by Melissa Diane Smith

Do you eat gluten free, but gain weight or end up feeling not well during the holiday season? If so, consider this: There’s a little-known secret to enjoying the holidays with health, energy and no weight gain: Eating against the grain. Preparing low-grain foods and even no-grain foods may be unknown to most people (even many people who eat gluten-free). But it is an overlooked strategy for making delicious holiday meals quicker, easier and with far less fuss.

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A follow-up to my previous post: Improvement in a wide range of health indicators was documented in nine sedentary, non-obese people with no known health problems who ate a grain-free, dairy-free, hunter-gatherer-type diet for ten days. These people were supposedly healthy to begin with, but they still, on average, saw these large improvements in health:

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Many people want to know more specifics about my new holiday E-book, such as what type of flour and sweeteners I use in my recipes. Rather than answer people individually, I decided to put the most common questions I have been receiving and my answers in this Q&A interview in case you were wondering about these questions, too.

Q. How is your book different from other cookbooks?

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Copy from the Back Cover of the Book:

There’s a little-known secret to enjoying the holidays with health, energy and no weight gain: Eating against the grain. Preparing low- to no-grain foods may be unknown to most people but it is an overlooked strategy for making delicious holiday meals quicker, easier and with far less fuss.

In Healthier Holidays Going Against the Grain, nutritionist Melissa Diane Smith offers 135 simple tips and 25 original recipes that can help people who eat any of the following diets:

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If you like the against-the-grain information you receive in Nutrition News and Notes but are hungry for more, join the Going Against the Grain Group! By not yet being a member, here are topics you’ve missed:

How to Spring Clean Your Diet

Creative Vegetable Ideas

Eating Further Against the Grain – when a gluten-free diet isn’t therapeutic enough

Baking with Coconut Flour

Eating Gluten Free in Restaurants

Summer Vacation from Cooking

More Summertime Strategies

Recipes, including Filet of Sole Florentine, Greek Halibut, Cool Noodle Tabouli for One, and Banana Coconut Muffins

Helpful Convenience Products from Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods and more

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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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Some people simply like to enjoy the visual, sensual experience of watching my Food Slide Show without explanation. (It’s best to view the slide show with a high-speed connection.) Others want to know more specifics about the foods in the slide show. So, for those of you who want to know the details, here are the foods in the order they appear:

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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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