A yukky Week for the Celiacs

Don't let me rip apart another clinical study!!!!!!  (Especially when I haven't read all of it....)

By now you have heard from practically everywhere that a new clinical study has prooooved for all time that all that gluten-free faddy stuff is stupid.

The new vast-grain-conspiracy mantra is:  NO -SEE -BO'O

What don't I like about the study, even after not reading it:  First, media sensationalism.  Hyperbole.  Gluten FAD diets.  What's not to hate about the way the media has handled this?

Then there is the idea of replacing the BAD gluten with something equally bad, dairy.

Third, there is the short cross-over period, and very short wash-out time.  I don't know about you-all, but major symptoms for me need at least two weeks.  Three days for the big stuff, maybe that is for most people who have full-blown "intestinal" celiac.

Perlmutter says it best in his blog post, what is really wrong with this study.  He also hints at the idea behind why I refuse to get "officially" diagnosed for celiac.  There is no reason on earth why I should go to a gastroenterologist for an expensive and invasive test if I do not even have "their" symptoms.  At best they might find local antibodies, but damage, not as much.  I can eat all that FODMAP stuff like jerusalem artichokes, onions, greens, cole crops.  I eat tons of veggies.  (I know, SHOCKING, on a LCHF diet, just SHOCKING!  I must be the only one.)  Why force me to eat wheat for six months, surely increasing the gluten-related neurological problems, just so I can make some non-symptomatic GI problems bad enough for a gastroenterologist to make money off me?

Actually, I am OK with the small sample size.  A small, well-done study with responsible reporting always wins.
 

Um, Honestly???

Sooooo, sales of Lean Cuisine PLUMMET???

Jimmy sent out a link to this blog post about Lean Cuisine's sagging sales.  Honestly, I have never had many of these "TV" dinners, but I know lots of folks who eat them all the time.  Back in the day when I was doing Weight Watchers and got plenty of coupons, I did try a few of these "healthy"-type frozen dinners.  But I thought they were bland and the portions and ingredients left me starving.

Lean Cuisines are big with people watching their weight at lunch.  You can bring them into the office, pop them in the microwave, and when you are done, that's it.  Great for portion control, but I don't know anybody who confuses them with real food.

Roz O'Hearn (yes, that looks like a real name, not just a St. Paddy's name!) says that Nestle (the company, not the Marion) uses "the same quality ingredients our consumers purchase when cooking from scratch."

Being data-driven as I am, I had to check this out.  I checked out the ingredients list for the first entree I could find, something called "Glazed Chicken".  Yum.  Embedded in the long list of ingredients were lots that I never use when I cook from scratch.  And here they are:

High Fructose Corn Syrup
corn oil
modified corn starch
sodium phosphate
caramel color
partially hydrogenated vegetable oil
wheat berries (OK, might be some disagreement on this.  Some consider it natural, some consider it a natural poison.)
maltodextrin
canola oil

Sorry to break it to ya Roz, but I don't think I could even buy modified corn starch at a store.  I think that is something people use when they are freezing things, not when they are cooking it from scratch.

Curious, I went to their website to check out more lists.  I noticed a new brand name, Honestly Good.  Now be careful and not use that phrase when describing food, since it is trademarked.   I guess it is just a brand, not an actual description of the actual food, which isn't as Honest as it first seems.

I scanned down the list of ingredients and found fewer than in the regular brand.  I don't have rice starch or dehydrated chicken broth in my pantry at the moment.  But wait, what is in this chicken broth?  My own scratch-chicken broth is chicken cooked in water and a few veggies for additional flavoring.  This chicken broth mix has added "flavor".  Yum, sounds flavorful.  They also add "natural flavor".  That's good.  I have lots of natural flavors in my food too.  I guess the difference between "flavor" and "natural flavor" is that one of the flavors is unnatural.

Its probably MSG.  They wouldn't "man-up" enough to admit that, in such an Honestlie-Good product and such.

Here's what I think about the sales plummet.  People aren't eating pasta anymore.  So many people are going wheat-free, and if they are going to blow it, a real pizza is a much better choice.  Just for fun, I started looking through all the ingredients lists for all the entrees.  Twenty-four out of the 24 I checked had added wheat.  When I tried to do a search, I found only two entrees that had no wheat at all.  People trying to avoid wheat altogether would also have a problem with the website.  When I entered "gluten" to exclude I got twelve pages of items, plus a gluten-ey list of entrees they somehow thought I would like at the bottom.

The one "Honestly Good" entree I checked had an astounding (to me anyway) 29 grams of carbs, and that included 6 grams of sugars that were hidden in various ways. 

Honestly, Nestle, people aren't buying your dinners because they suck.  They are either pasta or potstickers or whatever you want to call it, or bread or pita or whatever, and the few entrees that have the "safe" rice have either added gluten or wheat-based soy sauce.  We just don't want to eat that stuff anymore.  (And you should never have sold Peter's chocolate.)

Well F3K 'em!

Dr. Yoni says it best.

Read all about the fancy "nutritional" conference, the "tool" RD's who attend, and the absolutely astounding verbiage from the conference hosts on the good Doc's blog.  Oh, and don't forget the amazing RD tweets.

Yeah, I think we should get rid of cell phones and processed food and all that nasty stuff.  EMF makes you fat, along with eating all that saturated fat.  Thank goodness we have registered dietitians learning all about physics and waves and power calculations 'n' geeky science-y stuff like NU-TREE-INTS. 

Same with baby formula.  Baaaaaad!  I am giving it up today.  But don't take away my internet, no matter how fat it makes me.

Sooooo, processed food isn't the problem?  Technology isn't the problem?  What, low carb advocates aren't even the problem?  You mean its NOT the microwave?

I blame the tools.

Go Here. 

Things aren't what they seem even more than ever

My diet is dwindling down to fewer and fewer food groups, and moving into dangerous territory.  And I was thinking that it would really dwindle down to only kale, except the bagrada bug has also taken care of kale.  And, it is a good thing that Dr. Kruse just discovered that we can get all the electrons we need from the ground, instead of trying to get them from all this adulterated food.

First it was the genetically modified salmon, but now milk?  I was mostly on the primal side of paleo, but now will I have to go full-blown paleo?

I had planned another milk post even before this new plan came out this week.  It seems like People In Charge want to change our milk again, this time by adding artificial chemicals that cause neurological disruption (OK, at least in me.)  I don't think this is a good idea for this adulateration information not to be included prominently on the label.

This week, I visited that local store that says everything is 99 cents but that they really sell for a dollar.  I grabbed a container of whipping cream.  How bad can budget cream be?  Well, I was shocked that cream now contains milk.  I was somewhat prepared for the variety of gums and thickeners that are added to cream, but this addition of milk to cream and still calling it cream really stumped me.

...Like the label on one bottle of a dairy-type item  "Fat-free half and half".  And I don't know, maybe it the weird math-geek in me, but I am thinking that if it has no fat, how can it be half and half?  To me, half and half means 50/50, not 100/0 with additives.  If someone wanted to sell something with 100/0, then they couldn't call it something that implies some sort of 50/50.

Anyway, where was I?  Oh yeah, aspartame.  Years ago, I actually had something in common with our Dear Dr. Emily.  I had a diet coke habit.  I enjoyed a diet coke mid-morning, and mid-afternoon, until the coke machine at work turned out such bad-tasting water that I couldn't drink it anymore.  Then I started bringing my own cans to work.  This opened up an opportunity to experience a wide variety of diet Coke flavors.

After about a decade of this, I realized that aspartame consumed regularly wasn't doing me any good.  I thought it was the caffeine, but then realized I didn't get those effects from drinking gobs of caffeine-laden real coffee.  I got unnecessarily jittery, and less clear-headed than before, and a bit anxious.  After awhile, after reading so much negative press about aspartame, I switched from Diet Coke to regular Coke, but had only one "serving" a day.  I figured that sugar wasn't be best for me, but better than aspartame.

When I switched from aspartame to HFCS, I did gain weight.  Since then, of course, I have given up all pre-packaged soft drinks.  Every once in awhile I'll buy a bottle of sparkling mineral water and add in some home-made syrup.  I especially like chocolate-mint soda, but I have to be careful with it because it does contain too much sugar.

Now that I am not eating any adulterated unlabeled food anymore, I guess it is time to go to the beach and dig my feet into the sand and suck up all the electrons.  Mmmmmm!  Tasty!  I love being a groundaterian.

I'm going to clue you-all in as to why I think dieting makes people crazy.  Here's what is totally STUPID about the state of diet recommendations and our ability to follow them.  Practically every "diet" food being sold on the market has added aspartame.  Recently I visited a chain grocery store right in Dr. Mary Dan Eades backyard.  I was shocked that there was a whole aisle of yogurts and yogurt-like products, and I could not find ONE SINGLE FULL-FAT variety of yogurt!   Everything was low fat, and most contained aspartame.

Am I the only one thinking it is really funny that the People In Charge remove that nasty butterfat from the cow and treat it as toxic waste, and then add a real toxic unnatural additive to what is left and call that milk?  Not funny-ha-ha, funny-this-is-weird.