As you know, I do consultation with people to help them get higher levels of wellness.
I was sent an article this morning from Science Magazine arguing about Gluten…
What’s really behind ‘gluten sensitivity’?
I quote the entire article in the footnotes…
I muscletested the truth value of the article, 5%.
Anything and anyone that talks about the companies or industries that provide all the funding for “science” are sensitive topic for people whose job security depends on their compliance in toeing the interests of these industries or companies.
So the truth value will be low.
But even if you investigate the individuals, the stuff they can see and therefore talk about, is 10% truth value at best.
Why is this? For two reasons that are maybe one and the same… we’ll look at that:
1. the limited perspective of the human MIND
2. the memes of what is good for you and what isn’t, what is accepted and what isn’t.
What is the mind? The mind is a storage device that makes thinking unnecessary. It is the home of the shortcuts we call biases, prejudices, cognitive biases that we humans use to free up our energy to “do” life like a robot.
Originally the mind was useful. Really. But what you put in the mind, the long term memory, the attic as Management guru Peter Drucker calls it. But even though in dwellings the attic is not often visited, the human mind is used for everything in low vibration individuals… practically everyone human on the planet, 99.5% of everyone.
How did this happen? Well, it took a long time. The more verbal communication gained part in our lives, the less we can actually see, hear, feel, experience of reality. We have retreated into Plato’s Cave, and only see, hear, feel, experience what is allowed by the mind.
The mind stores words. Words is the content of the mind. Even feelings are only triggered by words. We call them “marker feelings”… actually Margoczi had the courage to call them marker feelings, I learned the expression from him.
This happened and is happening at an accelerated rate. The more words we have in our lives, the more we live in the mind.
And we stop being human… we become machines. Or puppets, if you prefer to see it that way.
We are effectively robbed of our self-reliance, self-determination, self-knowledge, and of access to real knowledge through our senses, including our brain.
Dystopian novels, like 1984 and Brave New World are already happening. For example Brave New World suggests that cloning people is the issue: no, cloning minds is the issue.
If you manage to think that your mind is cloned… don’t you feel upset? Don’t you feel used, abused, and don’t you start scrambling to free yourself?
Try it… To the degree that you find having a cloned mind upsetting, to the same degree there is still a human there… somewhere.
My entire work is to return people to being able to use their senses, restore their humanness…
It is just on the border of impossible and hopeless.
The ragtag team in the Matrix comes to mind. And the crew member who wants to go back into the Matrix to savor imaginary steak. I think that is the scariest scene of the whole movie.
I have a ragtag team, and they are well, they are moving, and they are coming out of the cave. Plato’s Cave.
Some are further along than others. I am working really tight with them, because the future of humanity depends on our success. How? I don’t know. that is not part of my mission, the how.
Part of the work I have to do to prepare these people to the work it takes to come out of Plato’s Cave, to come out of the mind, is to bring their health and their cell hydration up to a level where they can.
How do I do that? Well, rule number 1: I don’t use MY mind to advise them. I willfully exclude my mind from the interactions, from formulating my suggested changes in their diet and it their behavior.
I use muscletesting while being fully connected to Source. I refrain from having thoughts, having an opinion, so as not to color the suggestion.
Given that the title of this article is about gluten, I’ll say something about my insights regarding what insights I could glean from my muscletests:
I have never had even one person whose recommended food list included any grains, wheat, corn, etc.
Why? I don’t know. And I don’t care. If Source connected to your body says: don’t eat that… I’ll tell you: don’t eat that. If you do, you’ll have a decrease in your wellness, a decrease in your physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual wellness.
To me the most obvious signs are that you suddenly turn stupid, dense, impenetrable. You can’t follow. You can’t hear. Your cone of vision narrows. Your awareness gets pitifully low. You become untrainable.
My story
I am 70 years old. I was ill all my life. And unhappy.
It took me 18 months to wean myself off the foods muscletest/Source told me to stop eating. It was really challenging. I am still dreaming of eating a freshly baked bread with butter… or a bagel with cream cheese and lox… lol.
I have no brain fog any more. I move like someone 30 years younger.
I have no emotional ups and downs, no depression, no regrets, no anger, no upsets, no worries, no anxiety. I am pretty much not the same person I used to be. I look similar, but am not similar.
And I can say the same about students/clients who manage to keep their health number and cell hydration up to high levels.
When either of those fall, their productivity, intelligence, emotional intelligence fall too.
And, because they live in society with its seductive food products, they often fall of the wagon. A sandwich here, a candy bar there, a cup of coffee with milk… and they are off the wagon. The stupidity clues me in.
So what am I saying? Am I saying gluten is harmful? Am I saying fodmaps wreak havoc in you? I don’t know… I only know that people who claim they are on a gluten free diet get their information from the media (or their doctor) and they are still stupid, foggy, sluggish, tired, and can’t be teased out of their minds.
What I am saying is that those are words, gluten and fodmaps… Unless you live according to your body, you won’t get well.
Our diet is so different from what our body considers food, that we, as a collective mass of bodies, are stupid and cannot be considered human any more.
Our “leaders” are also non-human… they don’t eat better than you. So we, as a collective mass of bodies are cutting the tree under our feet, so to say.
You say you want to get well, and to tell you the truth: I don’t much give credence to your words. You want to feel better while you are in Plato’s Cave.
I am only interested in working with individuals who set their sights higher… become a human being who has a mind but is not the mind.
Homo Sapiens is a dead end of human evolution. We need to go back where we made, humanity, a wrong turn and grow from there.
I have no illusion that even if I became a magician, I would only have a ragtag team of a few consistently working towards that goal.
I am fine with that. We are mapping out the path… It is becoming part of All-Knowledge, that never disappears. What I call Source.
And after the current humanity annihilates itself, a new humanity will arise… maybe in a million years? And they will have a blueprint, so the next human experiment can succeed.
According to Source, this is the seventh experiment, we are the seventh generation of sentient beings on the Planet, and maybe in the whole Universe.
And according to Source, some specimens from a previous experiments survived the annihilation of the entire population, except these specimens.
Will my students survive? I don’t know. I am working on the knowledge and all my attention is on that. 1
What’s really behind ‘gluten sensitivity’?
In Science Magazine, By Kelly Servick
article truth value: 1%… meaning it is b.s. “Science” is in bed with the food manufacturers so it is in its interest to mislead you.
The patients weren’t crazy—Knut Lundin was sure of that. But their ailment was a mystery. They were convinced gluten was making them sick. Yet they didn’t have celiac disease, an autoimmune reaction to that often-villainized tangle of proteins in wheat, barley, and rye. And they tested negative for a wheat allergy. They occupied a medical no man’s land.
About a decade ago, gastroenterologists like Lundin, based at the University of Oslo, came across more and more of those enigmatic cases. “I worked with celiac disease and gluten for so many years,” he says, “and then came this wave.” Gluten-free choices began appearing on restaurant menus and creeping onto grocery store shelves. By 2014, in the United States alone, an estimated 3 million people without celiac disease had sworn off gluten. It was easy to assume that people claiming to be “gluten sensitive” had just been roped into a food fad.
“Generally, the reaction of the gastroenterologist [was] to say, ‘You don’t have celiac disease or wheat allergy. Goodbye,’” says Armin Alaedini, an immunologist at Columbia University. “A lot of people thought this is perhaps due to some other [food] sensitivity, or it’s in people’s heads.”
But a small community of researchers started searching for a link between wheat components and patients’ symptoms—commonly abdominal pain, bloating, and diarrhea, and sometimes headaches, fatigue, rashes, and joint pain. That wheat really can make nonceliac patients sick is now widely accepted. But that’s about as far as the agreement goes.
As data trickle in, entrenched camps have emerged. Some researchers are convinced that many patients have an immune reaction to gluten or another substance in wheat—a nebulous illness sometimes called nonceliac gluten sensitivity (NCGS).
Others believe most patients are actually reacting to an excess of poorly absorbed carbohydrates present in wheat and many other foods. Those carbohydrates—called FODMAPs, for fermentable oligosaccharides, disaccharides, monosaccharides, and polyols—can cause bloating when they ferment in the gut. If FODMAPs are the primary culprit, thousands of people may be on gluten-free diets with the support of their doctors and dietitians but without good reason.
Those competing theories were on display in a session on wheat sensitivity at a celiac disease symposium held at Columbia in March. In back-to-back talks, Lundin made the case for FODMAPs, and Alaedini for an immune reaction. But in an irony that underscores how muddled the field has become, both researchers started their quests believing something completely different.
video truth value: 1%Known wheat-related illnesses have clear mechanisms and markers. People with celiac disease are genetically predisposed to launch a self-destructive immune response when a component of gluten called gliadin penetrates their intestinal lining and sets off inflammatory cells in the tissue below. People with a wheat allergy respond to wheat proteins by churning out a class of antibodies called immunoglobulin E that can set off vomiting, itching, and shortness of breath. The puzzle, for both doctors and researchers, is patients who lack both the telltale antibodies and the visible damage to their intestines but who feel real relief when they cut out gluten-containing food.
Some doctors have begun to approve and even recommend a gluten-free diet. “Ultimately, we’re here not to do science, but to improve quality of life,” says Alessio Fasano, a pediatric gastroenterologist at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston who has studied NCGS and written a book on living gluten-free. “If I have to throw bones on the ground and look at the moon to make somebody better, even if I don’t understand what that means, I’ll do it.”
Like many doctors, Lundin believed that (fad dieters and superstitious eaters aside) some patients have a real wheat-related ailment. His group helped dispel the notion that NCGS was purely psychosomatic. They surveyed patients for unusual levels of psychological distress that might express itself as physical symptoms. But the surveys showed no differences between those patients and people with celiac disease, the team reported in 2012. As Lundin bluntly puts it: “We know they are not crazy.”
Still, skeptics worried that the field had seized on gluten with shaky evidence that it was the culprit. After all, nobody eats gluten in isolation. “If we did not know about the specific role of gluten in celiac disease, we would never have thought gluten was responsible for [NCGS],” says Stefano Guandalini, a pediatric gastroenterologist at the University of Chicago Medical Center in Illinois. “Why blame gluten?”
Defenders of NCGS generally acknowledge that other components of wheat might contribute to symptoms. In 2012, a group of proteins in wheat, rye, and barley called amylase trypsin inhibitors emerged as a potential offender, for example, after a team led by biochemist Detlef Schuppan of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany (then at Harvard Medical School in Boston) reported that those proteins can provoke immune cells.
Against the grain
Data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey show the rising tide of gluten avoidance by people without celiac disease. Celiac diagnoses also rose, but probably not its actual prevalence.
But without biological markers to identify people with NCGS, researchers have relied on self-reported symptoms measured through a “gluten challenge”: Patients rate how they feel before and after cutting out gluten. Then doctors reintroduce gluten or a placebo—ideally disguised in indistinguishable pills or snacks—to see whether the symptoms tick back up.
Alaedini has recently hit on a more objective set of possible biological markers—much to his own surprise. “I entered this completely as a skeptic,” he says. Over his career, he has gravitated toward studying spectrum disorders, in which diverse symptoms have yet to be united under a clear biological cause—and where public misinformation abounds. His team published a study in 2013, for example, that debunked the popular suggestion that children with autism had high rates of Lyme disease. “I do studies [where] there is a void,” he says.
In NCGS, Alaedini saw another poorly defined spectrum disorder. He did accept that patients without celiac disease might somehow be sensitive to wheat, on the basis of several trials that measured symptoms after a blinded challenge. But he was not convinced by previous studies claiming that NCGS patients were more likely than other people to have certain antibodies to gliadin. Many of those studies lacked a healthy control group, he says, and relied on commercial antibody kits that gave murky and inconsistent readings.
In 2012, he contacted researchers at the University of Bologna in Italy to obtain blood samples from 80 patients their team had identified as gluten sensitive on the basis of a gluten challenge. He wanted to test the samples for signs of a unique immune response—a set of signaling molecules different from those in the blood of healthy volunteers and celiac patients. He wasn’t optimistic. “I thought if we were going to see something, like with a lot of spectrum conditions that I have looked at, we would see small differences.”
The results shocked him. Compared with both healthy people and those with celiac, these patients had significantly higher levels of a certain class of antibodies against gluten that suggest a short-lived, systemic immune response. That didn’t mean gluten itself was causing disease, but the finding hinted that the barrier of those patients’ intestines might be defective, allowing partially digested gluten to get out of the gut and interact with immune cells in the blood. Other elements—such as immune response–provoking bacteria—also might be escaping. Sure enough, the team found elevated levels of two proteins that indicate an inflammatory response to bacteria. And when 20 of the same patients spent 6 months on a gluten-free diet, their blood levels of those markers declined.
For Alaedini, the beginnings of a mechanism emerged: Some still-unidentified wheat component prompts the intestinal lining to become more permeable. (An imbalance in gut microbes might be a predisposing factor.) Components of bacteria then seem to sneak past immune cells in the underlying intestinal tissue and make their way to the bloodstream and liver, prompting inflammation.
“This is a real condition, and there can be objective, biological markers for it,” Alaedini says. “That study changed a lot of minds, including my own.”
The study also impressed Guandalini, a longtime skeptic about the role of gluten. It “opens the way to finally reach an identifiable marker for this condition,” he says.
But others see the immune-response explanation as a red herring. To them, the primary villain is FODMAPs. The term, coined by gastroenterologist Peter Gibson at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and his team, encompasses a smorgasbord of common foods. Onions and garlic; legumes; milk and yogurt; and fruits including apples, cherries, and mangoes are all high in FODMAPs. So is wheat: Carbs in wheat called fructans can account for as much as half of a person’s FODMAP intake, dietitians in Gibson’s group have estimated. The team found that those compounds ferment in the gut to cause symptoms of irritable bowel syndrome, such as abdominal pain, bloating, and gas.
Gibson has long been skeptical of studies implicating gluten in such symptoms, arguing that those findings are hopelessly clouded by the nocebo effect, in which the mere expectation of swallowing the dreaded ingredient worsens symptoms. His team found that most patients couldn’t reliably distinguish pure gluten from a placebo in a blinded test. He believes that many people feel better after eliminating wheat not because they have calmed some intricate immune reaction, but because they’ve reduced their intake of FODMAPs.
Lundin, who was firmly in the immune-reaction camp, didn’t believe that FODMAPs could explain away all his patients. “I wanted to show that Peter was wrong,” he says. During a 2-week sabbatical in the Monash lab, he found some quinoa-based snack bars designed to disguise the taste and texture of ingredients. “I said, ‘We’re going to take those muesli bars and we’re going to do the perfect study.’”
His team recruited 59 people on self-instituted gluten-free diets and randomized them to receive one of three indistinguishable snack bars, containing isolated gluten, isolated FODMAP (fructan), or neither. After eating one type of bar daily for a week, they reported any symptoms. Then they waited for symptoms to resolve and started on a different bar until they had tested all three.
Before analyzing patient responses, Lundin was confident that gluten would cause the worst symptoms. But when the study’s blind was lifted, only the FODMAP symptoms even cleared the bar for statistical significance. Twenty-four of the 59 patients had their highest symptom scores after a week of the fructan-laced bars. Twenty-two responded most to the placebo, and just 13 to gluten, Lundin and his collaborators—who included Gibson—reported last November in the journal Gastroenterology. Lundin now believes FODMAPs explain the symptoms in most wheat-avoiding patients. “My main reason for doing that study was to find out a good method of finding gluten-sensitive individuals,” he says. “And there were none. And that was quite amazing.”
At the Columbia meeting, Alaedini and Lundin went head to head in consecutive talks titled “It’s the Wheat” and “It’s FODMAPS.” Each has a list of criticisms of the other’s study. Alaedini contends that by recruiting broadly from the gluten-free population, instead of finding patients who reacted to wheat in a challenge, Lundin likely failed to include people with a true wheat sensitivity. Very few of Lundin’s subjects reported symptoms outside the intestines, such as rash or fatigue, that might point to a widespread immune condition, Alaedini says. And he notes that the increase in patients’ symptoms in response to the FODMAP snacks was just barely statistically significant.
Lundin, meanwhile, points out that the patients in Alaedini’s study didn’t go through a blinded challenge to check whether the immune markers he identified really spiked in response to wheat or gluten. The markers may not be specific to people with a wheat sensitivity, Lundin says.
Despite the adversarial titles of their talks, the two researchers find a lot of common ground. Alaedini agrees that FODMAPs explain some of the wheat-avoidance phenomenon. And Lundin acknowledges that some small population may really have an immune reaction to gluten or another component of wheat, though he sees no good way to find them.
After the meeting, Elena Verdù, a gastroenterologist at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, puzzled over the polarization of the field. “I don’t understand why there is this need to be so dogmatic about ‘it is this, it is not that,’” she says.
She worries that the scientific confusion breeds skepticism toward people who avoid gluten for medical reasons. When she dines with celiac patients, she says, waiters sometimes meet requests for gluten-free food with smirks and questions. Meanwhile, the conflicting messages may send nonceliac patients down a food-avoidance rabbit hole. “Patients are withdrawing gluten first, then lactose, and then FODMAPs—and then they are on a really, really poor diet,” she says.
But Verdù believes careful research will ultimately break through the superstitions. She is president of the North American Society for the Study of Celiac Disease, which this year awarded its first grant to study nonceliac wheat sensitivity. She’s hopeful that the search for biomarkers like those Alaedini has proposed will show that inside the monolith of gluten avoidance lurk multiple, nuanced conditions. “It will be difficult,” she says, “but we are getting closer.”
