My first intention approaching this article was to go into whether gluten is as bad as the present science is showing it to be. But as I started thinking about the subject, it became obvious that all kinds of things get put into the villain category by our science that we the public blindly accept without question because the science proves it to be true. The problem is not if something is bad, but how relevant is that information?
For example, I will readily accept that being struck by lightening is bad for me. Should I spend my life indoors to protect myself from such a bad thing? Or should I look a little closer and find out what circumstances make it likely that I could be struck by lightening and just avoid those situations? The first choice is obviously the safest and requires no thought or investigation on my part, but also creates the greatest infringement on my freedom. The second requires me to do the work to effectively assess the real risk and then reap the reward of increased freedom by accepting a responsible risk.
Let’s apply the second line of thinking to gluten to see what we find. In a healthy individual gluten is simply a protein the digestive tract breaks down into amino acids to feed the body. People have been using gluten containing grains for thousands of years. Why is gluten sensitivity such a big issue all of a sudden? Even celiac disease, a genetic disease found in one person per 133 is more common. Testing blood samples from 50 years ago showed celiac disease has increased 300%. What is going on? What is really creating this sudden trouble that 15% to 40% of the population has with gluten?
Modern research medicine does not look for actual causes of problems, because they only make money fighting the final consequences of a problem with drugs. Understand this, no pharmaceutical company or university research team gets funded to eliminate health problems, only to profitably manage them. So don’t look to the normal sources of medical information for causes behind health problems. The same is true for social problems like poverty, crime, drug abuse, cancer, terrorism, and so on. The big money flows to whomever promises to solve the symptoms, not the actual core problems.
Lets get back to gluten. What is the real problem no one wants to look at? The truth is gluten sensitivity starts many years before there are any symptoms. The real problem is not gluten, it is the integrity of the intestinal lining. Your gut lining is only one cell thick, yet it is tasked with keeping everything you eat in the inner gut and away from the blood and body except just the tiniest broken down bits of food – amino acids, sugars, minerals, water, and fatty acids. To work correctly you need a healthy digestive system, a healthy diet, and a relatively low stress life. Americans mostly had that up until the 60’s. What changed? The American lifestyle changed – convenience foods, two wage earner families, and the gradual decline of the buying power of the dollar produced generations of Americans whose diet crapped out and stress levels climbed.
In simple terms the healthy gut lining started to be destroyed. Holes are burned through the lining allowing large proteins like gluten and bacteria parts to get into the blood causing a massive upset to the immune system. Stress shuts down the digestive ability of the stomach and pancreas, so now toxic bacteria grow in the gut causing inflammation as well as foods not being properly digested. More and more chemicals are being added to foods that block their digestion. For instance food coloring binds to proteins blocking our digestive enzymes from attaching and breaking down the proteins into harmless amino acids.
Acid reflux is one of the classic signs that the stress has shut down normal stomach acid production, which in turn allows the 1/10th strength stomach acid to wash up into the throat causing heartburn. This is supposed to be controlled by the parasympathetic nervous system – the Vagus nerve. But when the opposite sympathetic ‘fight or flight’ nervous system is active, the Vagus nerve shuts down.
So is gluten getting into your system a problem? Yes it is, big time. But how is it getting into your system in the first place? That is the real problem. If the digestion never went bad in the first place, then gluten would not be a problem. Avoiding gluten may be a necessary step to control symptoms in the moment, but the only long-term solution is to improve digestion and repair the gut lining. Do you see how the symptomatic problem is not the causative problem? Societal problems are much the same. Lets take poverty for example.
Money is not the solution to poverty, it only makes it worse. Entitlement programs actually create more poverty by teaching people to depend on others for their welfare. This disempowers them and destroys their spirit. Empowering people to care for themselves through their own labor and efforts is what eliminates poverty. This is the wise “teach a man to fish and you feed him for life” philosophy. Does anyone ever stop to wonder why it is that welfare neighborhoods have so much crime, drug use, and violence? What would you expect in a neighborhood filled with disempowered people. Disempowerment produces anger, resentment, and a desire to shut out the helpless feelings with drugs. Feeding people with the enticing lie that they are entitled to something for nothing is just a modern form of enslavement. How often we enslave ourselves with that same lie in our lives.
Just as the real problem with gluten is our modern lifestyle, the real problem with our societal issues is our faulty cultural beliefs about how life works. This is why these kinds of problems are so hard to tackle. There is no pill that can fix our lifestyle and no government
program that can fix our cultural beliefs. Change has to begin with each of us as individuals because we want something better for ourselves. I find this to be true in any arena. You have to want something better more than the payoff you get for staying where you are before any change is possible. Negative consequences do not promote change. They can inhibit old behaviors in the current moment, but consequences don’t create new effective adaptive behaviors. Only desire does that – and a lot of trial and error.
The year is winding down to an end. So if you have anything you consider to be a problem in your life, consider that the real problem is probably not what you think it is. Our culture trains us to attack symptoms and ignore deeper causes. The unfortunate truth is that nothing really changes until the underlying actual causes are addressed.