December 02, 2016
Source: Bigstock
Job’s tears is an Asian fake barley that got its name from people constantly crying out, “God, please remove this grazing-animal sewage from my mouth!”
Millet is soggy grass. Yum.
Teff is a “lovegrass” from the Ethiopian highlands used to build mud huts.
Arrowroot was a stale burrito eaten by the Arawak people of Haiti, who also ate rats and worms. The Arawak are extinct.
Mesquite powder is made from the beans of the largest weed in the world, a weed so humongous that in Texas we call it a tree.
Sago is gelatinous starch balls consumed by the people of the Moluccas. Do you know where the Moluccas are? Neither does anyone else.
Tapioca is tapioca. There’s a reason it’s a synonym for “boring.”
Would you care to take a guess as to what year the phrase “gluten intolerance” first entered the medical literature?
That year would be 2010.
Okay, let’s do the math on that. For the first 12,010 years of the agricultural society, there is no “gluten intolerance.” Then for six years we have so much of it that grocers start putting “Gluten Free” labels on bottled water. I”m not sure which aboriginal inhabitant of which continent believes that water ever contained gluten, but whoever he is, he’s probably still a hunter-gatherer.
Then we find out that “gluten intolerance” has about 30 symptoms”most of them disgusting and gastrointestinal, many of them involving the same symptoms found in any Tums commercial”but “may often be completely asymptomatic.” In other words, even if you don”t have symptoms, you probably suffer from some kind of gluten overload because “wheat belly,” as the diet advocates like to call it, causes 250 conditions and diseases, including heart disease, cancer, obesity, Alzheimer’s disease, vaginitis, epilepsy, clinical depression, congestive heart failure, bone disease, and diabetes. Conclusion: Obviously we would all be healthier if we just completely eliminated wheat, barley, and rye, the evil substances that have been consumed by every civilization in history, because we know better.
By the way, the doctors who are pumping this diet through books, videos, and relentless media are masters of nomenclature. Besides “wheat belly,” we have “grain brain,” “leaky gut syndrome,” and “gut dysbiosis.” In order to determine whether you have any of these conditions, you need an intestinal biopsy, an antibody blood test, an HLA-DQ test for your autoimmune system, an Immunoglobulin E skin-prick test to find allergies, and, my personal favorite, a “rectal challenge test.” I don”t know about you, but I prefer not to have my rectum challenged.
But here’s the best part: You can have all these tests, and be negative for everything, and still have gluten intolerance. Why? Because “testing is incomplete.” They haven”t developed enough tests yet for the 250 conditions.
By the way, you can also find gluten in medications and dietary supplements, so while you”re chewing your flax and wondering how you”re going to cure your aphthous stomatitis, I”d like to point out a few things a gluten-free diet does contain:
Sulfites
Nitrates
Glutamates
Benzoates
And a few things it does not contain:
Vitamins
Minerals
Protein
Fiber
Yeah, all that stuff gets bleached out in the deglutenization process.
So this whole story has a happy ending:
These people won”t be with us much longer anyway.
