Eating Regular Gluten Free Food puts you at Risk of Insulin Resistance! The Ultimate Guide by Kris Gunnars

When eating regular gluten free food, you may be thinking you are being healthy because after all you are not eating gluten. However, the non gluten flours such as rice, soy, corn, potatoe or tapioca have a big impact on the production of insulin in the digestive process of these carbohydrates. With daily high levels of insulin, your body starts to get deaf to insulin, which we call insulin resistance, and insulin can't do it's job of taking glucose out of the blood stream and using it. So blood glucose levels start to inch up. 

The results are that you store more of the glucose in the form of fat, if the level is high enough one may get the diagnosis of diabetes, ones risks for stroke and heart attacks go up. 

And it's bad for the brain too where studies have shown links between high blood sugar and anxiety and in later years, memory disorders. Alzheimer's is called type 3 diabetes because of the strong link to chronically high blood sugar levels and its diagnosis. 

The metabolic impact of insulin resistance is another reason I recommend a specific carbohydrate diet which has carbs that are known to have a low influence on insulin production and can reverse insulin resistance.  The one I recommend is Gut and Psychology syndrome protocol. 

Learn a little bit more about insulin and insulin resistance from Authority Nutrition. The excerpt here describes the situation when things are going well. Read the full article for the usual situation happening earlier and earlier in life. You know you don't have insulin resistance if as a woman your waist is 30 inches or less, and as a man your waist is below 34 inches. 

The size of your waist is linked to how healthy you are, and it is probably the best indicator of future health. 


http://authoritynutrition.com/insulin-and-insulin-resistance/Insulin and Insulin Resistance – The Ultimate Guide (my bold)
By Kris Gunnars, BSc August, 2015
35,845 views

Insulin is an important hormone that controls many processes in the body.However, problems with this hormone are at the heart of many modern health conditions.Sometimes our cells stop responding to insulin like they are supposed to.This condition is termed insulin resistance, and is incredibly common.

In fact, a 2002 study showed that 32.2% of the US population may be insulin resistant (1).

This number may rise to 70% in obese adult women and over 80% in some patient groups (2, 3). About a third of obese children and teenagers may also have insulin resistance (4).

These numbers are scary, but the good news is that insulin resistance can be dramatically improved with simple lifestyle measures.This article explains what insulin resistance is, why you should care and how you can overcome it.

Insulin and Insulin Resistance Explained

Insulin is a hormone secreted by an organ called the pancreas.Its main role is to regulate the amount of nutrients circulating in the bloodstream.Although insulin is mostly implicated in blood sugar management, it also affects fat and protein metabolism.When we eat a meal that contains carbohydrates, the amount of blood sugar in the bloodstream increases.This is sensed by the cells in the pancreas, which then release insulin into the blood.Then insulin travels around the bloodstream, telling the body’s cells that they should pick up sugar from the blood.

This leads to reduced amounts of sugar in the blood, and puts it where it is intended to go, into the cells for use or storage.

In conclusion, I recommend eating foods that have a low glycemic load and the list of those foods can be found at www.gaps.me and the full protocol in Dr. Natasha Campbell MacBride's book. It is based in scientific investigations going back to at least the 30's. 

Foods that are allowed but have higher amounts of fructose, like dates, have to be limited or you will get the insulin resistance problems. 

It is a delicious way to eat. 

The drawback is that it is mostly cooked at home from scratch. For those who don't cook or bake there are good resources online such as  The Heal Your Gut Cookbook found here http://www.amazon.ca/The-Heal-Your-Cookbook-Nutrient-Dense/dp/1603585613 or

www.comfybelly.com or 

www.elanaspantry.com (not everyone can or should eat chocolate which is not allowed in GAPS).

To Your Health

Dr. Barbara

"Sugar: The Bitter Truth"- A Must See Video by Dr. Robert Lustig from UCSF

If you want to know more about how carbohydrates including fructose found in fruits and rice cause chronic illness, watch this superb video by Dr. Lustig from University of California, San Francisco, called "Sugar: The Bitter Truth!" 

Don't drink your calories!
And Alzheimer's researchers suggest the only fruit you should eat if you want to lower your risk of Alzheimer's is berries! 

And stick to a specific carbohydrate diet, GAPS protocol, or sugar free Paleo, especially if you are gluten sensitive.
You can do it. 
To Your Health
Dr. Barbara 

Dr. Perlmutter's Brain Health Program in Grain Brain includes a Grain Free, GAPS Style Diet

I don't know anyone who doesn't want to age in good 

health and avoid Alzheimer's. 

We get a lot of information about how to do this, but does this information have to be updated from the 30's and 40's when most of these principles were established? There is a large movement to update classical teachings and Dr. Perlmutter, a neurologist in practice has put up-to-date research and recommendations into a book called "Grain Brain". 

Dr. David Perlmutter says in this interview: the first step is to stop gluten! (My bold):

Research suggests gluten can play a damaging role by the changes it imparts on your microbiome, the bacteria in your gut. But gluten can also wreak havoc with your neurological health via the inflammation it causes. Non-celiac gluten sensitivity may involve 30 to 40 percent of the population and according to work done at Harvard by Dr. Alessio Fasano, it may even affect every single human being.

The reason for this is because gluten, a protein found in wheat, barley, and rye, has significant effects on your gut cells, which leads to the production of a chemical called zonulin. Zonulin enhances inflammation and tends to make your gut porous and leaky (i.e. leaky gut syndrome). But that's not all. Dr. Fasano discovered that it can also make your blood-brain barrier leaky, allowing foreign proteins to migrate into your brain, where they clearly do not belong.

Listen to the full interview to pick up some brain saving tips.

Let's talk about those foreign proteins mentioned above. These proteins that migrate into the brain are recognized as "foreign invaders" mimicking a life threatening microorganism invasion, like "swine flu" or encephalitis, which then triggers a life saving reaction by the immune system. The reaction however, can go wrong with the confusion of the system when it thinks our own tissues look like gliadin proteins. Dr. Fraser Scott showed that celiac subjects had tissues that look like gliadin back in 2002, but other researchers have shown the same thing in other organs' connective tissues!!! 

This starts a reaction to one's own tissues with the production of anti deamidated gliadin, anti gliadin,  and  anti tissue transglutaminase antibodies (Tg2,3,and 6), especially worrisome is Tg6 but also Tg2, which attack the brain tissues and the tissues around the blood vessels blocking the "blood brain barrier".  Tg6's attack on the brain causes dozens of neurological disorders especially cerebellar ataxia, cerebral calcifications, peripheral neuropathy, epilepsy, migraines and possibly MS. 

Dr. Hadjivassiliou has written an extensive article  "Gluten Sensitivity; From Gut to Brain" on these neurological diseases and the good news is he has shown these conditions improve on a gluten free diet. If you want to see what the blood brain barrier thickened up with Tg6 looks like, go to page nine, and look at the picture labelled "A". The circle in the middle is the lumen of a blood vessel and around it is a cuff of thickness imbedded with Tg6 antibodies. This is very abnormal as the area around the blood vessel is rarely bigger than 1/5th of the diameter of the blood vessel. With one look at the diseased brain tissue's blood vessel you can tell there is something horribly wrong.

This abnormal attack on our own tissues also leads to psychiatric conditions. Here is a case of severe psychiatric symptoms, at one point requiring hospital admission, who improved with GAPS diet and B12 shots.

If your aim is good brain health, the first step is to stop eating gluten. 
You will want to get rid of all grains, though, because of the cross reactive and toxic proteins in them that promote leaky gut and inflammation just like gluten, which is the mechanism for the damage to the brain. 

There is more to do, of course, like remove chemical exposure especially to pesticides, proper dental care by a biological dentist, keeping your vitamin D levels good, keeping your blood sugar levels low and stable, keep your uric acid levels low by limiting your ingestion of fructose to 25 grams a day or less, monitor your B12 levels with a Homocysteine test, supplement with lots of folate (not folic acid, the chemical) probiotics and zinc, exercise moderately and keep your stress levels manageable.

To Your "Brain" Health

Dr. Barbara

GRAIN BRAIN By Dr. David Perlmutter: Surprising Truth About Wheat, Carbs, and Sugar - Your Brain's Silent Killers

The gluten brain/chronic disease connection is very strong, as I have been teaching since 2005. I wish to congratulate Dr. David Perlmutter, one of my favourite neurologists, for putting together his cutting edge health promoting  thoughts it into a book, "Grain Brain", a New York Times bestseller. It is sure it empower you to take charge of your health. 

This is what he says about Alzheimer's: My bold

“This is a disease that is highly revenue-producing for mega factories of various so-called Alzheimer’s drugs,” Dr. Perlmutter says. “The point is there is no meaningful treatment in 2013. It is a disease predicated on lifestyle choices primarily, because of the high amount of carbohydrates/sugar that we now, as Western-culture individuals, are consuming.It’s a preventable disease. It surprises me at my core that no one’s talking about the fact that so many of these devastating neurological problems are, in fact, modifiable based upon lifestyle choices.”(like diet, exercise and caloric restriction)


“They've been talking about it for years and years (which is now just gaining traction in mainstream medicine) that our health really depends on maintaining a barrier of the intestine from the bloodstream,” Dr. Perlmutter says.


“We now understand that the so-called blood-brain barrier, or that barrier that keeps things out of the brain where they don’t belong, is also affected by gluten, according to new research. It’s a very exciting time when we recognize that our biggest exposure to the environment is actually the lining of our intestines – not our lungs, not our skin. We are in fact very much dependent on the microbiota, the bacteria living in the gut, to maintain our health.”

Food, including the microbiota, is information to our cells. It tells them what to do. You can change your genetic destiny with the food choices that you make. Even the brain can get more healthy, because of something called neuroplasticity. See what Dr. Perlmutter has to say about neuroplasticity.  I see it in my practice everyday.

If you would like to know more about Dr. Perlmutter here is his Facebook page.

Time to cut back on the grains for all people. Find out if you are gluten sensitive because this will tell you how strict you have to be, because if you are GS, even eating small amounts of gluten, even once a month will increase your risk of dying by 6% a year.
Also increase your consumption of good fats like butter and real olive oil, eat traditionally fermented foods like sauerkraut, and get out side and exercise... these are the fundamentals of a GAPS diet and protocol. And it works.

To Your Health

Dr. Barbara