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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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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The vast majority of people who go on the gluten-free diet as it’s conventionally prescribed gain weight – and nearly one-third who are normal weight become overweight. So says a study in the October 2006 American Journal of Gastroenterology.

Gaining weight is desirable for people who are underweight when they are diagnosed with celiac disease. However, contrary to popular opinion, there are few underweight celiacs: only 4 percent of 371 patients in this study were underweight when diagnosed.

It’s much more common to be normal weight or overweight at the time of diagnosis.
Of the patients diagnosed with celiac disease over a ten-year period in a clinic in northern Ireland, 39 percent were overweight and 57 percent were normal weight.

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