Why you should probably stop eating wheat
news.discovery.com
news.discovery.com
Wikipedia says that Italy is fourth in the list of countries with the highest life expectancy. People on average are reasonably fit, it's rare to come across someone that can be defined as "obese".
Of course over the last decades the number of overweight or obese people HAS increased, but what has changed has been the arrival of fast food chains, and the availability of cheap and convenient processed foods over fresh ones.
I agree this is oversimplifying. But so does this this article.
Demonising a particular food (and idolising others) it's the worst kind of information you can give people, the truth is that you can safely eat most of commercially available food with moderation and common sense.
Energy, weight, hunger, depression, happiness, vitality, vigor, stamina and comprehension have all improved dramatically. I mean dramatically. And I've lost nearly 25lbs.
Going wheat free was quickly followed with other smaller changes (increased fitness, generally better eating, better social life, better professional life) but eliminating wheat preceded all the changes by about two months and I think it was the catalyst for many of the other positive changes.
Just my experience, as of late. But I hear it repeated over and over by others who have done the same.
What a load of crap.
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/nutritionsource/what-should-you-...
So, I am calling "fail" on your link.
Fear monger much?
(Plants are full of biocides. Remember the "apples tainted with alar" scare? Sodium azide is about twice as toxic as cyanide in terms of dose, but I'm fairly certain you'll physically burst before you can ingest enough from wheat to affect you. Each airbag in your car contains enough sodium azide to kill 50 people. (50-250g of sodium azide, LD50 ~25mg/kg) Drive safely.)
It doesn't really hurt anyone, but it does turn sour. My mother is a breast cancer survivor and she told me a lot about her experiences meeting with other women (some of whom are now dead, which upsets me somewhat).
In particular she struck up a friendship with one woman who was very outspoken in meetings, and told her the 'must reads' for any woman going through breast cancer, and handed her a book she had with her. It was a diet book for women with cancer, HEAVILY annotated and sticky-noted by this woman, to a shocking degree.
When she showed it to me, I realised there was a culture of blame among women with breast cancer; you are 'at fault' for getting cancer because you had the audacity to eat or drink X and must make penance by following these self-help books. I felt sick after I came to that realisation.
I would surmise taking it further and that any nutrition advice of this kind is really just a set up to blame people for their failures when they wind up with something serious.
Of course taking care of yourself is good, and people should be encouraged to do so, but any advice outside of your doctor should really be taken dubiously, all pseudoscience aside.
The article falls into bad science: http://blog.tedx.com/post/37405280671/a-letter-to-the-tedx-c...
But if you want me to speculate, which I do not feel speculates very far...we know from court records that tobacco companies purposefully spiked their product with nicotine so as to cause more tobacco sales. What chemicals have we seen a spike in from wheat from the industry in the past decades? The chemicals with opiates.
On the fringes of social science, some people think wheat was a grass which was harvested originally for its opiates, not its nutritional effect. It is not the only plant with multiple purposes - cannabis can make hemp, but also has psychological effects. The extreme version of this theory is the agricultural revolution was started by a bunch of drug addicts trying to get their opiate fix from wheat.
See that is speculation. Although speculation which could possibly have some grounding. What is scientific and grounded is that some people have a negative reaction to gluten and gliadin. Which this article is about. I am surprised they did not talk about how gliadin is an opiate, because there are many scientific papers on that. You can look it up yourself. I wrote a biology paper on this once. I can post the references to the scientific literature if anyone is interested and does not know how to look it up themselves.
In short: I'm not going to do the legwork for you. I have no horse in this race. But... I would have liked to check out credible journal articles suggested by someone that is (perhaps) more informed than me -- I wouldn't even know what to search for on Google Scholar.