by Melissa Diane Smith

The gluten-free diet is one of the most talked-about and followed diets these days for good reason: It’s the nutritional answer for the growing number of people who learn they are gluten intolerant. However, few people realize it, but eating gluten free can harm health in other ways when we focus only on “gluten-free” and end up eating a gluten-free version of the Standard American Diet that leads to ill health. Many people are doing that, unknowingly making mistakes with their diet that lead to weight gain, elevated blood sugar, heart disease risk factors, new allergies, immune system problems, and more.

I will address these issues and the little-covered topic, “It’s Gluten Free but Is It Healthy?” at the Southern Arizona Celiac Support (SACS) general meeting on Saturday, January 14, 2012, at 10:00 a.m. In my presentation, I’ll explain the most common mistakes people make with the gluten-free diet that lead to health problems and cover key food concepts that promote better health. My presentation will take place at Pima Community College, 4905 E. Broadway Blvd., and will be immediately followed by book signings of Going Against the Grain and my follow-up book Gluten Free Throughout the Year.

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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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by Melissa Diane Smith

In the first study to compare the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer diet and the conventionally recommended diabetes diet in people who have type 2 diabetes, the Paleolithic diet improved glycemic control and HDL-cholesterol and lowered blood pressure, weight, and waist circumference better than the diabetes diet over a three-month study period.

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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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BREAKING NEWS: Eating a hunter-gatherer-type diet improves a wide range of cardiovascular risk factors – blood pressure, glucose tolerance, insulin secretion, insulin sensitivity, total cholesterol, low-density lipoprotein cholesterol and triglyceride levels – in people who do not exercise in less than two weeks, according to a just-published study in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition.

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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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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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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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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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