Are you experiencing anxiety about the worldwide economic crisis and wondering how you can tighten your budget? One simple way is to slash the number and amount of gluten-free products you buy. Gluten-free foods aren’t available at most stores so people have to spend more money to drive to locations farther away to purchase them. Even worse, gluten-free products are two to three times more expensive than regular products, according to a 2007 study. That’s a hefty price to pay for people experiencing tough financial times.

Consider also that it’s not just the cost of gluten-free products – it’s the cost of those products to our health. Few people in the gluten-free community or natural food industry like to talk about it, but many gluten-free products are simply junk foods that happen to be gluten-free.

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Higher plasma vitamin C levels, an indicator of a high fruit and vegetable intake, is associated with a substantially decreased risk of type 2 diabetes, according to a European-based study of more than 20,000 middle-aged adults.

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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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A component of wheat gluten stimulates an innate immune system response in people with or without celiac disease, says a report in the British medical journal Gut.

Researchers from Spain performed gut biopsies on six patients without celiac disease. Then they used an innovative technique in which they challenged those gut biopsies with fragments of gliadin, a component of gluten, and watched for an interleukin-15 response. Interleukin-15 (IL-15) is a marker of activation of the innate immune system.

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Humans aren’t alone in being sensitive to gluten and having symptoms including diarrhea, bloating, fatigue, depression and skin rashes and blistering. Rhesus macaques, a type of monkey, develop gluten sensitivity and these same gluten-related symptoms. They also recover when put on a gluten-free diet.

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A reader from Canada wrote me to let me know about a post she wrote today on the Sjogren’s World Community Forum. She told me that my Going Against the Grain book helped her and that eating completely against the grain proved to be the answer to greatly improve many symptoms she was experiencing.

Sjogren’s disease is an autoimmune disorder characterized by dry eyes and a dry mouth. It also can be a more systemic disease, affecting many organs and involving connective tissue disease, such as rheumatoid arthritis, systemic lupus erthematosus or scleroderma.

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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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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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