Back On The Diet Train September 16, 2011

Longtime readers know I developed type 2 diabeetus a while back and had to start doing all the stuff necessary to deal with that – medicine, blood-monitoring, diet, exercise, blah blah blah. I was actually doing very well and got my blood sugar levels firmly under control and dropped a significant chunk o’ me over the course of a year. I even something something number in my last blood test into the normal range. Which meant that the diabeetus was gone. I even stopped taking the medication. Then I went on vacation and gave myself permission to indulge and to skip exercise as a reward. Yeah. That was…unwise. I never re-established those healthy things and in the year since I regained almost all the weight. Interestingly my blood sugar levels still kept in the normal range though and I have none of the symptoms of diabeetus. I chalk that up to staying mostly away from the really bad stuff like sugary soda-pop and the like, but obviously I”m not doing well in other areas. Like fast food. It’s time to get back to doing healthy things again…but with a twist.

NO WHEAT

Yesterday Instaheh linked to this book on Amazon: Wheat Belly: Lose the Wheat, Lose the Weight, and Find Your Path Back to Health. It’s 10 bucks on the Kindle so I went ahead and grabbed a copy. I started reading it yesterday. Currently I’m 30% of the way through. It’s written by a medical doctor and he’s convinced that modern wheat gluten is some of the worst stuff you can possibly eat and that epidemic obesity and diabeetus is closely related to vast increase in consumption of wheat products as promoted by the official USDA guidelines of eating less fat & meat and eating “lots of healthy grains”. He’s making a persuasive case that wheat is a whole system messer upper.

Why Wheat, Why Now?

There’s been kind of a building noise around gluten for a while. Lots of products are touting themselves as “gluten free”. There’s a whole aisle devoted to the stuff at Whole Foods I noticed. Mr Ace O’Spades asked a question a while back about this stuff along the lines of “Humans have been eating wheat products for thousands of years. Wouldn’t we have noticed a problem with wheat a long time ago?” Well, yes and no. Actually societies that turned to a largely grain-based diet did indeed start developing diseases and problems that they didn’t have before. But obviously not to the extent we’ve seen more recently. Previously people exercised a lot more than we do now just in the course of their everyday lives. That alone can mitigate a lot of things. But the real culprit (according to this guy anyway) is the advent of modern wheat strains that are almost in complete prevalence today. He’s saying that the genetic structure of modern dwarf wheat is very, very different from what our ancestors ate, and that the gluten from this stuff breaks down in the digestive system into compounds that humans were never designed to handle. And many of us are in fact NOT handling them very well.

Oh, and apparently you shouldn’t try to switch to stuff like breads and crackers that advertise themselves as “gluten-free” because they’re based on other starch-flours, which while not as bad they’re still doing bad blood sugar stuff.  I’ve still yet to get to how to identify all sources of wheat products in commercially produced food. Like is maltodextrin derived from wheat? Eh, it can be apparently, though that article says it’s gluten-free. The point remains that they use wheat-derived products in lots of stuff that don’t necessarily make themselves immediately apparent.

I’ll let you know how things go.