What Grain Is Doing To Your Brain

My wife went gluten free and sugar free about 18months ago. That's led to losing 30 lbs, reduced incidence of numbness in the extremities (residual effect of west Nile) & heart murmurs. In addition she seems to be functioning at a higher cognitive level. She has suddenly taken a huge interest in reading and has written over 300,000 words of a series of novels. She is negative for celiac or any food allergies.

I go on and off gluten free and I'm starting to realize that while the effects are less profound for me, I do better without grain (we do eat a lot of oats).

The business of eating exclusively meat and dairy is due to ignorance. You should be eating large quantities of vegetables, particularly leafy greens. The hardest part of changing your diet is re-learning how to eat.

OTOH I find the historical perspective somewhat suspect. If you believe Jared Diamond, grain led to the rise of civilization. I think that it's incredibly difficult to understand life for the majority of humans. 100 years ago there were no antibiotics. 200 years ago there was no refrigeration. 300 years ago, the fastest way to move goods was by horse, which meant farming was naturally local. 500 years ago, corn and potatoes were unknown in the European diet. Humans have been around for about 2 million years. The best analogues are the abject poor in underdeveloped parts of the world, which makes the advice in "Born to Run" about "eating like a poor person" take on a new light.

This article is bad, and while there are certainly reasons to think cutting wheat out of your diet could be helpful, it's certainly not a slam dunk case. The confidence level here is absurd, and some of the translation to laymen's speak is completely misleading.

> And yet Perlmutter argues that his recommendations are not radical at all. In fact, he says, his suggested menu adheres more closely to the way mankind has eaten for most of human history.

The human race has had an extremely varied diet based on geography, and even today doesn't really have a standard diet. (Sidenote: this is also the major flaw with labeling of diets like this as "paleo:" there was no "paleolithic" diet. Yes some populations ate about 50/50 meat, fruits and vegetables, but few of today's agriculture resembles that available even 20k years ago, so using that as justification is weak).

> Perlmutter says we need to return to the eating habits of early man, a diet generally thought to be about 75% fat and 5% carbs.

He gets more specific here, but he gets even more wrong. There are some populations who had a diet of up to 95% carbs.

> “Perlmutter uses bits and pieces of the effects of diet on cognitive outcomes — that obese people have a higher risk of cognitive impairment, for example — to construct an ultimately misleading picture of what people should eat for optimal cognitive and overall health,” St. Catherine University professor emerita Julie Miller Jones, Ph. D., told the website FoodNavigator-USA.

This is the biggest issue with the article. Perlmutter (or at least the journo covering him) does not do a good job of untangling obesity's and caloric intake's effect and the effects of wheat specifically.

> Further research published in the New England Journal of Medicine in August showed that people with even mildly elevated levels of blood sugar — too low to register as a Type 2 diabetes risk — still had a significantly higher risk of developing dementia.

Blood sugar does not necessarily come from ingesting sugar, it also comes from fat.

> “This low-fat idea that’s been drummed into our heads and bellies,” Perlmutter says, “is completely off-base and deeply responsible for most of our modern ills.”

He's almost right here: the idea of low fat diets is stupid. We should focus much more on food quality and overall caloric intake.

> “People are getting to this place of understanding that their lifestyle choices actually do matter a whole lot,” he says, “as opposed to this notion that you live your life come what may and hope for a pill.”

Yes. Good.

> "The exact parts of the brain that allow people to become addicted to narcotics are stimulated by gluten,” Perlmutter points out.

Oh come one. Gluten and EVERY OTHER FOOD.

> “Nutrition matters,” Perlmutter says. “The brain is more responsive to diet and lifestyle than any other part of the body and until now it’s been virtually ignored. We load up on medications when our mood is off, we hope for an Alzheimer’s disease pill when we get older. I submit that we need to take a step back and ask, ‘Is this really how we want to treat ourselves?’”

Absolutely.

Anybody read this 'Ten Health Benefits of Fiber' thing? Who writes this stuff? I'm sure it's with good intentions, but the way it is written now doesn't sound convincing at all: every single sentence except the one for picture 6, contains 'may' or 'can'. I feel this just doesn't cut it in a world where proper education about food is a must since so many are suffering from not eating healthy. Suppose I'm desperate for a new healthy diet and want to go for fibers (after all, the title says there are ten reasons why I should) and read this, I just might think 'well it just could be better, but it could as well not be, screw this'

> a diet rich in extra-virgin olive oil, grass-fed beef and wild fish provides “life-sustaining fat that modern American diets are so desperate for.”

So a diet completely unsustainable when considering a human population of 7 billion?

Twaddle and pseudoscience.

People who cut out grains invariable also reduce their simple carb load and are surprised at how much better they feel.

There's decent evidence that avoiding grains like wheat is a good idea, but I don't think there's any reason to think sugars and simple starches are bad for you. The article insinuates orange juice is bad for you because it has sugar in it. So what? People in Cuba get something like a third of their calories from cane sugar and are quite healthy; healthier than Americans. Many healthy cultures have subsisted on milk, which is loaded with sugar.

Cutting out sugars and simple starches like rice is just a convenient way for fat people to lower calorie intake. If you're lean I've not seen any convincing arguments to avoid sugars.

Also, a lot of the paleo way of looking at diet as the cause of diseases is I think way over done. Some folks will insist almost any disease can be traced to diet, but I think there's good evidence that yet to be isolated infections cause things like rheumatoid arthritis and MS and some other stuff. For example, skeletons show rheumatoid arthritis existed only in the New World and spread after contact to Europe and Asia. Another aspect is mutational load. People with weak immune systems or poorly tuned cell metabolism used to regularly die in childhood. Now these people survive to adulthood and eventually exhibit various degenerative diseases. They also pass their genes on, increasing prevalence in the population. Diet surely matters, but population increases in various middle age degenerative diseases probably has other factors totally independent from diet.