out for wheat
▶ Understanding gluten intolerance
▶ Getting a definitive answer by testing
▶ Resisting temptation
▶ Seeing how gluten affects behavior
Maybe you’re new to the gluten-free lifestyle and you want to know what you can safely eat and how to turn it into a gluten-free gastronomic delight. Or maybe you’ve been gluten-free and are looking for some spice in your life and some giddyap in your gluten-free.
Maybe you suspect you have some type of gluten sensitivity, and you’re trying the gluten-free diet to see if you feel better; or you’re trying the gluten-free diet to help manage your weight. Or maybe someone you love and cook for (or cook for and love) is going gluten-free and you’re doing your best to support, encourage, and nourish your hungry guy or gal.
Why you’re cooking gluten-free doesn’t really matter, because you are. And that’s awesome. Because the gluten-free diet can be the healthiest diet on the planet, it may dramatically improve your health, both physical and emotional.
For those of you who really want to dig into the details about the health benefits of a gluten-free diet, you may want to consider buying the companion to this book, Living Gluten-Free For Dummies. It contains everything you need to know about the medical conditions as well as practical and emotional guidelines for living (and loving) a gluten-free lifestyle.
For now, here are the basics so you know why your health may dramatically improve when you go gluten-free. Too good to be true? Read on, friends, read on.
Looking Into the Downsides of Wheat
You’ve probably been raised to believe that wheat – especially whole wheat – is really good for you. Although wheat does offer some health benefits, the same benefits can easily be found in other foods without the unpleasant side effects that many, if not most, people experience. But here’s the bottom line: Wheat’s not good for anyone, whether you have gluten sensitivity or celiac disease or not. Here are ten big problems with wheat.
The human stomach may not fully digest wheat. Cows, sheep, and other ruminant animals do just fine with wheat because they have more than one stomach to complete the digestion process. When the partially digested wheat leaves their stomach, it goes to another stomach where it is further broken down, then to another and another until the process is complete.
Unlike our bovine buddies, we humans have only one stomach. When the wheat leaves our tummies, it’s not fully digested. Those undigested portions begin to ferment, and do you know what the byproduct of fermentation is? Gas. Icky, belchable, fart-forming gas. For many people, this accounts for the gas and bloating they feel after they eat wheat, whether they have gluten sensitivity or not.
Recently, lots of books and articles have been written on the subject of pro-inflammatory foods. These foods are rapidly converted to sugar, causing a rise in the body’s insulin levels (read more about this in the later section, “Wheat can mess up your blood sugar levels”), causing a burst of inflammation at the cellular level. Almost everyone knows that blood sugar rises from eating sweets (cakes, cookies, and candy). But lots of foods not considered sweets have pro-inflammatory effects – foods that have wheat in them, like cereal, pasta, breads, and bagels. These foods can be high in simple starches; when these are broken down, they act the same as sweet foods, raising blood sugar levels, releasing insulin, and causing inflammation. Bear in mind that the inflammation occurs in all people, not just those with wheat or gluten sensitivities.
It turns out that inflammation, once thought to be limited to “ -itis” conditions like arthritis, may actually be at the root of a number of serious conditions, including heart disease, Alzheimer’s, and some types of cancer. And if vanity is the only way to prove a point, consider this: Dr. Nicholas Perricone, renowned author of The Wrinkle Cure, considers inflammation to be the “single most powerful cause of the signs of aging.”
One great tool for identifying pro-inflammatory foods is the glycemic index. The glycemic index measures how fast your blood sugar rises after you eat a food that contains carbohydrates (like pasta, potatoes, and bread). It rates foods on a scale from 0 to 100, where water is 0 and table sugar is 100. The lower the glycemic index rating, the less likely the food is to be pro-inflammatory. Foods made from wheat, especially refined wheat, have a glycemic index in the 50 to 80-plus range, putting them on the high side and classifying them as pro-inflammatory.
So what is leaky gut syndrome? Good question. The simple-and-not-perfectly-correct-but-close-enough answer is that leaky gut syndrome is a condition whereby stuff is leaking from your gut into your bloodstream – stuff that shouldn’t be there, like toxins (and large molecules like gluten!).
So how does it happen? When people eat wheat, their bodies produce extra amounts of a protein called zonulin.
The lining of the small intestine is basically a wall of cells that most materials can’t pass through on their own. When important vitamins and minerals are present, zonulin tells the passageways in the intestinal wall to open so those nutrients can pass into the bloodstream. The blood then carries the nutrients to other parts of the body, where they can be used to nourish the body.
But when people eat wheat – not just people with celiac disease, but all people – their zonulin levels rise too high, and the passageways open too much and let things into the bloodstream that shouldn’t be there. This increased permeability of the lining of the small intestine, known as leaky gut syndrome, can cause a variety of problems health-wise.
For people with celiac disease, leaky gut syndrome starts the cascade of events that lead to health problems. Gluten is a large molecule that really shouldn’t be able to get into the bloodstream, but it does because zonulin levels are too high, and the body allows it in. After it’s in the bloodstream, the body sees the gluten molecule as an invader – a toxin – so it launches an attack, and in doing so, it damages the area around the gluten molecule, which includes the lining of the small intestine. The villi, which are short hair-like structures that are designed to increase the surface area of the small intestine so it can absorb more nutrients, are damaged in the attack. That’s why people with celiac disease who continue to eat gluten often have serious nutritional deficiencies.
Most of the wheat people eat is refined, which means manufacturers take perfectly good wheat – which has some nutritional value, especially in the bran and germ – and they take the good stuff away. You can read “refined” as “little nutritional value” wheat. Sadly, that’s the form that most of our wheat-based products use – refined wheat nearly void of nutritional value, making it a high–glycemic index food that just makes you fat and messes with your insulin production.
Did you know that manufacturers actually have to enrich refined wheat because they’ve taken out all the nutrients? And even then, the wheat’s not that valuable, nutritionally speaking. Whole wheat provides more nutritional value than non-whole wheat, but it’s still wheat, and there are more than just a few reasons that wheat may not be good for anyone.
Aha! Now that got your attention! Okay, so you can live with the gas, bloating, and leaky gut syndrome, but wrinkles? I think not! Well then, put down that bagel, or buy stock in Botox, because according to some experts, the inflammatory effect of wheat – especially refined wheat – can cause wrinkles (see the earlier section “Wheat is a pro-inflammatory agent” for more on pro-inflammatory foods).
The most famous of these experts is Dr. Nicholas Perricone, a dermatologist and adjunct professor of medicine at Michigan State University, who maintains that inflammation contributes to accelerated aging and that through diet (and supplements and creams), you can erase scars and wrinkles, increase the production of collagen and elastin, enjoy radiance and glow, and develop a dewy, supple appearance to your skin.
Of course, this wouldn’t be relevant unless the “diet” he