I haven't shared this with you because I wasn't sure where you stood on this whole '21st Century Nutrition', but the late 90s saw me on a LOT of medications: Remeron, Elovil, Prozac, two statin drugs, and a drug that helped me sleep. I was not miserable but I was getting fatter and fatter and despite the TWO statin drugs, my cholesterol/triglycerides were maxing out(if you remember one of the last tests you did for me it was in a similar state).
I went to see a 'Naturopath' who was German, trained in Ayurvedic, Homeopathic and even Western medicine. He said 'Melancholy, when you break down the word, means black bile. You have a sick liver'.
He put me on the most daunting diet I've done to date: No Wheat, No Dairy, No sugar(including fructose from fruit).
I stayed on the diet for 18 months. It was torture. Fortunately, I did this during the .com downturn circa 2001-2002, when I had little work and could afford the time to make all my meals from scratch. However: two weeks in I had serious heroin-like withdrawal symptoms that had me with shakes and cravings for a banana split or pretty much any sweets. The phelgm my body produced was copious and rainbow-colored. After that, I've never been depressed. Also, my allergies, headaches, and weird knee pains(I was 29!!) went away. Since then, I've been on different kinds of diets, but that initial cleanse was so deep and powerful that I've not had allergies, depression, sleep problems or any of the things I was suffering from back in my late 20s. I've also had healthy cholesterol readings as well as much better physical checkups.
So I can say from experience that some of us just aren't meant to be eating certain foods. If you imagine what your basic racial stock is, then think about the regions and foods that racial stock historically was exposed to and you get an idea of what you are probably genetically stacked to digest fully. Me, I'm Irish/Scottish. Barley does my body wonders, but wheat wreaks complete and total havok. Lots of fat and meat do me wonders. Lots of sugars and fruits are terrible and I get hypoglycemic. Corn... don't get me started, but I think only full-blooded Native Americans can handle corn, yet we're pretty much made of corn here in America. (The meat you eat is made of corn and corn is in almost every processed food in one way or another.)
Your ethnic background commentary makes much sense, but wheat is very much in my ethnic background. There are some questions being raised at this point, given the increasing rate of individuals appearing to have problems with wheat; is it us or has the wheat changed? I would suggest the same about corn.
The older I, get the more concerned I become about our tendency to monoculture for our food stuffs. Don't know how much a fan you are of tomatoes, but I can't wait for the local heirlooms to come to market each year. Each variety has a different taste and texture. Shouldn't the nutritional value vary from plant to plant and strain to strain as well? Not only that, but with the havoc we are wreaking on the environment and bringing about significant climate change, I am truly worried that we are going to see many of our cash crops fail, with too many eggs in too few agricultural baskets.
Further, I'm concerned about the way we raise things, ie,pesticides, GMO, and the way we chemically fertilize and that's just talking about unprocessed foods. How many of us actually really cook? How often do we open something once we get home, that was either canned or frozen or pick up something at a take out on the way home? I work to avoid things such as high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, but you really have to work at that to be successful. Don't even get me started on preservatives. And how we treat and feed our livestock? You're right, for the most part, they're just as much surviving on a diet as alien to their evolution as we are, not to mention antibiotics in their feed. Then we eat them, and we expect there not to be both heath and ecologic consequences?
Lastly, our lives have evolved, but our genetic make up? Not so much. We are still very much the same species our ancestors were, 4 and 5 generations back. We evolved over the millenia as a mobile species, but how many of us spend our days sitting at a desk or working in an office, and not walking, lifting, carrying, harvesting, etc. Where is the labor to actually burn the calories we're consuming? I cannot tell you how many people I have seen arrive in this country from the third world at normal weight, and 10-15-20 years later, are 20-35-50 lbs heavier than they were when they arrived, suffering from all the illnesses so rampant with the western diet and lifestyle.
So, in short, yeah, I do believe what we said back in the 60's. You are what you eat.
You're right. I've watched a few documentaries recently, on YouTube, like King Corn and similar where they question the wisdom of our food supply chain. In King Corn is where they break down the carbon of a average American and show that it's 90+% corn. Then they discuss that corn today is nothing like corn yesterday.
This is the same with wheat. Things like oats, barley, millet and rye are pretty much so sturdy that they haven't been modified much in the last century. Wheat, however, is completely different now than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. I'm searching for the place I found this but I can't seem to find it so I can't name the book that discusses the alteration of wheat over the years. Things like selective breeding for gluten and cross breeding species to get more cold resistance and insect resistance... while it's more like 'old fashioned' genetic engineering through 'plant eugenics' and not the Monsanto-level genetics we get today with 'roundup ready'.
Soy, Wheat, Corn are huge in the food industry and they're the hardest for almost every human to digest because we have yet to evolve the kinds of enzymes that can break down these genetic freaks.
One promising thing I have been seeing in my science blogs(Slashdot covered it a few times as well) is the gut bacteria research. They're finding that slender people have different gut bacteria that is more efficient at absorbing nutrients and even produce anti-inflammatory byproducts. Fat people tend to have bacteria that putrefies food making harder to absorb the nutrients, they also have byproducts that produce inflammation.
I'm betting that when you and I quit eating wheat, our joints get better because we stop feeding one or two strains of inflammation-producing bacteria.
I went to see a 'Naturopath' who was German, trained in Ayurvedic, Homeopathic and even Western medicine. He said 'Melancholy, when you break down the word, means black bile. You have a sick liver'.
He put me on the most daunting diet I've done to date: No Wheat, No Dairy, No sugar(including fructose from fruit).
I stayed on the diet for 18 months. It was torture. Fortunately, I did this during the .com downturn circa 2001-2002, when I had little work and could afford the time to make all my meals from scratch. However: two weeks in I had serious heroin-like withdrawal symptoms that had me with shakes and cravings for a banana split or pretty much any sweets. The phelgm my body produced was copious and rainbow-colored. After that, I've never been depressed. Also, my allergies, headaches, and weird knee pains(I was 29!!) went away. Since then, I've been on different kinds of diets, but that initial cleanse was so deep and powerful that I've not had allergies, depression, sleep problems or any of the things I was suffering from back in my late 20s. I've also had healthy cholesterol readings as well as much better physical checkups.
So I can say from experience that some of us just aren't meant to be eating certain foods. If you imagine what your basic racial stock is, then think about the regions and foods that racial stock historically was exposed to and you get an idea of what you are probably genetically stacked to digest fully. Me, I'm Irish/Scottish. Barley does my body wonders, but wheat wreaks complete and total havok. Lots of fat and meat do me wonders. Lots of sugars and fruits are terrible and I get hypoglycemic. Corn... don't get me started, but I think only full-blooded Native Americans can handle corn, yet we're pretty much made of corn here in America. (The meat you eat is made of corn and corn is in almost every processed food in one way or another.)
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The older I, get the more concerned I become about our tendency to monoculture for our food stuffs. Don't know how much a fan you are of tomatoes, but I can't wait for the local heirlooms to come to market each year. Each variety has a different taste and texture. Shouldn't the nutritional value vary from plant to plant and strain to strain as well? Not only that, but with the havoc we are wreaking on the environment and bringing about significant climate change, I am truly worried that we are going to see many of our cash crops fail, with too many eggs in too few agricultural baskets.
Further, I'm concerned about the way we raise things, ie,pesticides, GMO, and the way we chemically fertilize and that's just talking about unprocessed foods. How many of us actually really cook? How often do we open something once we get home, that was either canned or frozen or pick up something at a take out on the way home? I work to avoid things such as high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated vegetable oil, but you really have to work at that to be successful. Don't even get me started on preservatives. And how we treat and feed our livestock? You're right, for the most part, they're just as much surviving on a diet as alien to their evolution as we are, not to mention antibiotics in their feed. Then we eat them, and we expect there not to be both heath and ecologic consequences?
Lastly, our lives have evolved, but our genetic make up? Not so much. We are still very much the same species our ancestors were, 4 and 5 generations back. We evolved over the millenia as a mobile species, but how many of us spend our days sitting at a desk or working in an office, and not walking, lifting, carrying, harvesting, etc. Where is the labor to actually burn the calories we're consuming? I cannot tell you how many people I have seen arrive in this country from the third world at normal weight, and 10-15-20 years later, are 20-35-50 lbs heavier than they were when they arrived, suffering from all the illnesses so rampant with the western diet and lifestyle.
So, in short, yeah, I do believe what we said back in the 60's. You are what you eat.
Reply
This is the same with wheat. Things like oats, barley, millet and rye are pretty much so sturdy that they haven't been modified much in the last century. Wheat, however, is completely different now than it was at the beginning of the 20th century. I'm searching for the place I found this but I can't seem to find it so I can't name the book that discusses the alteration of wheat over the years. Things like selective breeding for gluten and cross breeding species to get more cold resistance and insect resistance... while it's more like 'old fashioned' genetic engineering through 'plant eugenics' and not the Monsanto-level genetics we get today with 'roundup ready'.
Soy, Wheat, Corn are huge in the food industry and they're the hardest for almost every human to digest because we have yet to evolve the kinds of enzymes that can break down these genetic freaks.
One promising thing I have been seeing in my science blogs(Slashdot covered it a few times as well) is the gut bacteria research. They're finding that slender people have different gut bacteria that is more efficient at absorbing nutrients and even produce anti-inflammatory byproducts. Fat people tend to have bacteria that putrefies food making harder to absorb the nutrients, they also have byproducts that produce inflammation.
I'm betting that when you and I quit eating wheat, our joints get better because we stop feeding one or two strains of inflammation-producing bacteria.
Reply
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