For burger restaurants like McDonalds, Burger King, and Hardees, keep away from the fried chicken sandwich and order their grilled option.
Many places now offer salads as a healthier option. Be sure and remove the bacon, croutons, and cheese. Instead of using fattening ranch dressing, go for balsamic vinaigrette or Italian dressing. And most importantly, avoid drinking soda with your meal! Soda consumption is one of the major contributing factors to obesity. Instead, go for bottled water or unsweetened tea.”
Gluten free diets have become a popular health trend.
Should everyone avoid gluten?
“People with celiac disease have a true gluten allergy and need to avoid it. This is only 1 percent of the U.S. population. Many nutritionists and doctors are recommending that the other 99 percent should also completely eliminate gluten from their diet because it’s not healthy. I wholeheartedly disagree! Dietary fiber from whole grains, as part of an overall healthy diet, helps reduce blood cholesterol levels, blood sugar spikes, and lowers the risk of heart disease and colon cancer.
In May of 2017, the British Medical Journal published research conducted by Harvard School of Public Health, analyzed over 100,000 subjects for 25 years. That’s a big study! They found participants with the highest intake of gluten-containing grains had significantly lower rates of heart disease than those with the lowest consumption of gluten. Gluten consumption was associated with a 15 percent lower risk of developing coronary heart disease. In October 2015, the World Health Organization announced that eating whole grains (containing gluten) reduces colorectal cancer by 17 percent. When was the last time you heard anything good about gluten? The latest grain free diets have ostracized one of natures most important food groups.
The reason so many people have gut issues after eating gluten is because of chemicals that are destroying our delicate friendly gut bacteria (microbiome). Why all of the sudden in the last couple decades has digesting gluten become such an issue for so many people? We can’t blame the gluten because we’ve been eating it for 3 ½ million years.
In fact, research from the University of Utah shows our caveman ancestors diet was 40% gluten containing grains. The reason so many people have a hard time digesting gluten is because when the microbes of our gut are damaged, this causes inflammation, making gluten more difficult to digest.
One thing we can blame on destroying our gut is the pesticides and herbicides that are sprayed on our wheat and on our fruits and vegetables. The most common is called glyphosate, the ingredient in Monsanto’s Roundup. Ingesting this chemical destroys our friendly bacteria and creates inflammation, which leads to what’s referred to as ‘leaky gut.’ This is a major cause of fatigue, memory loss, irritable bowel, autoimmune disease, headaches; the list goes on and on. There are many other chemicals that destroy our gut, making gluten more difficult to digest. A common one is called Bisphenol A (BPA,) found in plastic containers and even on receipts from the store. Then there’s perfluorinated compounds (PFCs), including perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) and perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA.) These gut-destroying chemicals can be found in cookware, our food, and water supply