Gluten Free Vegan Living

Did you get a chance to listen to the speakers at The Gluten Summit was held earlier this month?  Personally, I missed the audio presentation, but got a chance to view the transcripts.

In case you did not hear about The Gluten Summit …..

29 experts and opinion leaders gathered to prove to the world that it MUST ask, “Could health issues be caused by gluten?”

So, I am going through the talks one by one and plan to share with you some of the highlights.

First talks I have read are about Gluten and it’s affect on the brain.  Here are some of the things I learned

A Grain of Truth: The Gluten Summit — Presenter: Dr. Daniel Amen, MD
How Gluten Can Affect the Brain, and How to Optimize Brain Function!

• Low Fat Diets are bad for your brain:

And, then, the second step is to avoid anything that hurts your brain. And, this is, perhaps, where gluten may come into the conversation. So, the first thing that hurts your brain is, one, not knowing about your brain’s health and not caring. The second thing is having the Standard American Diet that’s filled with processed food, excessive amounts of fat, sugar, and salt, although I have to quality fat because sixty percent of the solid weight of your brain is fat. So, having healthy fat is absolutely essential. Low-fat diets are bad for your brain. But, bad fat is clearly a problem: trans fats or cheap oils that boost omega-6 fatty acid levels in your body, which are pro-inflammatory.

• Negative thinking patterns are clearly bad for your brain:

Not focusing on what you’re grateful for is bad for your brain. And, one of the most insidious things that is bad for your brain is hanging out with unhealthy people. People are contagious. And, if your friends tend to be unhealthy, guess what? So do you. So, I often tell my patients, “Find the healthiest person you can stand, [10:00] and spend as much time around him or her as possible.

• Food is either medicine to your brain or poison:

And, your brain uses twenty percent of the oxygen you breathe, and about twenty-five percent of the calories you eat. So, food is medicine or it’s poison. And, it’s through this journey that I realized that milk is often toxic to people. Probably the best users of cow’s milk are baby cows. And, that gluten from wheat for a certain percentage of the population can clearly be poisonous.

•  Wheat can be addictive:

Yes, the benzodiazepines in wheat or the gluteomorphins that bind to the heroin or opium receptors in the brain create that addictive tendency quite easily.

• Tackle football can cause brain damage:

So, we did the big NFL study where we scanned and treated 150 NFL players, active and retired players. And, what we found was that they all had brain damage. So, you should not let your kids play tackle football. I mean, I don’t know how else to say that clear. Your brain is soft, your skull is hard. Your brain runs your life. Why would you ever hurt it unless you weren’t that smart?

But, the exciting news was even though they all had brain damage, eighty percent on a smart, natural program showed cognitive improvement and increased blood flow to the brain. So, even if you have been bad to your brain, you can make it better. And, we can prove it.

• Eliminating wheat can help children with Attention Disorder:

We know an article was published in the Journal of Attention Disorders that, when they looked at children diagnosed with celiac disease and they put them on a gluten-free diet–it was 132 children–every child or their parents reported improvement in all twelve markers of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Every marker improved in every child within six months.

There’s another study. Pelsser from Holland put children on an elimination diet. And, after six months they had 73% reduction in symptoms. It’s the same effect as Ritalin. And, there’s just no side effects to being on a really healthy diet minus potential food allergens. And, people go, “Oh, there’s nothing to eat!” And, it’s like, “You know, God gave you a big brain for a reason. There’s a whole bunch of things to eat.”

I will be sharing more info learned from The Gluten Free Summit in a later post!