Less than 2 years ago, my wife was diagnosed with MS (Multiple sclerosis). As soon as we found out, I started digging like crazy to learn more about why this happened and what we could do to prevent it from progressing. I'm a big believer in that the body has the ability to heal itself by avoiding certain foods and intaking others. I mean, food is fuel we put in our body.
After digging for a while, I came upon some staggering discoveries. First, there are people who have reversed their MS almost completely on diet alone. The diets consist of A LOT of high-nutrition fruits and vegetables along with Omega 3's, organic meats, etc. These Paleo-like diets also forbid gluten with the main reason being that it causes serious inflammation in some folks. This TEDx video by Dr. Terry Wahl was very helpful (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjgBLwH3Wc). I read her book and it literally laid the foundation for which changed our eating habits entirely.
A month or so after, we flew out to Massachusetts to a well-known wellness center where they performed various blood and stool tests. The Dr's (including a Nutritionist) sat down with us for the entire day and asked about daily habits from what our work days were like to what we ate. Without mentioning my own research, they also said that gluten is something we should completely remove from our diet.
There's a ton of other stuff out there, but since removing gluten entirely, my wife has felt great. We just did an MRI and she has no new lesions. She no longer experiences blurriness or weakness which is great. It may not be completely because of Gluten, but removing seems to have seriously made a impact.
Well, it quite well known that gluten creates several problems for SOME people. That's quite a different argument from the over generalization you did at the GP.
It's indeed something to keep in mind, but the good news is that it's easy to test for.
Gluten intolerance isn't a binary state, it's a scale. Everyone's on it somewhere, but unless it's REALLY bad, you'd probably never get diagnosed or even tested.
Main benefit of avoiding gluten though is it's a simple rule that helps you avoid a lot of bad foods, and excuse it socially.
I love that anecdotes are considered worthless in medicine when in fact they're very clearly good places to start.
Take an anecdote and do a small population study to try and find correlation. Then if there are any significant results, start looking for causation.
In history nothing is legit except for primary sources. In medicine, it seems, primary sources -- no matter how compelling -- are worth a damn. Hilarious.
No. Medicine is so broad and subjective that it's easy to find an anecdote implying almost anything. That's why expensive double blind is so important -- even doctors fool themselves.
How many "carrots cured my cancer" wild goose chases would it take to bankrupt even the biggest company? Whatever that number is, it's smaller than the number of wild-ass medical anecdotes rolling around out there.
Of course, everybody thinks that their own anecdote is compelling and obvious and all their friends on carb-free diets are idiots...
After digging for a while, I came upon some staggering discoveries. First, there are people who have reversed their MS almost completely on diet alone. The diets consist of A LOT of high-nutrition fruits and vegetables along with Omega 3's, organic meats, etc. These Paleo-like diets also forbid gluten with the main reason being that it causes serious inflammation in some folks. This TEDx video by Dr. Terry Wahl was very helpful (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLjgBLwH3Wc). I read her book and it literally laid the foundation for which changed our eating habits entirely.
A month or so after, we flew out to Massachusetts to a well-known wellness center where they performed various blood and stool tests. The Dr's (including a Nutritionist) sat down with us for the entire day and asked about daily habits from what our work days were like to what we ate. Without mentioning my own research, they also said that gluten is something we should completely remove from our diet.
There's a ton of other stuff out there, but since removing gluten entirely, my wife has felt great. We just did an MRI and she has no new lesions. She no longer experiences blurriness or weakness which is great. It may not be completely because of Gluten, but removing seems to have seriously made a impact.