threatened with stiff $ penalties if my apartment walls are not back to builder-white has been prioritized by me as greater than blogging. But I’m here now! So let’s get talking!

I was organizing the office last week, and while I was organizing the notebooks we have, one had the papers flipped so the back page was facing out. And on it had been written the first half of a day’s food journal – my food journal, actually. When I found that food journal, I read it and laughed while simultaneously shaking my head. “No wonder…” I thought. Here’s what my journal listed:

Bfast: Oats (steel cut) with berries and honey
Snack: Apple with almond butter, nuts (probably almonds or cashews)
Lunch: Caprese salad, asparagus
Snack: Gluten free crackers

Why do you think I laughed at this list & thought ‘no wonder?’…It looks like pretty decent food, right? I mean, it’s definitely not McD’s!

We’ll explore several variables that are ‘less than optimal’ with that food journal over a few blog posts (because you’ll glaze over if we do this all in 1 go) & it’s my hope that you’ll learn from my early mistakes & make more optimal choices for your meals and snacks.

So what’s wrong with that list of food? It’s just one big insulin-spiking roller coaster that contains very little protein or fat and a whole lotta carbs. It has approx. 34g of protein, 35g of fat and 100g of carbs. Remember I still had dinner to get through (where there would have been another grain + protein) to add to these totals. Compare that to today, when I don’t eat 100g of carbs in an entire day, I eat 2.5x that amount of fat, and eat 3.5x that amount of protein. And I’ve gotten significantly healthier since changing how I eat from that early food journal when I’d just gone gluten free.

Whether you’re on the Paleo bandwagon, the gluten free band wagon, or no wagon at all – one thing you simply must understand if you are to understand how food/lifestyle plays into health/wellness.

Inflammation is at the root of almost* all disease.

*the scientific theory does not allow for a definitive statement unless every variable has been proven/disproven. Since new diseases are still emerging, we cannot say all, but for the top killers of humans- heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and even cancer – look to inflammation first.

Here are 2 ways to create inflammation in your body. (There are other ways, but we’ll leave those for another time)

1. Eat foods that spike your blood sugar, causing lots of insulin to be released into your blood stream.

2. Eat foods that contain pro-inflammatory compounds in them.

Let’s take apart #1: When you eat a food, it breaks down into smaller components as you digest it. Eat a food that breaks down as a simple sugar (carbs do this) & your body has to send out insulin to deal with the spike in blood sugar. Because, you see, you no live long time if you have sugar for blood.

You don’t eat many sweets you say, eh? How about your whole wheat bread (2 slices raise blood sugar more than 2 Tbsp table sugar), your rolled oats (because you already know those ‘instant’ oats are not as healthy)…sorry, same deal- blood sugar spike, your side of fruit along with your yogurt (sigh…sorry Charlie, fruit is full of fructose & most yogurts have 8g of sugar or more)…and all those cheery little gluten-free goodies like gluten free pasta/crackers/bread/cookies/etc.? oh this is so not good, those spike your blood sugar even more than the whole wheat bread. Total bummer right? Initially, I agreed…yes, bummer.

But when I looked at what those silly little gluten free foods were doing for my wellness and performance, I was willing to try something different. What wasn’t working for me? Well, at the time I wrote that food journal, I was gluten free, but I was unknowingly relying on sugar to keep me going all day. No, I wasn’t eating sweets at every turn. I was eating grains at breakfast daily, as a small part of lunch or afternoon snack (usually tortilla chips or GF crackers) and a few nights a week quinoa would show up on the dinner plate.

Grains break down as glucose in your blood stream. Whole9 says it well in their Grain Manifesto: “When too much blood sugar is present in the system, your body quickly runs out of places to store it as useful energy, and will store any excess as body fat.

In addition, when too much insulin is present in the system, the cells in your body become desensitized to the hormonal “message” insulin is trying to send. Since the message isn’t getting through, your pancreas is prompted to release even more insulin when your body doesn’t need it.

Finally, chronically high insulin levels lead to a condition in which your body has trouble releasing the energy already stored in your cells. This is a bad place to be. If (via a diet high in carbohydrates) this pattern continues, insulin levels continue to rise, fat stores continue to grow and the body becomes completely incapable of responding to its own directions.”

Does that make you re-think that pre/post-long run bagel or your gluten free crackers and cheese afternoon snack? *For the record: I’ve leaned out more since cutting the grains in my diet way, way down. No, it’s not hard, you just have to learn what you’re doing. Vegetables and potatoes provide ample carbs for the diet of even an active person.

I’m also not “hangry” anymore. Hangry: ‘hungry’ + ‘angry’ = “hangry” <–not a good thing for all parties involved. Hangry-ness happens when your blood sugar is plummeting after a previous skyrocket. Now, I get hungry, but it’s a deep, real hunger of needing nutrients – not a response I’m feeling from my ‘here & then gone’ simple carb snacks. I can go several hours without eating, and am not wrecked from it. I used to eat literally every 90mins some bite, snack or meal would go in my mouth because of the blood sugar roller coaster I was on.

We’ll get to method #2 for creating inflammation in the next post. We’ll look at how you can limit the amount of pro-inflammatory compounds you eat & find more optimal foods that will fuel your body better. Till then, take a good look at what you’re eating – maybe do a food journal for a few days, and see what types of foods you’re eating most. If it’s a carb-heavy diet, take a serious look at how that’s making you feel, look, and perform & consider how a change to your diet could improve on those things.

That is a giant gummy bear in the picture. Consuming that would be 1 very bad way to regulate your blood sugar. Let’s talk about another…

You probably know that if you eat foods that spike your blood sugar, that’s not good. You may not totally “get” why, but you get the idea…high blood sugar means you ate something that was sugary, and at some level, you know that is not good for you. Right? ok. So did you know this?….

Whole wheat bread raises your blood sugar MORE than 2 Tablespoons of sugar.

It doesn’t matter if it’s fancy 9-grain or the weird wheat bread that is white (gotta trick those kiddies who only want white bread!) Whole wheat bread is a high glycemic index food, and was the main food cardiologist, Dr. William Davis, removed from his patients’ diets when he was trying to help them avoid obesity & its’ related diseases (namely, diabetes and heart disease).

The curious side effect of doing this? His patients reported back in the following months with not just normalized blood sugars (diabetics became NON-diabetics, no sign of the disease at all & no more need for medication!) but they also reported back with:
*major weight losses
*skin rashes they’d had for decades were suddenly gone
*acid reflux clearing up entirely, rheumatoid arthritis pain improved & disappeared
*asthma symptoms were eliminated
*deeper sleep & greater focus was reported
*athletes reported more consistent performance
*and even irritable bowel syndrome so severe a patient was looking at a colon removal – healed within 1 year

Many of his patients were NOT intolerant to gluten based on a blood or saliva test – yet they STILL improved their overall health by removing wheat/gluten from their diet.

Have I got your attention? Given the health stats of the US population, either you see yourself or someone you care about in the list above. This was NOT intended by Dr. Davis to be a study on the removal of wheat/gluten from the diet. He simply wanted to lower, then stabilize, their blood sugar by removing foods that severely raise blood sugar, wheat being one of the biggest influencers of blood sugar.

Once Dr. Davis started seeing consistent results like this, he began to investigate what exactly was going on here. If you look at every disease or condition above, they are ALL rooted in inflammation.

Wheat (and all products made using wheat and all of wheat’s by-products) contain gluten. What we know already is that people with gluten intolerance are highly affected by gluten. It cuts through the gut lining causing food particles to float around the body where they do not belong and set off immune responses that can cause cancer, PCOS, RA, IBS, allergies, reflux, and a list that is miles long of other symptoms.

What Dr. Davis was seeing, and explained so well in his book, Wheat Belly, is that “everyone, to some degree, is intolerant to gluten. Gliadin, the protein within gluten (which is within wheat) has the unique ability to make your intestine permeable. It triggers the release of a protein that handles intestinal permeability. This protein, called zonulin, unlocks the tight junctures of your gut wall & allow for food particles to pass through, making a “leaky gut”.”(1)

Think of it this way: Our stomach is billions of cells linked together by a seam, just like the seams in your clothing. Now remember, whether “intolerant” via a blood or saliva test or not, gluten comes along & once in the gut, zonulin realizes its time to party & comes out of the woodwork.

Zonulin is able to act like a needle and un-stitch the seam of cells in your gut. Breaking down food in your gut is an incredible process, & one that must be tightly controlled. And when the tight junctures of the gut are opened, that food can go anywhere in the body it wants. Once food escapes to other areas of the body, the immune system mounts a response, and if a particle of pizza is sitting near the ovaries, guess who’s under threat of developing some kind of fertility issue?

FYI – there are only a few other things in this world that share the ability to unlock those tight junctures of the gut lining. They include cholera & dysentery. Not the best company to be in, eh gluten?

So, it’s now established that gluten is a total douche canoe when it comes to your gut lining, whether you’re blood/saliva-tested as intolerant or not. But what about the blood sugar deal that started this whole blog post out?

Go back & look at the partial list of conditions above, that Dr. Davis saw improved in his patients. They are all rooted in inflammation. When your blood sugar is dis-regulated, inflammation runs rampant in your body. It will be very difficult to keep fat off your body (due to perpetual hormone imbalances) you will be slow to recover from workouts & athletic performances, & you will be incredibly susceptible to other diseases like heart disease & cancer, if left unchecked long enough.

While the process from high blood sugar to heart disease is a long one best saved for another blog post – understand this – when you ingest a food with a high glycemic index (like wheat bread, sugar, or processed snacks) a flurry of hormones are released to handle this. Because, you see, if that sugar was not managed out of your blood stream, you’d be dead before sunset. You cannot walk around with sugar coursing through your veins.

What foods have as high a glycemic index as wheat bread? Dried, sugar-rich fruits are higher, as are cornstarch, rice/potato/tapioca starch. That’s about it. For what it’s worth – salmon & vegetables have a glycemic index of, essentially, zero. (2)

So your body does what any good body should do – it uses hormones & metabolic responses to mitigate the blood sugar & get things “back to normal.” Well, sky-rocket your blood sugar enough times & you’ll permanently damage the system…enter type-II diabetes. When your blood sugar is dis-regulated, visceral fat (the stuff around your mid-section) starts showing up.

Visceral fat is a truly remarkable in that it deals double, triple, even quadruple blows upon the body.“Unlike fat in other areas of the body, visceral fat provokes inflammatory phenomena, distorts insulin responses, issues abnormal metabolic signals to the rest of the body, and in men, produces estrogen…hello man-boobs,” writes Dr. Davis.

Visceral fat not only produces abnormally high levels of inflammatory signals, but itself as a unit is also inflamed. It is filled with inflammatory molecules that empty directly into the liver, which in turn responds by producing yet another sequence of inflammatory signals. Visceral fat can almost be looked at like another organ…one you did not come with when you popped out of your Momma’s belly. You grew that sucker all by yourself, and it could very well be the organ that kills you (& will certainly be the organ that most disrupts the quality of your life).

So do yourself a favor & learn to manage your blood sugar. Eliminate the foods from your diet that have the highest glycemic index *it’s worth noting that foods on your grocers’ shelves that bear the label of “ADA [American Dietetic Association] Approved” are generally wheat-based & have some of the highest glycemic indices out there….oh what $$ can buy…* And for Gods’ sake, would you acknowledge that there are so many more foods out there that should hold a higher place in your life than gluten? It’s not good for anyone, whether you have the special “gluten intolerant” label on your medical chart or not. 

All I want is for you to live a high quality, optimally fit life – and for you to see that it is NOT HARD to do it without gluten. And if you can save yourself some diseases down the road, or lacking performance in the short-term, then you’re all the better for it. And PS – just because you are not clinically diagnosed as gluten intolerant now, does not mean you won’t develop it down the line. But that doesn’t matter anyways…because every person’s gut is intolerant to gluten regardless of clinical diagnosis.

Dr. Davis listed his resources in his index. Here are the ones I sited today:
(1)Drago S, El Asmar R, Di Pierro M et al. Gliadin, zonulin and gut permeability: effects on celiac and nonceliac intestinal mucosa and intestinal cell lines. Scand J Gastroenterol 2006;41:408-19

(2)Glycemic Index_Human Nutrition Unit, School of Molecular and Microbial Biosciences, University of Sydney: www.glycemicindex.com

The latest one you’ve probably seen is from yogurt maker Yoplait - they say if you eat one of their yogurts, a fruit, and a grain for breakfast for 2 weeks, along with some kind of sensible food elsewhere in your day, you’ll lose weight quickly. If all you know about nutrition is what the calorie label says, you’d think “yep! healthy!” But that’s not the case at all. When you break down the functional nutrients in each food item, you’ll see that the yogurt/grain/fruit combo is a DISASTER for your health & weight.

Here’s the problems with this plan:
Yogurt - 
1) If it’s not Greek Yogurt, it’s not worth your time. Regular yogurt has a high amount of sugar and very low protein. Greek Yogurt is the opposite of that – as long as you’re getting plain or vanilla – don’t ever get swayed into buying fruit already mixed in yogurt, add your own and save calories and sugar grams. Protein feeds muscles. Sugar feeds fat cells. If it does not have a solid amount of protein, 11g or more is good, you’re feeding your fat cells predominantly. Not what you want to do when trying to lose or keep fat off. 

I always recommend Stonyfield Farm Oikos Greek yogurt, because it’s organic, and I try to avoid non-organic dairy because of the extremely low quality of the milk produced by factory farmed cows. If you want a high quality Greek Yogurt, but don’t want to pay a little more for the Oikos quality, Chobani is another fine yogurt. I checked out the new Dannon and Yoplait Greek Yogrts for you – Dannon Plain is the only one I’d recommend. Even the Dannon Vanilla has fructose in it – and as you’ll see in our next segment, you want to avoid fructose at all costs!!

2) Yogurt contains casein – a protein found in dairy products (but not in whey protein powder). Casein has the same brutal effects that gluten has on the body to someone sensitive to it. You do NOT have to be diagnosed with a casein sensitivity to experience the effects of casein on the body. Casein is very difficult to breakdown, is highly addictive, and in the body, has an opiate-like effect on the brain. It raises the inflammation level in the body & high inflammation = fat storage. If your inflammation levels are high, you will have difficulty losing weight.

Fruit –
Fruit sugars, known as fructose, break down in the body differently than table sugar. Do not believe any commercial that tells you “sugar is sugar.” It is not!! Regular sugar breaks down in the bloodstream, and then is either used for energy or stored as fat. Fructose is a sugar that breaks down in the liver and forms triglycerides - the chemical form of some fat in the body – the fructose part of your fruit literally will break down as fat. Think your cholesterol levels are controlled by how much red meat you eat? You actually also need to take a look at how much fructose you eat if you’re watching your cholesterol.

Fruit is best kept to a minimum if you want to be lean and fit. My naturopath wants me steering clear of fruit unless I’m eating it with a protein, and then only occasionally. I eat berries, an occasional apple, and 1/2 a banana when I have a long run scheduled. That’s about it for me. Here’s a chart on fructose grams in fruit so you can make your own decision. (scroll down on the linked page for the chart)

Grains-
The Yoplait people want you eating some kind of grain along with your casein-opiod/yogurt & your fructose-triglycerides/fruit. If you’ve been reading here for a while, you know my stance on glutenous grains. I AM gluten intolerant – you may not be – but you definitely are better served to keep gluten to a minimum in your diet. Gluten, like casein, is highly addictive, raises inflammation in the body (making it easier to hang on to fat), & causes breakdowns in the intestinal lining of the gut (where the majority of your immunity is stored, and where 80% of your serotonin, the chemical in our body that makes us feel happy is stored).

Eating a diet rich in gluten serves little purpose. There are bountiful amounts of gluten free grains - I enjoy many of them and want you too as well! I eat Rudi’s Gluten Free toast with my eggs in the morning, gluten-free oats for pre-long distance run meals, corn tortillas for my mexican-style lunches, and quinoa along with my grass-fed beef burgers for dinner. So as you see, you can still eat grains and get enough carbs in your diet for energy, without dipping into the gluten-y grains that cause such problems. This excellent in-depth article outlines just how awful gluten is to anyone’s body.

The Bottom Line:
Yoplaits’ plan is for you to restrict your calories to see the weight loss. But calorie restriction without calorie quality will ultimately fail you. The number of calories you eat does matter. The TYPE of calories you eat matters as much or more than just meeting a certain calorie number at the end of the day. 

You could eat ‘x’ amount of calories all from 100-calorie pack snacks, instant oats, frozen meals, and Yoplait ‘Light!’ – but you’d be sacrificing a large amount of nutrients that your body needs while ingesting a large quantity of anti-nutrients. Your body requires certain nutrients every single day, multiple times per day. Your biological systems that regulate your weight NEED the proper nutrients – not getting them can have a disastrous effect on your weight loss efforts. I’ll say it again people, foods & drinks that inflame your body make it extremely difficult to lose fat. Inflammation = fat. Bottom line.

Sit down to each meal/snack in your day knowing that you’ve picked a solid protein as the foundation, have a food that looks just as it did when it was growing on a vine/in a tree, and are eating a bit of fat from a healthy source. It’s really not that hard, your weight loss results will be much more long-lasting, and you’ll have a much better chance of fending off much of the inflammatory diseases that are raging in this country today!

*Gluten intolerance does not come from eating too many preservatives in food. Preservatives are bad for you, but they have nothing to do with gluten intolerance. Gluten intolerance, at all levels, is related to the protein in gluten called gliadin, which is very difficult to digest.

*Gluten intolerance is not something you grow out of. If you have an intolerance, or Celiacs’, you will always have it. The ONLY way to “treat” gluten intolerance is to avoid ALL forms of gluten for the rest of your life.

*If you’re Celiac or Non-Celiac Gluten Intolerant (NCGI) eating it “once in a blue moon” is just as bad as eating it with reckless abandon: when you eat gluten, even a tiny crumb of it, your body sends the majority of your immune response to your intestines to fight the gluten – which means simple viruses, and not so simple cancer cells, and every range of immune compromise in between gets a fighting chance when your body is off fighting gluten.

*You’re not missing anything nutritionally by not eating gluten, when done properly. Since you won’t be eating breads & cereals fortified with B vitamins (that are synthetic & not as readily available to your body as other methods of ingesting B vitamins), you need to eat more & a greater variety of vegetables to get your vitamins & minerals.

*If you have gluten intolerance, there is a good chance some or all of the members of your family have it too, since it is a genetic permutation. Family members should be tested once one family member finds out they are Celiac or NCGI. If testing is to take place, DO NOT stop eating gluten until you have done your test. Going gluten free before taking a gluten intolerance test of any kind WILL skew the results.

We, humans, do not digest very well the protein in gluten, called gliadin. Some of us process it the same way we’d process opiates (that’s right, if you or your kids are intolerant, the brain will register the same as if it were a highly illicit drug). When we try to break down gluten, inflammation in our bodies goes up – inflammation = disease & breakdown in the form of heart disease, cancer, infertility, acid reflux, skin irritations & much more.

And I’m going to call out Elizabeth Ward, the RD who wrote on WebMD that “eating gluten does not usually cause damage – unless you have celiac disease.” She is utterly WRONG in this statement as referenced here, here, and in this amazing interview with a doctor. And this is why people become so confused – people who are unintelligent on the topic speak as if they are wise & confuse everyone. Which is part of why I write to you all, to take away the confusion, & lay it out straight for you so you can go be optimal YOU with all the right info!

*these are just my lessons, as always, consult a physician, or MUCH better yet - a natural health practitioner to get yourself taken care of

So, here we go, my summary of a few of the lessons learned in 500 Days of living Gluten Free:

- When you’re gluten free, your body fat should reduce with the diet change, but it won’t if you stick with pre-packaged cookies, pastas & items that are simply junk-food with a gluten free spin. Save gluten free sweets for special occasions, plan to do them up homemade-style & you’ll enjoy them far more than if you eat them because it’s Thursday.

- It’s not normal to be congested all the time – excess stuff in your nose, throat & ears could be a sign you’re over-doing it on the gluten or that your body simply is not processing the gluten well. To help the process along, get a neti pot – I named mine Herman, he does amazing work.

- Imitation crab meat has gluten in it. So does Taco Bell’s meat & the grilled chicken sandwich. Same goes for most seasoning packets & many chocolates – damn you chocolate makers!! Just make a piece of lovely chocolate without gluten as a filler! Thank you Ghiradelli for rising above that nonsense!

- If you commit to memory the locations of restaurants near you that “do” gluten free, your life will be much easier. Restaurants that do not carry a gluten-free menu may be able to do gluten free, but never ever count on it, unless you’d like to go hungry should they not be able to accommodate you. Trust me, I’ve had to go hungry several times because of counting on something I should never have counted on.

- When eating out (at a restaurant or someone’s home) ALWAYS ASK BEFORE INGESTING! Some diners add pancake batter to their eggs – eat them while doing gluten free & you’re in trouble – don’t even get me started on why they’d go & ruin eggs that way.

- Gluten free beer is delish, but for when you want a mixed drink – you may have problems with most vodkas if you’re sensitive to gluten since they are distilled from wheat. Ciroc, Chopin & Belvedere are NOT from wheat & thus fine to drink if gluten intolerant. (Wine is still the best!)

- If you have gluten intolerance, you may want to check on any casein intolerances too (found in dairy). I had keratitis (small white-ish bumps) on the back of my arms since I was a child & no one could tell me why I had it. Got the casein mostly out of my diet (I dot it on rotation diet now) & shocker! bumps are almost totally gone! A little more time & they will be entirely healed.

- Testing for gluten intolerance is best done through a saliva or blood test. Scratch tests tend not to show a consistently positive result because skin reactions set off a different immune response than those in the blood & saliva.

- Modified food starch is usually made with wheat. If it’s on the ingredient list of your purchase choice, put it back & walk away. You see, it takes only a microgram to set off a reaction in someone highly sensitive to gluten. Once that reaction happens, your immune system & gut (which are so closely connected!) have to go through the response steps, raise inflammation, & work through the healing response.

- A lot of gluten reactions present as bowel issues, but there are so many more that you would never think are related. For me, in the beginning when I’m make a rookie mistake & ingest a bit of gluten, the following 4 days would be torture mentally, emotionally, & energetically. Tired, cranky, sad & hardly the desire or energy level needed to workout hard. Pay attention to your body, it will tell you if you’re giving it something it does not want.

So let’s raise our wine glasses (filled with a gorgeous ruby pino) & toast another 500+! days of gluten free eating, gluten free discovering & gluten free optimal living!!

Glutamine is a non-essential amino acid, meaning your body can make it itself, whereas other amino acids you must take in through your diet because your body cannot produce it. Recently, it has been classified as a conditionally essential amino acid, which means that even though the body can produce it, if there is a time of extreme stress, the body’s demands exceed the rate at which the body can produce it & depletion occurs, requiring supplementation to support the body’s needs.

Glutamine is involved in more metabolic pathways than any other amino acid. It converts to glucose, which is required for energy. It helps to manage blood glucose levels as well as the correct pH level in the body (which is critical to health!). It serves as a fuel source for cells of the intestinal lining, that without it, those cells waste away making digestion & nutrient absorption challenging. It is also the base of the building blocks for DNA & RNA synthesis.

So to summarize that paragraph: Your body uses glutamine to *have energy for daily & workout function *control blood sugar spikes & drops, which affect how much fat you store & if you develop diabetes *keep your pH in a range that does not cause disease, breakdown & sickness *help your body use the nutrients from the food you eat & keep the place where 80% of your immune system is stored (in your gut) healthy & *to upkeep the very things that make up who you are.

Glutamine also plays a role in helping the body to secrete HGH (human growth hormone) – which helps the body metabolize fat & support new muscle growth. And supplementation of glutamine can help in the treatment of arthritis, autoimmune diseases, fibrosis, intestinal disorders – and can play a big role in helping people to not waste away when they are going through treatments for critical health issues like cancer & AIDS.

When you are in good health, your gut lining is strong & functioning as God intended it- absorbing nutrients, digesting & eliminating the foods we take in. When your gut health is compromised, which antibiotics, the Pill, poor nutrition, extreme stress, medical treatments, lack of breast milk received as a newborn, and many more things can cause – your body lacks a major player in the key to optimal health. Glutamine plays a big role in helping the gut to heal if it is damaged & remain strong, especially if you’re someone like me, who already has an altered gut due to almost 3 decades of gluten intolerance that I didn’t know about & ate a gluten-filled diet that was damaging my gut the entire time.

Glutamine has many benefits for optimal health, but, if you are hyper-sensitive to MSG, you should use glutamine supplementation with caution as glutamine metabolizes in the body into glutamate. So if you have physical reactions to MSG in food, give due diligence before starting to supplement with glutamine. MSG & glutamate as metabolized from glutamine are NOT the same thing – MSG is a chemical compound that scientists still don’t really understand other than that it can make any food taste more like that food. MSG is EXTREMELY dangerous to consume regularly. Glutamate as the metabolized form of glutamine is simply what the body does to this amino acid to make it readily available for use within the body.

Glutamine is just one supplement that may help you to move closer to optimal health. Our diets today are so nutrient deficient, even in fruits & vegetables if they are not organic, and we’ve done such damage to them from living an unhealthful life at some point in our lives or from taking antibiotics, that we all need to consider supplementation to help us return to optimal health. We should not rely on them as something we need forever, as your supplement profile should change as your health changes, but you should explore supplements as an added benefit to your health plan.

Consult with your naturopath before beginning a program (I’d say doctor, but to be honest, very few doctors understand supplements in a natural or holistic way so you’d probably be met with the answer “you don’t need that” if you talk to them).

Gluten has the potential to shorten your life if you consume it with ANY level of intolerance. Gliadin, the protein in gluten, is difficult to digest & for those with intolerance to it this means that those proteins sneak through the stomach & into the blood stream, where they make their way to any & all parts of the body and act as an opiod. That’s right, when you eat gluten with an intolerance, even a tiny amount, it’s going to places like your brain, your joints, your heart, your immune system, and creating problems such as cancer, arthritis, brain fog, mood changes, and tons more.

So yeah, it’s not ok to eat gluten – even tiny amounts – if you’re intolerant. That doesn’t mean get crazy, but it means be totally freaking educated so you don’t accidentally activate cancer cells because your body does not have active natural killer cells because the gluten disables them. That’s one thing that can happen if you still eat gluten. As you can see, I’m passionate about this.

And if you don’t have any intolerance? Still better to limit your gluten intake because it IS an inflammatory food, which means when you eat it, your inflammation levels rise as your body tries to process it. Inflammation is seen in the body as dysfunction like arthritis, heart attacks, skin issues – and as excess stored body fat – for those of you who’d like to look like you workout.

So – what’s the deal with Modified Food Starch? (And modified corn/tapioca starch, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, and many more “flavorizers”) Well, I saw my naturopathic doc to get another ASI Stress Test done to check my adrenal levels (they’d been elevated the last time we checked). The test also checks your insulin levels, cortisol levels, DHEA & progesterone levels, and for any immune reaction to gluten in your system. When he called with the test results, I was shocked that he told me I was “borderline” for gluten intolerance.

“Um, Doc, shouldn’t my number for that reading be 0 since I already don’t eat gluten?” “Well Kate, obviously it’s sneaking through somewhere, one big area people don’t realize is they consume any products that contain things like HVP, modified food/corn/tapioca starch, and many more things, that the process to make those uses gluten- THUS, if you consume something that contains those things, you’re ingesting gluten.” Crap.

As you know I don’t eat processed/packaged stuff very often – but have you looked yet to see how pervasive those additives are in food today???? It’s sick how they are in virtually anything on a store shelf today. I was looking at tapioca pudding last week as a nice little summer-weather dessert for me & my man – and every single type contained modified tapioca starch. Your yogurt may have it. Your pudding cup definitely does. Your fruit snacks do. And if you check the things you eat daily, I’ll bet you find stuff that has chemicals in it that are made using gluten.

These are all basically new versions of MSG, and along with MSG, they should all be banned. They don’t do the body any favors. There are better ways to make food because we’ve done it for a long time without these newer chemical additives to food.

So! If you’re trying to stay gluten free, be wary that if you eat these chemicals, you are consuming gluten. I’m watching everything that goes into my diet now to see just how often I run into these food additives & to see if I can step around them. I urge you to read your labels this week & see if you can count how many times you go to eat something that contains these things in the ingredient list. It all comes down to eating as nutritionally valuable as possible – if that food gives you a big bang for your buck, then have at it! If it’s edible stock price is plummeting as you read the ingredients list, know that if you consume it, you’re consuming a lower quality product for your high performance body.

Never would I want this much frosting on my cake

 Performance Center where I work. Long story short, I’m going to be working a booth to help golfers determine if  they are muscularly imbalanced & if so, how we can help them. Going to be at it all weeekend, so blogging will be difficult.

So my birthday is coming up. I love birthdays. I’m a birthday fan thanks to the giant deal my parents’ made out of birthdays when I was  growing up. I even believed in a “Birthday Man” who brought my presents….yeah, I’m not sure what he’d look like either, but I thought everyone knew about the Birthday Man. Thanks to him I got some awesome presents as a kid. So needless to say, I think birthdays are really fun – even when they are a somewhat age-ing milestone birthday & are the 1st birthday as a gluten free follower.

Now, you know that I love cooking meals & have been doing well learning to bake gluten free desserts, as witnessed here by my key lime madness & here with my cheesecake dreams. But it’s my birthday, and frankly, I’d rather not bake my own birthday cake. I will if I have to (although with what free time I’m not sure), but I’d rather not. So I called Whole Foods yesterday to find out about cakes in their Gluten-Free Bakery. The first girl I talked to said, “Well, I don’t know how gluten free you need it to be…” Ummm, seriously? Was she looking for a % of gluten free to non-gluten free? “Totally gluten free is how gluten free I need it to be,” is what I said – along with other thoughts in my head that are not worth saying here. So she let me know that they have a banana loaf that is gluten free if I’d like that.

I would not like a banana loaf for my birthday cake thank you very much.

So I called another Whole Foods. They have cupcakes, but no cakes. Onward I go looking for other local bakeries that do gluten free. I came across a local bakery that does cakes. It looked promising. Looks like a cake. Has frosting on it. Gluten free & vegan options. Fingers crossed as I dialed the store to find out how much it would cost to put together a cake with frosting & writing on it.

$45 for a single layer, feeds 7 people, gluten free cake. Y

And this, my friends, is why you should know how to cook & bake healthy, and especially gluten free, foods & dishes. Because the mark-up on a cake is insane. And when things are labeled “gluten free,” they automatically get to cost more…1) because, in honesty, the flours are a bit more expensive than regular white flour, but 2) because they know they can charge more because where else are you going to find a gluten free cake?? Certainly not Whole Foods, that’s for sure.

So when you think, “I’m not a good cook, I can’t bake worth a dime.” The truth is, if you can follow a recipe, you can cook & bake & actually that skill is worth at least $45.