Of course not! Right?!?

Why not? Well, we know what poison oak does to your skin, so can you imagine what it would do to your gut?

One of the advantages (and also disadvantages, frankly) of being in an “alternative” healing profession (don’t get me started on the term alternative… “mainstream” medicine has helped create a nation of sick people, and alternative methods focus on health… why are WE considered alternative?) is that lots of theories, potions, supplements, ideas, and techniques hit my radar on a weekly basis. Some of them are nothing more than “get rich quick” schemes, some are completely new paradigms that need to be tested, and some just inherently make sense as soon as I learn them. I spend hours every week reading, talking to people, researching and wading through this stuff so that I can maximize my health and present information that I think is valuable to my family, friends, and of course, patients.

Many of you know that I am mostly gluten free (I say mostly because I seriously watch my wheat/gluten intake, but living in an Italian family it does sneak in to my system occasionally) and I’ve found that I perform better and have better health because of it. Recently, the concept of being completely grain free has hit my radar.

The idea comes from a book called “The Paleo Diet” and a follow up book called “The Paleo Solution” by Robb Wolf. I’ve only read the latter, by Wolf. In it, he does a  remarkable job explaining how grains affect the GI tract. Much to my surprise, all grains cause inflammation, and not just those common suspects like wheat and corn.

He explained it like this: if you look at life from an anthropological and evolution perspective, it’s beneficial for some plants, like blueberries to be eaten by us. We eat them, and their seeds are deposited in the plains by the by-products we eliminate (obviously modern sewage has changed this benefit somewhat, but you get my point). From the blueberry’s point of view, humans eating them means propagation of the species.

Grains are different. When we eat them, they just die. So just like poison oak has a defense mechanism to keep us away (oils that cause a skin reaction), grains have a similar mechanism… but it happens on the inside!

Wolf does a great job explaining the mechanism in his book, so I’m not going to go into it again. The easiest way to think of it is this… eating grains is like eating poison oak. It causes inflammation and damage to the “skin” of your GI tract.

If you’d like to buy the book, you can get it from Amazon.com.

If you have questions, let me know. 🙂

~Dr. M