Is it true that gluten is dangerous for your health? Or is that just a myth? In truth, gluten-free foods are often even less healthy than normal ones, so let’s have a closer look at this myth and how it began in the first place.
Food is part of our everyday lives. We eat at breakfast, lunch, dinner and a lot more times we’re not supposed to.
Lies are also part of our everyday lives. We are being fed lies by television, by giant corporations who conspire against us, and by our boss who has not enough money to raise your wage after he bought his new Porsche.
Did anyone notice how much the market has recently been flooded with gluten-free foods? Well, unless there’s a widespread epidemic of celiac disease (CD) no scientific study ever noticed, there’s absolutely no reason to believe that something we ate for centuries has suddenly become dangerous.
In fact, although a lot of false information has been spread about the alleged “wheat belly” and its association with the obesity epidemic, the truth is that eating gluten-free food is actually dangerous for our health if we are not affected by CD.
Why? Mostly because we need gluten for various purposes, so we should eat it. It’s just as simple as that. By not eating it, we also slowly lose our ability to digest it and, in due time, will become gluten-intolerant. Even worse, it looks like gluten-free food is packed with several substitute sugars to mimic the texture and taste of gluten. These chemicals truly do more harm than good – and will make you fatter, too.
So who are the fathers of this humongous lie? Apparently, it stems from two best-selling books: Wheat Belly (written by the cardiologist William Davis, MD) and Grain Brain (written by the neurologist David Perlmutter, MD). Both these books are both full of vastly exaggerated and non-scientific claims, and are nothing more than predatory marketing.
The first one is published by Rodale Inc. – a company known to publish unsound scientific material and low-quality magazines sold for marketing purposes. In one of their books, they blamed sugar intake for crimes such as rape and even for the rise of Nazism (no joke). Mr. Rodale himself claimed he would live to be 100 during an interview, only to die of a heart attack onstage just a few moments later. We can safely assume that he was murdered by a hidden nazi agent who poisoned his coffee with sugar that morning.
The latter one is written by an even shadier individual, Dr. Perlmutter, who is known for his pseudoscientific claims (including some anti-vaxx ones). Dr. Perlmutter built a whole (grain) empire on these bonkers health claims. One of his books even suggests taking a “$8,500 brain detoxification retreat” run by himself where some shamanic healing ceremonies are performed. Because you know, magic and shamanism scream science so loudly. I guess that the only “wheat belly” that got really fat with gluten-free diets was Perlmuter’s one.
Article by Dr. Claudio Butticè, Pharm.D