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| Healthy whole wheat, on the left. |
"Testing found that 5.6% of them have celiac. Unfortunately wheat flour is their staple food (I wonder what that started?). Before celiac was diagnosed, people thought their children were merely dying from a malnourishing diet or GI illness. Researchers are now finding celiac hotspots across the Middle East, India, and Africa.
"This is interesting because so much government food aid contains gluten. How many of the children you see on those "save the children" campaign ads are really suffering from celiac like this child?? How many such starving children will be given gluten-containing food aid and will die as a result?"
5.6% of a population is celiac? And that's likely only the tip of the iceberg.
As I mentioned in a comment a while ago, wheat is a proven cause of heart disease, cancer, and even schizophrenia, in humans. Would you eat any other food about which that could be said?
P.S. Added excerpt from Melissa's post.
P.P.S. Wow, Melissa buried the lede on this one. I got around to following the link (To Frontiers in Celiac Disease
by Alessio Fasano, et al) in her post above, and found this:"We have recently completed a screening project on school children in Cairo City, Egypt. Blood samples were obtained from 1,500 children attending school in Cairo City between October 2001 and June 2004... The prevalence of [celiac disease] in this sample of Egyptian students was 53% (95% CI 0.17-0.89). This estimate may be low, as more CD cases could be diagnosed at the follow-up, e.g. in the group currently showing a positive tTG IgA and a negative EMA [partial CD symptoms]."
53% of the kids!? That's incredible. This is from the region where wheat cultivation has gone on the longest, mind you. (Alessio Fasano is the leading researcher on celiac disease.)
This is scary, I mean all the food we eat contains grain, well all the stuff on the shelf and how many people do you really know who don't purchase premade food! Sigh..
ReplyDeleteUp until recently, everyone smoked.
ReplyDeleteYou can still buy premade food, you just read the ingredients very carefully. Which means you wind up buying a lot less of it...
Wheat is murder.
ReplyDeleteThanks Don. :)
ReplyDeleteI do, I even make my kids read them too. They know what is allowed and what is not.
ReplyDeleteMy older daughter, who's fought tooth-and-nail against our paleo diet, finally admitted that whole wheat makes her feel pretty bad, but white bread doesn't make her feel "as bad". So could she still eat white bread?
ReplyDeleteProgress, one small step at a time. :)