Here is my first attempt at giving you something very informative.  Hope it helps.  As a trainer/coach I am often asked, “What should I eat?”  Truthfully, up until the recent future I was ill prepared to answer it.  In many ways I still am but working on it.  However, with the extra time I have had on my hands and the addition of shi**y-britches (Dustin) to the house hold I have boned up on a few thing nutritionally.  Lately I have been hung up on one substance, GLUTEN.  Rather than ask what should I eat, people need to also seriously consider what they shouldn’t eat.  This is kind of negative and goes against good coaching principals but taking Gluten out of your diet will improve every aspect of your well being.

First off, what is gluten and where do we find it?  Gluten is the protein in foods processed from wheat, barley and rye, just think wheat and flour.  Interestingly enough it’s the Latin word for glue (thanks Wikipedia! By the way would you eat glue?).

Why should it be taken out of your diet?  First of all, it should not be avoided, it needs to GO, BE BANISHED, and EXPELLED NOW and here are the main points as clear as I can put them.  Check out this link for more info:  http://www.mypassion4health.com/articles/gluten_sensitivity.html  

  

1) Gluten limits your stomachs ability to absorb all essential goodness.  Gluten causes inflammation of the gut leading to a disrupted digestive track and the mal-absorption of nutrients in other foods.  With food prices rising and store likes whole foods marking up anything healthy gluten ensures that you aren’t getting your money’s worth, your literally flushing it down the toilet.  

2) All people, including you and me have an auto immune response to gluten, yes all people; EVERYONE!  Without getting overly nerdy, this means that when you eat gluten the white blood cells in your body attack the gluten and damage the surrounding tissue.  A signal is sent from the brain that says attack, not digest, this is a bad thing.  This leads to systemic inflammation, code for all systems down.  In other works, if your body were a medieval kingdom, gluten is the agent that causes the knights who are supposed to protect the town to slaughter its own people.  To be very honest with you, no matter what is wrong with you, arthritis, lupus, cardiovascular disease and irritable bowel syndrome, its symptoms will worsen if you eat gluten and subside if you eject gluten.  The immune response is different for each of us.  In some it is very small for others who have celiac disease eating gluten could kill them, really.

        

It’s not an easy fix.  Some researchers believe that 50 micrograms can affect a system for a month to 6 weeks.  Some researchers also believe that if you were to take gluten completely out of your diet today, it would take your small intestine 6-12 months to fully heal.  Wheat products are cheap and provide a way to feed the masses but severely limit your body’s ability to do an essential task, digest.  Get off the gluten and get better.  You might not see the results now, which is a problem in our society, but you will get better.

 

By the way, this post could not have been written without Shi**y-britches’ help.  For all things nutrition I rely on him.  Dustin leans heavily on the teachings of the Paleo Wizard, Robb Wolf.  Check out the Paleo Solution, Robb’s blog, and Paleo Solution’s free pod casts on I-tunes for entertaining and awesome info about eating Paleo.