I’ve been reading Mark Sisson’s blog (Mark’s Daily Apple – Primal Living in the Modern World) for quite a while now and have always been pleased with the relevance of his content and how important a source of information on the gluten-free diet that his blog is. Truth be told, 90% of my diet would be considered Primal. I do my best to avoid all refined flours, including rice and corn and base my diet on meat, vegetables, and fruits. Occasionally, I will review a labeled gluten-free product that contains rice or corn, but those times are becoming fewer and far between as I’ve realized the benefits of eating a naturally gluten-free diet.
In this post, A Tale of Two Gluten Studies, Mark really hits home the point of why a gluten-free diet not based in naturally gluten-free products is detrimental to one’s health. It’s something that I’ve been preaching for a long time, but the point never seems to make it into the mainstream media and we continue to hear reports of how avoiding gluten is actually detrimental to your health. Cookies are cookies, cupcakes are cupcakes, and junk is junk, no matter how you prepare it. I’m not going as far as saying people can’t eat convenient packaged food, but you can’t base your diet on this convenient packaged (labeled gluten-free) food and expect a good outcome. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in a grocery store and heard people talking about how a certain gluten-free cookie was better for them than other cookies. This truly makes me crazy. Flour and sugar is the same
I post a fair amount of recipes from some of the greatest food bloggers around and there are more than enough options for healthy eating. I even post items that are not necessarily healthy, but as a treat, they’re OK — just don’t do it everyday. Anyhow, below is an excerpt of Mark’s post. Be sure to click through and read the entire post as it is a very well written article with information that we should all hear.
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“A couple recent gluten studies made me think of Dickens’ opening lines from “A Tale of Two Cities,” which describe the concurrence of contradictory states of being and consciousness in 18th century Western Europe. That’s people for ya. We can be miserable and happy at the same time. We can believe something despite evidence to the contrary staring us in the face. You’ll see it in online arguments, especially regarding subjects whose research luminaries publish in journals that offer online access to study abstracts for us plebs. That’s why comment board arguments between two opposing camps touting completely contradictory information stretch endlessly – because they can always trot out URL after URL of an abstract that appears to support their point. For every study, there’s a counter study…”
