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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Vegetables offer more protection against diabetes than grains or fruit, Australian research shows.

A study, which looked at fiber intake and tracked 2000 people over 49 years of age for 10 years, found that vegetable fiber had the strongest link to reduced risk of type 2 diabetes.

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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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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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