Dump the Breadbasket and Turn That Food Pyramid on its Point

It’s not that I don’t like folks who grow grains.  I mean, I am related to some wonderful folks who grow wheat for a living, who are on my husband’s side of the family. I’ve been to their church bazaars and eaten their jello molds.

In France, I went to medical school at Amiens in the Somme, the breadbasket of France, and I took care of lots of stalwart folks who grew wheat for a living.

In Kansas, my husband taught me a charming piece of etiquette in solidarity with the wheat farmers.  Every time we went out to restaurant, I destroyed the dinner rolls served to me, so the restaurant could not serve them to the next patron.  I was supporting the wheat farmers, and it was good.
Dr. Terry Wahls is a physician who reversed her own MS (Multiple Sclerosis) largely with a grain-free diet. Obviously, I think highly of this diet, formulated by this woman to treat her own MS.

I used to be considered an IB (irritable bowel) patient myself, but that set of symptoms has pretty much disappeared since I no longer consume grains.

Like her, I reached dietary wisdom in my own way — from observing patients, as well as myself.

Has nobody but me wondered if mainstream medicine requires a “course correction,” since many mainstream medical doctors the world over have chosen self-experimentation over mainstream medical practices?

Lots of people have published lots of things, generally for academic stature (attaining professorial rank, “publish or perish,”) but often seem to reinforce common beliefs — sometimes, they even present as “poor science,” especially to colleagues from physical or chemical sciences.

Some people who go back over old data and find new conclusions become my heroes, but are often forgotten or even reviled by the medical mainstream. People like Alessandro Menotti, who re-analyzed data from Ancel Keyes, in the Italian part of the seven countries study, to show that heart disease risk was a function of eating sugar and not eating fat.

Me, I have  been looking for reasons that people need to eat carbohydrates.

I have found absolutely none.

Your body can and does a wonderful job making enough carbohydrates to feed your brain from other sources.  Always. Carbohydrates may have been part of helping the human race survive, in the distant past, when appropriate animal-based foods were too hard to kill or domesticate. This is the subject of some marvelous ethnographic research by Jared Diamond. I have to admire two Italian research scientists from the University of Padua, who deliberately published in simple English for the widest possible readership, see nutrition, notably grains, as a cause of mental illness.

I’ve got to admit this one took me aback.  I have certainly known that the relationship between nutrition and psychiatry had been too little studied.  Still, I had seen circumstantial evidence of the things could be related.

Evidence that schizophrenics may have metabolized some nutrients differently. The idea that autism may have been related to malabsorption of nutrients. European research that omega 3 supplementation could delay (or perhaps even prevent) psychotic break — the onset of those horrible symptoms that make people live an alternative reality, seeing and hearing things that the rest of us do not.

I have reviewed the literature that showed autism could improve with exclusion of certain dietary substance.

I checked the references and the theory that consumption of wheat, and perhaps even dairy, may have an effect — and yes, perhaps even a causative one — upon major mental illness.

Both these authors and the physician who bought about remission of her own MS agree that there is a large lag time between research science and clinical medicine. The MS-afflicted doctor said there is 15 years of lag time.

The two Italian authors said that the knowledge about a possible link between nutrition and mental illness has been around about 50 years.

Neither would argue that they had solved the problem for all afflicted people.  We have a diet that can be “offered” to patients, and individual case studies.

I don’t know how, with so rapid and universal a means of disseminating information as the internet, we have reached such a place, where information both real and bogus is plentiful, but we cannot seem to advance information that will save human lives.

Although I have come to wonder if there is not someone making money by keeping people ill and in need of treatment, I decline further analysis, leaving such exercises to economic and political analysts who are proficient and specialize in such things.

I applaud the Italian scientists, who have dared present their hypothesis in the land of bread and pasta.

I know wheat farmers mean well.

Still, I have no plans to click together the heels of my ruby slippers right now.  It is not a good time for me to go back to Kansas.

Humans certainly do not need the exorbitant amount of helpings of grain that have stood as the base of the food pyramid for a very long time.

We need a lot of fat.  You need it to grow a brain.

I’m the one who thought calling someone a “fathead” was a compliment.

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