|
Alpha Nutrition Health Education Series The Book of Gluten Introduction |
|
|
Alpha Nutrition Health Education Series The Book of Gluten Introduction |
|
Alpha Health Education
Order Options |
Immune responses to gluten, the proteins found in cereal grains are a common cause of several diseases. The remarkable fact is that eating “normal”, often-recommended foods can be hazardous to your health. Gluten-caused diseases are curious diseases that confuse everyone who has them, treats them or studies them. The first confusion is about “normal food” causing serious disease. If you live in North America or Europe, bread is a normal staple food. All nutritional recommendations encourage you to eat bread; the more whole wheat, the better. Bread tastes good. Bread is found everywhere and is an inexpensive food. Toast is normal breakfast food. Sandwiches are normal lunches. Bread, pasta, hamburgers, hot dogs, pizzas are normal fast foods and many people eat these foods for dinner. You could argue that North America is a bread culture. The confusion arises when evidence accumulates that bread can make some people chronically ill. Bread can cause autoimmune disease. Bread can cause cancer if you have celiac disease and continue to eat gluten. The task of a person with gluten disease is to live in a bread culture without eating bread. How can anyone accept such a deviant path? We eat the seeds of the cereal grain plants. The seed has a bran casing, a starchy endosperm that contains 90% of the protein, and a small germ nucleus that is the plant embryo waiting to grow. Any flour made from the starchy endosperm contains proteins and that are potentially problematic to the grain intolerant person. Gluten is a mixture of over 100 proteins classified in two groups, the Prolamines and the Glutelins. Wheat, barley, oats, and rye must be excluded on a gluten-free diet. Rice is the principle substitute for cereal grains. The classic presentation of the best-defined gluten disease, Celiac Disease, is chronic diarrhea, with abdominal bloating, sometimes pain, weight loss, iron deficiency and other evidence of nutrient malabsorption. The emphasis in medical textbooks is on the digestive tract symptoms of celiac disease. Immune responses to gluten can cause an alarming range of systemic diseases, however, and it is best to think of celiac disease as an example of a gluten-caused digestive tract disorder that is associated with a host of whole body diseases. The associated diseases are expressions of delayed pattern food allergy. Celiac disease research allows us to create a model of delayed pattern food allergy. Celiac patients have increased gastrointestinal permeability and demonstrate the whole-body effects of food allergy, including brain dysfunction, arthritis, and inflammatory lung disease. We think that people diagnosed with celiac disease are a sub-population of a much larger group with gluten allergy. Latent disease may manifest as irritable bowel syndrome, sometimes with iron deficiency anemia, with or without diarrhea. Latent disease appears in other disguises as asthma, hives, eczema, arthritis, fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue. Latent disease may also present as a serious “autoimmune disease”, a hormonal disorder, a psychiatric disorder, a neurological disorder, and as cancer. The diagnosis of celiac disease is an arbitrary separation of one small subgroup within a much larger group that suffers disease when they eat gluten. Our argument is that gluten-caused disease and the diagnosis of gluten allergy should not depend on specific tests such as the intestinal biopsy used to diagnose celiac disease. We recommend gluten elimination in all digestive tract disorders and in all the conditions that are commonly related to celiac disease. Our assumption is that if you look at symptomatic populations with gastrointestinal symptoms and/or autoimmune disease, then the incidence of gluten sensitivity will be much higher than the estimated prevalence of celiac disease. Since a strict gluten-free diet is protective against the complications of all forms of gluten allergy, it is important that the undiagnosed forms of celiac disease or "wheat allergy" unrelated to celiac disease are treated with diet revision. People who are diagnosed with Celiac disease often feel like outcasts and resent the hard work of avoiding gluten. We have taken the opposite approach and ask a much larger group of people to exclude gluten along with other popular foods as a routine measure of restoring health. If you have developed the attitude that excluding gluten from your diet is very hard, you will find the Alpha Nutrition Program challenging. People with celiac disease need to change their perception; they are not rare people with an uncommon disease. They are a minority group within a much larger group of people with milk and wheat disease. The Alpha Nutrition Program excludes cereal grains as a general policy because of the high incidence of problems in a large group of diverse patients with cereal grain ingestion. Our theory is that gluten proteins produce a number of diseases that overlap and are only occasionally manifest as well-defined, discrete disorders.
The Book of Gluten is intended to be used with the Alpha Nutrition Program The program is modular and versatile and can be adapted to a variety of disease conditions where diet and nutrition play a role. This text provides background knowledge, helpful in understanding all forms of Wheat Allergy, Celiac Disease, the association with delayed pattern food allergy and the relevance of diet revision. eBook editions are sent in Microsoft Reader format as file attachments to an email we send in response to your order. We guarantee that these are safe files to open. You need the Microsoft Reader installed and working in your computer, laptop or pocket PC. before you order our eBooks The Microsoft Reader is Free to download. See eBooks for more information.
|