grain brain. the surprising truth - david perlmutter

[...]... sensitivity to twenty-four “cross-reactive” foods to which a gluten-sensitive individual may also react Even if you don’t choose to have these tests done today, having a general understanding of them and what they mean will help you embrace the principles of Grain Brain I will be referring to these tests and their implications throughout the book PART I THE WHOLE GRAIN TRUTH If the thought of your... the balance of the book, which will take you deeper into the story of Grain Brain The chief questions I want you to think about are: Have we accelerated our brain’s decline by following a low-fat, high-carb diet with fruit on the side? Can we really control the fate of our brains through lifestyle alone despite the DNA we’ve inherited? Is there too much invested interest in Big Pharma to consider the. .. of the modern grain and the battle of the bulge, we’re going to go one step further to see how it can inflict harm where we never imagined before: the brain CHAPTER 2 The Sticky Protein Gluten’s Role in Brain Inflammation (It’s Not Just About Your Belly) Tell me what you eat, I’ll tell you who you are —ANTHELME BRILLAT-SAVARIN (1755–1826) MOST EVERYONE HAS EXPERIENCED the throb of a headache and the. .. tremor,” and another for “dystonia.” The doctors had offered him a blood pressure medication, propranolol, which is used to treat some types of tremor disorders The other recommendation was to have the various muscles in his arms and neck injected with Botox, the botulinum toxin that would temporarily paralyze the spastic muscles Both he and his mother had elected not to use either the pills or the injections... dysfunction and disease —especially if the assault continues Another problem with anti-gliadin antibodies is that they can directly combine with specific proteins found in the brain that look like the gliadin protein found in gluten-containing foods, but the anti-gliadin antibodies just can’t tell the difference This has been described for decades and again leads to the formation of more inflammatory cytokines.5... he said: The stomach being the digestive organ, labours in digestion, when diarrhea seizes the patient… and if in addition, the patient’s general system be debilitated by atrophy of the body, the coeliac disease of a chronic nature is formed.”10 In the seventeenth century, the term sprue was introduced into the English language from the Dutch word sprouw, which means chronic diarrhea—one of the classic... a gluten-free program and for whom no other cause was identified But unfortunately, most mainstream doctors are not on the lookout for the dietary explanation for such movement disorders and they are not aware of the latest reports These cases are not outliers They reflect patterns that I’ve witnessed in so many patients They all might come to me with vastly different medical complaints, but they share... one more example of a case that’s emblematic of another set of symptoms linked to the same culprit Kurt and his mother came to see me when he was a twenty-three-year-old young man suffering from abnormal movements His mother stated that six months prior to their visit, he began “looking like he was shivering.” Initially his tremors were subtle, but then they increased with time He had been to two neurologists... cells adapt by reducing the number of receptors on their surfaces to respond to insulin In other words, our cells desensitize themselves to insulin, causing insulin resistance, which allows the cells to ignore the insulin and fail to retrieve glucose from the blood The pancreas then responds by pumping out more insulin So higher levels of insulin become needed for sugar to go into the cells This creates... impairments And they were far from being able to grasp the role of inflammation in the story, which had yet to enter our medical library of knowledge In 1937, the Archives of Internal Medicine published the Mayo Clinic’s first review of neurological involvement in patients with celiac, but even then the research could not accurately describe the real cascade of events They attributed the brain involvement . help you embrace the principles of Grain Brain. I will be referring to these tests and their implications throughout the book. PART I THE WHOLE GRAIN TRUTH If the thought of your brain suffering. that has occurred over the past century—from high-fat, low-carb to today’s low-fat, high-carb diet, fundamentally consisting of grains and other damaging carbohydrates—is the origin of many of. to the foods we eat. There is little doubt that one of the largest and most wide-reaching events in the ultimate decline of brain health in modern society has been the introduction of wheat grain