If you rent just one movie to watch at home this year, make sure it’s “King Corn”. Better yet, buy yourself a copy, so you can watch it every so often and remind yourself of the messes that have been created in our farming practices, our system of raising animals for meat, our own health and the health of the environment — all because of growing outrageous amounts of corn.

“King Corn” documents the experience of two idealistic college graduates who decide to grow an acre of corn in Iowa. Viewers follow them through the whole process — government subsidies, genetically engineered seed, and pesticides that kill everything but the genetically engineered corn. Viewers then learn how the surplus of corn seeps into our foods in many ways, and what all that corn does to us, to animals, to the environment, and to small farmers who can’t compete with big industrialized food corporations.

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At a gluten-free fair a few months ago, a friend briefly saw me and said, “Oh, Melissa, I am so bloated and gaining so much weight lately. I know it is all the corn products I have been eating lately.”

My friend is not alone. Corn has infiltrated the American food supply in a major, yet mostly invisible way, and virtually all Americans eat corn in some form without knowing it. People who begin a gluten-free diet (free of wheat, rye and barley) often are so focused on avoiding gluten that they substitute corn-based foods in place of wheat – repeatedly having corn tortillas instead of flour tortillas, for example – and end up eating a lot more corn-based foods. They gain weight and develop other health problems and don’t understand the reason why. Corn is the reason.

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Drinking more than one soft drink a day is associated with a higher risk of developing individual cardiovascular disease risk factors, as well as developing the cluster of risk factors known as metabolic syndrome, according to a 2007 study published in Circulation.

The research, part of the ongoing Framingham Heart Study that evaluates common factors that contribute to cardiovascular disease, followed middle-aged men and women during a four-year period.

At the start of the study, researchers established that participants who drank one or more soft drinks a day had a 48 percent higher chance of having metabolic syndrome than those who drank less. Over the four-year follow-up, the results were similar, showing that people who drank one or more soft drinks a day had a 44 percent higher risk of developing metabolic syndrome for the first time.

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Last Monday I participated in a short, nationally televised “grain debate” in New Zealand on NZ TV One.

You can view the video here.

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I’m back from my trip to New Zealand and it’s good to be back online. First, the country is beautiful and the people are wonderful. Unfortunately, I experienced some not-so-nice weather and my trip was way too short, but I still packed a lot into those days that I was there.

I gave the keynote address, “Going Against the Grain: The Overlooked and Most Effective Strategy to Prevent and Reverse Obesity and Diabetes,” to the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association (AIMA) conference in Auckland last Saturday and then a workshop, “Going Against the Grain for Practitioners and Patients,” the next day. The doctors in attendance were very welcoming and receptive to the information and I was impressed with how many of them already were eating against the grain themselves in one way or another. New Zealand is in good hands with the doctors in AIMA NZ.

Last Sunday, an article about me and my work came out in New Zealand Woman’s Weekly, the publication with the largest circulation in the country (approximately 1 million people in a country of 4 million people). Read or download the article:

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I will be giving the keynote address at the Australasian Integrative Medicine Association conference in Auckland, New Zealand May 3 and 4, 2008. The conference is on obesity and diabetes, which are epidemics in New Zealand as they are in other western nations. But I will also be covering information about gluten sensitivity in my follow-up workshop, too. If you would like to see the program of the conference or forward it to anyone you know in New Zealand, you can find more info here. Needless to say, I am honored and excited!

Note: This is an older study — one that most people don’t know about but should.

Change the diet and see striking improvements in virtually every measure of health for people with diabetes in just seven weeks? That’s exactly what happened for ten middle-aged, overweight, diabetic Australian Aborigines in 1982.

All ten of them had developed type 2 diabetes after leaving the bush where they had lived some years before and abandoning their traditional diet. Their diet in an urban area of Australia consisted mainly of flour, sugar, rice, carbonated drinks, beer, port, powdered milk, cheap fatty meat, and potatoes.

For a research experiment, the Aborigines agreed to return to their traditional homeland, and eat the way they did before, hunting and gathering foods. During that seven-week period of time, their diet consisted of seafood, along with birds, kangaroo and the fatty larvae of a local insect (during the time they were on the coast). They moved to a more inland location and ate freshwater fish and shellfish, turtle, crocodile, birds, kangaroo, yams, figs, bush honey, and other plant foods.

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A higher intake of vegetables, but not fruits, significantly reduces the risk of developing type 2 diabetes, according to a new study reported in the Journal of Nutrition.

The study, which involved 64,191 middle-aged Chinese women, showed that a high intake of vegetables — including cruciferous vegetables, green leafy vegetables, yellow vegetables, allium vegetables, tomatoes, and other vegetables — was associated with an almost 30 percent lower risk of diabetes compared to those who ate the lowest amounts. A high intake of fruits, on the other hand, was not associated with a reduced risk of diabetes.

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Eat real food kind of goes without saying. But we need to get back to that and steer away from thinking of foods as carriers of nutrients that manufacturers can manipulate for the better for our health, keynote speaker and The New York Times best-selling author Michael Pollan told a capacity crowd at Natural Products Expo West last week.

Natural Products Expo West is the country’s largest natural, organic, and healthy products trade show. It was larger than ever this year: More than 52,000 retailers, manufacturers and industry professionals attended the show to see a record 3,392 exhibits in the Anaheim Convention Center. “Gluten-Free” was an extremely popular category of products – even hotter than it has been the past few years. There were a number of healthful, whole-food, gluten-free products at the convention. However, it is amazing how many companies offer highly refined gluten-free products that people think are healthy just because they’re gluten free. Pollan’s comments on the changes that have taken place with our food and the way we look at food offers some much-needed perspective so we can make smarter choices in the foods we buy.

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Eating a Stone-Age-type diet with no grain products is considerably more effective at lowering blood sugar levels and reducing waist sizes than the often-recommended Mediterranean diet that contains whole-grain foods, according to a study by Staffan Lindeberg, MD, PhD, and his colleagues at Lund University in Sweden.

In the study, the researchers asked 14 patients to consume an “ancient” (Paleolithic or Stone-Age) diet with lean meat, fish, vegetables, fruits, eggs, and nuts, but no grains or dairy products. Fifteen other patients were asked to follow a Mediterranean-like diet that included some of the above foods along with whole-grain foods and low-fat dairy products. Both groups of the patients had serious heart disease, plus either type 2 diabetes or a less severe form of glucose intolerance.

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