The Disremembered
aeon.co
aeon.co
You probably have even more information from childhood stored in implicit memory. If you're like most people, you learned how to ride a bike, tie your shoes, understand language, and play catch. The memories of learning these things are separate from the memories needed to actually do them.
Erasing all of a person's memories would truly destroy them. Once they formed new memories, they would be as different from their original self as an identical twin separated at birth.
I know, not eating any bread leaves a feeling of hunger, it's almost as if I haven't eaten any food. But thats only because I've been eating bread all my life every single day and so the body got very accustomed to it. But after 3 months I also realized that body doesn't need it to feel full.
Friends in my vicinity get also disturbed by my saying bread is harmful to the body. But I am myself the evidence that bread is no good for the body.
Subjects (let us call them "topics", to distinguish from "test subjects": people being experimented upon) are not some amorphous substance that you "pour" into your mind; they are all different. You also cannot erase a topic from your mind so you can fairly re-test the pouring after making some change, like diet or whatever.
If you have difficulty with a topic X today, you can find the same topic X easier after some passage of time simply because you were exposed to X, and let it "settle in your brain" for a while.
There is no way to to have a valid, objective test using the same person and the same topic, where we can determine that the same topic X became easier to learn due to some external factor, like not eating bread. The test is confounded by the subject's prior experience with tackling X: the "after" situation is different from "before" because of prior experience.
There is no way we can test different topics X and Y, either. If you have difficulty with learning topic X, and then some external factor changes (like not eating bread), and you have an easier time with topic Y, that doesn't conclusively show anything. The test is confounded by both similarities between X and Y (applicability of the prior experience with tackling X to tackling topic Y) and by their differences (difficulty in Y is unrelated to difficulty in X).
If you want to study this properly, you need large, random samples of people. You need control groups as well as test subjects. One group doesn't consume bread (or anything with glutent) and another does. Both learn similar topic in a similar setting. Does the test group show different progress from the control group? Different in a significant way? Even studies done at this level still have confounding problems that give us reason to be skeptical of their claimed results: such as improper sampling methods, lack of proper control over information leakage in experiments, poor accountability for the round-the-clock behavior of human subjects, and abuse of statistical methods to draw unwarranted conclusions.
Then there is the poor amount of data you have gathered (if we can call it data). How many times have you quit eating bread and observed the difference on learning or other cognitive tasks? Sounds like you've only done this once. You've done this once, and, what is more, you're biased: prior to the experiment you already believed the "gluten-brain" hypothesis already from your Internet readings, and were looking to confirm it. In honest research, even if we personally believe in a hypothesis, we must work on focus on eliminating the serious objections which tend refute the hypothesis, and not simply look for a few shreds of observations which suggest that it might be true. If we cannot eliminate the objections, we have to face the fact that the hypothesis may not be true after all.
I do a lot of alternative medicine stuff for a very serious medical condition. My father had Alzheimer's and I was able to do something for him that was helpful for a time, so I have a smidgeon of first-hand experience with this specific issue as well as extensive experience with alternative, nutrition-based medicine generally.
People who try to oversimplify a complex problem and suggest some singular cause, as you have just done, are a huge headache for me personally. I have spent a lot of years working to be able to speak at all about what has really worked to make a life-saving difference with my deadly condition.
Hacker News is an especially bad place to use tactics like this and doing so only makes it that much harder to discuss alternative views in a serious way and in a way that has some hope of being respected and engaged. So I really wish people would not do this sort of thing here.
Oversimplify? Actually that's correct but only the "simple" part of it. It as simple as refraining from certain foods.
That was over 14 years ago and I have spent a whole lot of years reading up on health topics and working to improve my health. I suspect I know a good bit more about the topic of what foods can do to a body and how to use them to get specific effects than you currently know or will ever know.
When I was a lot sicker, I did my best to avoid yeast-leavened bread and to limit yeast-leavened foods. I went so far as to come up with a pizza dough recipe that had no yeast in it. As I got healthier, I began tolerating bread better. I have a long history of tolerating wheat poorly and I still have to limit wheat. People with CF are at greater than average risk for Celiac (gluten and wheat intolerance) than the general population and it is common for people with CF to tolerate wheat and dairy poorly. I generally tolerate food better than I used to. I used to really struggle to eat and had a whole lot of food intolerances.
I have spent a whole lot of time in alternative med circles talking with people who have tried chelation and gotten super picky about the foods they eat and so on. Some of those folks have PhDs and some of them have been really helpful in explaining some things to me related to my own research into alternative therapies for my own condition.
One of the problems with your hypothesis here is that "bread" is not a monolith. There are a great many things that qualify as bread and they can contain quite a lot of different ingredients. I assume you mean yeast-leavened wheat breads. Yeast can be a problem for a number of reasons for people with certain issues and some folks don't tolerate wheat well. But you also find yeast and wheat in other things, so just eliminating "bread" doesn't fully solve that problem if one of those specific ingredients is the culprit.
Furthermore, my experience has been that, for example, how a crop is raised and processed can have such significant impact on the chemical make-up of a particular food such that I need to be a lot more specific even than “x food” in order to come up with meaningful restrictions. For example, I have to be careful with meats and there is a big difference between, say, kosher meat and non-kosher meat or organic, grass-fed meat and "commercially" grown (for lack of a better alternative term).
There are a huge number of things that impact brain health. I am getting my brain function back after having it significantly impaired by years of being very ill and years of taking a metric fuck ton of prescription drugs in order to avoid dying. Some things that have gone into repairing my brain function include B vitamins, the right fats, good quality salts and the right carbs.
If removing yeast-leavened wheat bread from your diet is doing you significant good with regards to your brain function, I will suggest that a likely explanation is a) you have an infection and the yeast feeds on the infection and creates alcohol within your system that impairs your brain function and/or b) you have what gets called "leaky gut syndrome" in some alternative med circles. The belief there is that leaky gut allows molecules to be directly absorbed into the blood stream and that causes proteins to cross the brain blood barrier and cause mental impairment. I don't know how accurate that mental model is. I don't specifically ascribe to it as far as my own health issues go.
However, I do know that the gut is about 70% of your immune system, so if there is anything wrong with your gut, you can bet money there is a shit-load of other problems happening because of it.
Removing stressors from your diet may take some of the load off a frail gut, but it won't repair it. Some things that may help include organic yogurt, good quality sea salt, the right carbs and the right fats (coconut oil and organic butter are two that work well for me).
I will reiterate that I really wish people like you would not jump in here with completely nonsensical assertions that they can't explain better than "I removed bread from my diet and I THINK it is helping, though I can't provide you any real metrics for how it is improving." I can provide real metrics for how much my health has improved and it has been nightmarish to try to get people to engage me in a meaningful manner and not dismiss me as just some quack. So folks like you just really get on my nerves.
Best of luck with your quest to slow your brain deterioration.
Gluten is a composite made of the proteins glutenin and gliadin. (Look it up in the Wikipedia.)
These proteins have molecular structures that are freaking huge.
You digest these macromolecules like any other proteins, thereby breaking them down into little amino acids. Your body then uses the materials to make new proteins, like for example the keratin in your hair and nails.
Gluten does cause GI problems for people who are sensitive to it. Your gastro-intestinal tract is essentially an inverted exterior of your body; this is much like having a rash on your skin, or inflammation in your airways.
People who don't experience any digestive discomfort from gluten have no need to stay away from it.
Instead of following internet quacks, you should maybe crack open some textbooks on real biology.