With sales of foods labeled gluten free now reaching over 6 billion dollars a year, something truly profound is happening to the way in which Americans are perceiving the role of wheat in their diets. Once celebrated as the very poster-child of the health food movement, folks are increasingly rejecting this “king of grains,” and are now identifying it as being at the very root of their health problems.
Detractors claim that the movement is just a fad, or worse, that those who have embarked upon it without an official diagnosis are a bit crazy. After all, simply “feeling better” following gluten elimination is not considered to be proof of anything within the conventional medical system. Biopsies, antibody, and genetic tests later, if nothing is found, and you still think gluten – this ‘sacred,’ omnipresent grain – is a problem, you might just get referred to a psychiatrist.
But anecdotes and “subjective experience” aside, the type of clinical research that constitutes “Truth,” with a capital T, from the perspective of the dominant medical establishment, can be found on the National Library of Medicine’s biomedical database known as MEDLINE. This vast bibliographic archive contains over 21 million citation entries, which as of time of this writing, contains 9,776 references to gluten.
There has been a sharp increase in interest and research on the topic of “gluten intolerance” – although we prefer to label the subject “gluten toxicity,” in order to shift the focus away from the “victim” back to the “aggressor,” the gluten itself. In 1971, there were 71 studies listed on MEDLINE which referenced gluten. Last year in 2011, there were 514.
One of our many interests here at GreenMedInfo.com is to identify “Problem Substances,” which is why we have created an index by that name with 698 subjects listed from A-Z. If you navigate to WHEAT under the “W’s” you will find a list under “Advanced Topics” with 205 health conditions and/or adverse health effects associated with wheat consumption, all of which were determined solely through research in peer-reviewed and published medical journals indexed on MEDLINE.
You will also find, below the listed diseases, a “pharmacological actions” field set which lists 20 distinct ways in which wheat harms the body, e.g. nerve-damaging (neurotoxic), immune-damaging (immunoreactive), inflammatory, etc.
With evidence growing that training the mind or inducing certain modes of consciousness can have positive health effects, researchers have sought to understand how these practices physically affect the body. A new study by researchers in Wisconsin, Spain, and France reports the first evidence of specific molecular changes in the body following a period of intensive mindfulness practice.
The study investigated the effects of a day of intensive mindfulness practice in a group of experienced meditators, compared to a group of untrained control subjects who engaged in quiet non-meditative activities. After eight hours of mindfulness practice, the meditators showed a range of genetic and molecular differences, including altered levels of gene-regulating machinery and reduced levels of pro-inflammatory genes, which in turn correlated with faster physical recovery from a stressful situation.
“To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that shows rapid alterations in gene expression within subjects associated with mindfulness meditation practice,” says study author Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Investigating Healthy Minds and the William James and Vilas Professor of Psychology and Psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Most interestingly, the changes were observed in genes that are the current targets of anti-inflammatory and analgesic drugs,” says Perla Kaliman, first author of the article and a researcher at the Institute of Biomedical Research of Barcelona, Spain (IIBB-CSIC-IDIBAPS), where the molecular analyses were conducted.
The study was published in the Journal Psychoneuroendocrinology.
Mindfulness-based trainings have shown beneficial effects on inflammatory disorders in prior clinical studies and are endorsed by the American Heart Association as a preventative intervention. The new results provide a possible biological mechanism for therapeutic effects.
This episode is with an interview with David Asprey, part 1, titled “Bulletproof Coffee: Revisiting Fat and Health” and is being released on Sunday, May 26, 2013. This interview with Burt and Tom was recorded on Wednesday, May 20, 2013.
Dave uses a combination of nutrition, nervous system training, and anti-aging technologies to improve the performance of the human body and mind.
Dave Asprey is a Silicon Valley investor, biohacker, and entrepreneur who spent 15 years and $250,000 to hack his own biology. He upgraded his brain by more than 20 IQ points, lowered his biological age, and lost 100 lbs without using calories or exercise.
The Financial Times calls him a “bio-hacker who takes self-quantification to the extreme of self-experimentation.”
His writing has been published by the New York Times and Fortune, and he’s presented at Wharton, the University of California, and Singularity University.
Dave has been covered on video on CNN, ABC News, Nightline, Forbes, and MSNBC. In print, he’s been featured in Men’s Health, Forbes, Fast Company, the Los Angeles Times, and Vogue.
Dave’s Bulletproof Executive blog was born out of a fifteen-year single-minded crusade to upgrade the human being using every available technology. It distills the knowledge of more than 120 world-class MDs, biochemists, Olympic nutritionists, meditation experts, and more than $250,000 spent on personal self-experiments.
From private brain EEG facilities hidden in a Canadian forest to remote monasteries in Tibet, from Silicon Valley to the Andes, high tech entrepreneur Dave Asprey used hacking techniques and tried everything himself, obsessively focused on discovering:
What are the simplest things you can do to be better at everything?
Knowing this leads to being bulletproof, the state of high performance where you take control of and improve your biochemistry, your body, and your mind so they work in unison, helping you execute at levels far beyond what you’d expect, without burning out, getting sick, or just acting like a stressed-out jerk. It used to take a lifetime to radically rewire the human body and mind this way. Technology has changed the rules.
Your orders from this link help to support Gnostic Media:
Start with 4-500 ml (2 mugs) of black coffee brewed with my mold-free Upgraded Coffee beans. (Why this is important)
Add 2 Tbs (or more, up to 80 grams, about 2/3 of a standard stick of butter) of Kerry Gold or other UNSALTED grass-fed butter
Add 30 grams of MCT oil for max energy, weight loss and brain function (this is 6 times stronger than coconut oil, your next best choice)
Blend with a pre-heated hand blender, Magic Bullet, or (best) counter top blender until there is a creamy head of foam. (It doesn’t work well if you mix it with a spoon)
It’s really fast and easy to prepare. Realize salted coffee is a crime. Do not do this with salted butter. Bleah.
Kerrygold butter or another grass-fed brand of butter really matters because corn or soy-fed cows don’t make butter with the same fats. Those butters don’t blend well, don’t taste good, and don’t make you feel Bulletproof.
Grass-fed butter is much healthier than other butter. It doesn’t make cholesterol levels worse, it optimizes them! Starting your day with grass-fed butter will give you lots of energy and it will give your body healthy fats that it will use to make cell walls and hormones.
If you’re like most of my friends who try this, your body is so starved for healthy fats that you feel like you can’t get enough. It will take your body a week or two to fully turn on its fat digestion systems when you switch to a high healthy fat breakfast of Bulletproof coffee. If at first it is a little too rich, try using less butter at first and build up to the amount you like. Taking a betaine HCl or digestive enzyme supplement with your coffee will also help your body digest the butter.
Try this just once, with only 2 Tbs of butter, and have nothing else for breakfast. You will experience one of the best mornings of your life, with boundless energy and focus. It’s amazing.
After one drink of Bulletproof coffee, you’ll never be tempted to eat fat-free, insulin-raising, fat-storing toast and oatmeal breakfasts again!
P.S. If you benefit from this post, I’d really appreciate it if you tried my Upgraded Coffee beans. I created them for maximum mental performance and health, and they work, costing $2 more than Starbucks normal beans, and less than their “Reserve” coffee. The proceeds support the research that gets published on this site, and your brain really will notice the difference. Thank you.
Like an infectious disease that initially spreads and then abruptly dies, Facebook’s growth is set for a rapid decline within the next few years, according to a new study from Princeton University.
Researchers at Princeton’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering predict that Facebook will lose 80 per cent of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.
The study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, used epidemiological models used to track the spread of infectious diseases and publicly available Google search query data, to explain how users adopt and abandon online social networks.
Recent studies by psychologists and social scientists in the US and UK suggest that contrary to mainstream media stereotypes, those labeled “conspiracy theorists” appear to be saner than those who accept the official versions of contested events.
The most recent study was published on July 8th by psychologists Michael J. Wood and Karen M. Douglas of the University of Kent (UK). Entitled “What about Building 7? A social psychological study of online discussion of 9/11 conspiracy theories,” the study compared “conspiracist” (pro-conspiracy theory) and “conventionalist” (anti-conspiracy) comments at news websites.
The authors were surprised to discover that it is now more conventional to leave so-called conspiracist comments than conventionalist ones: “Of the 2174 comments collected, 1459 were coded as conspiracist and 715 as conventionalist.” In other words, among people who comment on news articles, those who disbelieve government accounts of such events as 9/11 and the JFK assassination outnumber believers by more than two to one. That means it is the pro-conspiracy commenters who are expressing what is now the conventional wisdom, while the anti-conspiracy commenters are becoming a small, beleaguered minority.
Perhaps because their supposedly mainstream views no longer represent the majority, the anti-conspiracy commenters often displayed anger and hostility: “The research… showed that people who favoured the official account of 9/11 were generally more hostile when trying to persuade their rivals.”
Additionally, it turned out that the anti-conspiracy people were not only hostile, but fanatically attached to their own conspiracy theories as well. According to them, their own theory of 9/11 – a conspiracy theory holding that 19 Arabs, none of whom could fly planes with any proficiency, pulled off the crime of the century under the direction of a guy on dialysis in a cave in Afghanistan – was indisputably true. The so-called conspiracists, on the other hand, did not pretend to have a theory that completely explained the events of 9/11: “For people who think 9/11 was a government conspiracy, the focus is not on promoting a specific rival theory, but in trying to debunk the official account.”
In short, the new study by Wood and Douglas suggests that the negative stereotype of the conspiracy theorist – a hostile fanatic wedded to the truth of his own fringe theory – accurately describes the people who defend the official account of 9/11, not those who dispute it.
Additionally, the study found that so-called conspiracists discuss historical context (such as viewing the JFK assassination as a precedent for 9/11) more than anti-conspiracists. It also found that the so-called conspiracists to not like to be called “conspiracists” or “conspiracy theorists.”
Both of these findings are amplified in the new book Conspiracy Theory in America by political scientist Lance deHaven-Smith, published earlier this year by the University of Texas Press. Professor deHaven-Smith explains why people don’t like being called “conspiracy theorists”: The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination! “The CIA’s campaign to popularize the term ‘conspiracy theory’ and make conspiracy belief a target of ridicule and hostility must be credited, unfortunately, with being one of the most successful propaganda initiatives of all time.”
In other words, people who use the terms “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” as an insult are doing so as the result of a well-documented, undisputed, historically-real conspiracy by the CIA to cover up the JFK assassination. That campaign, by the way, was completely illegal, and the CIA officers involved were criminals; the CIA is barred from all domestic activities, yet routinely breaks the law to conduct domestic operations ranging from propaganda to assassinations.
DeHaven-Smith also explains why those who doubt official explanations of high crimes are eager to discuss historical context. He points out that a very large number of conspiracy claims have turned out to be true, and that there appear to be strong relationships between many as-yet-unsolved “state crimes against democracy.” An obvious example is the link between the JFK and RFK assassinations, which both paved the way for presidencies that continued the Vietnam War. According to DeHaven-Smith, we should always discuss the “Kennedy assassinations” in the plural, because the two killings appear to have been aspects of the same larger crime.
Psychologist Laurie Manwell of the University of Guelph agrees that the CIA-designed “conspiracy theory” label impedes cognitive function. She points out, in an article published in American Behavioral Scientist (2010), that anti-conspiracy people are unable to think clearly about such apparent state crimes against democracy as 9/11 due to their inability to process information that conflicts with pre-existing belief.
In the same issue of ABS, University of Buffalo professor Steven Hoffman adds that anti-conspiracy people are typically prey to strong “confirmation bias” – that is, they seek out information that confirms their pre-existing beliefs, while using irrational mechanisms (such as the “conspiracy theory” label) to avoid conflicting information.
The extreme irrationality of those who attack “conspiracy theories” has been ably exposed by Communications professors Ginna Husting and Martin Orr of Boise State University. In a 2007 peer-reviewed article entitled “Dangerous Machinery: ‘Conspiracy Theorist’ as a Transpersonal Strategy of Exclusion,” they wrote:
“If I call you a conspiracy theorist, it matters little whether you have actually claimed that a conspiracy exists or whether you have simply raised an issue that I would rather avoid… By labeling you, I strategically exclude you from the sphere where public speech, debate, and conflict occur.”
But now, thanks to the internet, people who doubt official stories are no longer excluded from public conversation; the CIA’s 44-year-old campaign to stifle debate using the “conspiracy theory” smear is nearly worn-out. In academic studies, as in comments on news articles, pro-conspiracy voices are now more numerous – and more rational – than anti-conspiracy ones.
No wonder the anti-conspiracy people are sounding more and more like a bunch of hostile, paranoid cranks.
After being falsely accused of staging a hoax regarding Wheaties cereal containing metal fragments, Mike Adams the Health Ranger explains how PR Newswire and the mainstream media have become too stupid to understand basic science.
by Slayer Ji, Founder
Tuned Body
Gnostic Media
Marlene Leung, CTVNews.ca
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