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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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:

(more…)

Want to know how to make these delicious, gluten-free, grain-free, sugar-free muffins?

Join the online Going Against the Grain Group!

The Going Against the Grain Group goes further than just offering you against-the-grain nutrition news. It offers ongoing nutritional support all year long with quick and easy meal ideas, recipes, food preparation tips, special reports, nutrition lessons and information about helpful food products, including early announcements of new products and products that fare best in real-life taste tests.

(more…)

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.

(more…)