Tips for not being Glutened Over the Holidays

Like most holidays my wife Sue and I are returning home to visit our families in the UK. While it is great to catch up with everybody it can be a tricky navigating the trip while remaining true to your dietary restrictions. With this in mind here are some tips you might find useful this coming holiday:

1. Hold Gluten-Free Holiday Celebrations at Home

This may not always be possible but having full control over food preparation is the sure fire way you won't get any gluten fall out after holiday meals. Wish me like while I eat our meal at my mother-in-laws who insists our food sensitivities are just a fad!

2. Don't Focus So Much on the Food

After most holidays we often end feeling like we have eaten far too much. This is usually because there is far too much emphasis put on the food. The Holidays should really be about reconnecting with family and friends so try and organise plenty of activities outside of the home where you can enjoy quality to time together.

3. Remember to Feel Joyful for Good Health

Having a restrictive diet can for some seem a huge inconvenience and unfair. Rather than feeling sorry for yourself try to be thankful for your new found good health. There is more to life than eating. Like you should really work to live, you should also be eating so that you are able to live to the fullest.

4. Whatever You Do, Don't Cheat on the Diet!

There is no such thing as being a little bit pregnant. The same goes when you are gluten sensitive. Once your body decides that it does not like it then one little slip can, according to some studies, set you back 6 months! Think about that when you pick up that mince pie!

5. Be Assertive

When eating out, whether it be at a restaurant or with friends, be sure to make it abundantly clear that you will and must not consume anything with gluten. I often hear from my clients that they do not want to offend people. Personally I think if people really genuinely care about you they should respect your decisions. Think about it another way, is it worse to hurt someones feelings or to suffer the consequences of being glutened.

6. Don't Feel Guilty

If in the end that Christmas pudding looks too delicious to miss then make sure you eat and enjoy it without any guilt. Having negative thoughts while eating anything can have a detrimental effect. If it has a negative effect then at least you know why. None of us are perfect, including myself!

Finally

I just like to wish you and your family the happiest of holidays and a healthy New Year!

The truth about gluten

A general definition is that gluten is a storage protein found in grains. In essence grains are the seeds of grasses. The job of gluten is to help perpetuate the species of the grass by supplying food for the embryo inside the seed but also it acts a protective chemical against potential predators. Wheat, Barley Rye and Oats are the commonly known grasses and they also represent the commonly known sources of gluten. Most people see these grains as representing gluten as they are the ones commonly linked to Celiac Disease, which is an autoimmune disease of the small intestine. Some of the common foods that are seen to contain gluten include breads, pastas, cereals, crackers, beer ,donuts, cake, cookies etc as they are made predominately from wheat, barley and rye.

Let’s go a little deeper and see exactly what gluten really is.

Gluten is a mixture of proteins found in all grains. It is composed of two primary sub fractions:

• Promalines.
•  Glutalines.

The Promaline gliadin is the most studied piece of gluten in the medical literature as it relates to coeliac disease.

Promaline Definition

"Any of a class of simple proteins soluble in alcohol and usually having a high proline and glutamine content, found in the grains of cereal crops such as wheat, rye, barley, corn and rice."

Promaline are further sub classified into: alpha, beta, gamma and omega fractions.

Alpha and beta gliadins are the best studied in relation to coeliac disease.

Below is a table showing some of the common glutens found in different grains.

Grain	Type of Promaline subfraction of gluten	% Total Proteins
Wheat	Gliadin	69
Rye	Secalinin	30-50
Oats	Avenin	16
Barley	Hordein	46-52
Millet	Panicin	40
Corn	Zien	55
Rice	Orzenin	5

It is important to be aware that although it says the percentage of protein in rice is only 5; this can usually be much higher when looking at specific species of the rice. So when avoiding gluten if you are gluten sensitive it is imperative you avoid all sources.

This is an excerpt from “Nutritional Therapy” by Stephen J Gislason, MD:

“Grains are the seeds of grass. The seed has a bran casing, a starchy endosperm, which contains 90% of protein (including gluten), and a small nucleus, which is the plant embryo, waiting to grow. Any flour made from the starchy endosperm contains promalines and is potentially toxic to the grain sensitive/intolerant person.”

The take home point from this information is that gluten is found in all grains, and not just wheat, rye and barley.

Dominick Hussey

Osteopath and Functional Medicine Practitioner

Osteopathy and Functional Medicine

Ottawa Health Wellness Centre

Muscle pain - An early sign of Autoimmune Disease?

Do you have constant or intermittent episodes of chronic pain?

Do you need regular visits to your local osteopath, chiropractor, physio or massage therapist to help keep these pains at a manageable level?

If the answer is yes, then you could possibly have the early signs of autoimmune disease.

An autoimmune disease occurs when your body's immune system has destroyed part of itself. A familiar autoimmune disease is  Rheumatoid Arthritis, where where your immune system destroys the lining of your joints. Another example is Hashimoto's Disease where your thyroid gland is destroyed.

I recently wrote a blog titled "Shoulder pain, your thyroid and soya". After reading this article, a friend of mine in the UK commented to me on Facebook that he had been diagnosed with Hashimoto's and was now on medication. Previous to the diagnosis he had suffered from a recurrent shoulder problem for many years which since he has been treated for his thyroid has disappeared.

There are three main factors that lead to the development of an autoimmune disease:

1. Genetic predisposition - whether your family suffered from an autoimmune disease.
2. Triggers - food sensitivities, heavy metals, chemical toxins.
3. Intestinal Permeability - "A leaky gut".

One of the main food sensitivity triggers for autoimmune disease is wheat gluten or gliadin. The second most common autoimmune disease triggered by gluten is Hashimotos disease.

The concept of helping peoples chronic pain issues by taking them off gluten or gluten cross reactive foods, such as soya, is not unfamiliar to me. I have helped hundreds of people this way but have not really understood the true mechanism.

As a guide in my diagnosis of clients I use Applied Kinesiology or muscle function testing. With AK I can detect weaknesses in individual muscle groups. I also use it to test for food sensitivities. In AK each muscle in the body is linked to a specific gland or organ. I can therefore test how the muscle for the thyroid which is the Teres Minor and see if it weakens when the person is in contact with a particular food or any other trigger such as gluten. This is just a guide for me that this person needs further lab investigations for the foods I find that weaken that muscle.

Studies have shown that antibodies for autoimmune diseases can be found in the blood 9 years before the person starts exhibits signs and symptoms of the disease. Up until that point it can the person could be happily unaware that anything was happening in their body that was sinister. Chronic persistent muscle problems could be your bodies early warning system like the red light on your dashboard.

There are tests available through Cyrex Labs which can tell you whether you have these autoimmune antibodies in your system.

There are of course many many other mechanisms that could be causing muscle pain but this makes sense to me. I welcome any questions or comments.

Gluten Free Diet: Why it might not be helping?

I have lost count on the number of clients I have advised to gluten free because I thought it would help their symptoms.

For the vast majority it was a positive experience as their long term chronic symptoms disappeared. For the minority, the effort was not rewarded even though they had been 100% gluten free. Up until a few months ago this had been a puzzle to me until I was listening to a podcast in my car on the way to work. The podcast was a an  interview with Dr Tom O'Bryan, who is an internationally renowned expert on Coeliac disease and gluten sensitivity.  He was talking about a brand new set of blood tests that were now available which looked at gluten sensitivity. The test that interested me the most was for Gluten Cross Reactivity (GCR).

To understand what GCR is you have to understand how the body normally reacts to gluten

When your body gets sensitive to gluten it produces antibodies which are little Arnold Terminators that go around zapping the invading gluten proteins that are in your blood. Unfortunately sometimes Arnold gets confused between the gluten proteins and similar proteins in your body and starts zapping them.

GCR occurs when Arnold starts thinking that the proteins from other foods are gluten proteins. The body then produces more gluten antibodies to zap those other proteins but which will also continue to attack your body. So you may as well be eating gluten and no wonder your symptoms don't change.

The GCR test which is available through Cyrex Labs in the US tests the most common foods that cross react to wheat gluten.

These include: cows milk, casein, whey protein, soya, milk chocolate, instant coffee, yeast, oats, sesame, buckwheat, hemp seed, millet, sorghum, amaranth, quinoa, tapioca, teff, corn, and rice. 

As I mentioned these are only the most common and many foods have not been researched as yet. However if you have had no change in your symptoms on a traditional gluten free diet and you eat some of the above it would be worth getting tested or just try avoiding them all and seeing if you see any benefit.

Since learning this information I have begun begun routinely testing my clients for the above foods. To date that tested positive for wheat gluten were positive to some of the cross reactive foods.

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.

Shoulder pain, your Thyroid and Soya

The food we eat has an enormous effect on our bodies. I see this in virtually every patient that walks into my office. I have recently been treating two clients for chronic shoulder pain. Shoulder problems are, speaking from my own experience, notoriously difficult to treat. The same was true for these two clients. In both cases, their pain had started without any particular reason. Treating them using massage and osteopathic manipulation had seen only minor improvements.

There had to be a deeper root cause.

When problems don't respond to physical treatment then if I am looking deeper the first place I look is the persons diet. There are certain foods that I know from experience have caused clients issues in the past. On questioning both these clients both were eating large amounts of soya. The man was having soya based protein powder shakes every morning and the woman had been consuming soya milk as she was intolerant to cows milk.

There is a lot of misinformation about the health benefits of soya.

The main benefit is that it has a positive effect on the incidence of breast cancer in the far east. It is true that there is less breast cancer in far eastern countries like Japan where they eat large amounts of soya, but they eat soya sauce. This is totally different in nature to the highly processed products that we see in the western world which is made primarily from highly toxic genetically modified soya beans.

So how is soya bad?

Soy contains a number of substances that are harmful to your body and in particular the thyroid. The thyroid is the gland found in the base of your neck that controls the rate at which you burn food. One of these substances is soya gluten which is similar in structure to the gluten we find in wheat. Wheat gluten has been shown in research to be linked to the thyroid autoimmune disease, Hashimoto's. This disease occurs when your body mistakes the proteins in your thyroid for the gluten protein and attacks it. Because soy gluten is similar in structure to wheat gluten so the same problem can arise if you eat too much soya.

With your thyroid under attack so this obviously has a negative effect on how well it works.

The medical term for a reduction in the function of your thyroid is hypothyroidism. The typical symptoms for someone with an under active thyroid include fatigue, weight gain, sensitivity to cold, numbness in the fingers, constipation, depression and muscle and aches and pains. Not all these symptoms need to present but the last one on the list is the most relevant for my two clients.

The exact mechanism as to why a person's shoulder should be effected can not be explained using western science.

However there is a connection when you look at at it from the practice of Chinese Acupuncture and Applied Kinesiology which connects different organs and glands to particular muscles. Your thyroid is associated to the Teres Minor muscle in your shoulder. So when the function of thyroid is reduced to this effects the strength of the muscle and so your shoulder is likely to develop a problem.

A simple answer to a chronic problem.

Suffice to say I duly advised both clients to remove soy and a few weeks later their shoulder pain was gone!

If you have been suffering from chronic pain which has been unresponsive to physical treatment then looking at your diet could be the next best step to finding an answer. Let me know if you have any questions or comments below.

Be like Superman and look at your health from 30,000 feet!

What I love about my job is that is that it is a constant journey of exploration. Each new client that comes through the door brings a whole new learning experience for me.

There are some familiar patterns that tend to appear but I DEFINITELY learn something new from everyone, and everyone I treat makes me feel how little I need to learn about how I can help people.

Don't get me wrong I do help many people but with some I frustratingly draw a blank.

I am a huge advocate for looking at the BIG picture when looking at someones health.

I was listening to a interview with Dr Tom OBryan, a world expert on Gluten Sensitivity and Coeliac Disease, and he said that when looking at a persons health problem you have to "look from 30,000 feet".

I totally resonated with this as it is exactly where I want to be when a client comes to see me.

When your car starts making a funny noise you don't take it to the car wash and hope the problem is going to go away. The same when your body starts to get aches and pains, taking that pill, having that massage, getting that adjustment is not really going to solve your problem.

It may well go away temporarily but eventually it's going to rear it's ugly head.

I had a new client this week who came to me with chronic pain in his neck, shoulder, between his shoulders, lower back, knees and ankles. He was a mess!

He had been for massage and chiropractic care since he was in his teens. This had kept him going but now at 42 in his words, "I feel like an old man".

One good thing was that he was open to doing anything to help himself. This was music to my ears as I knew I could be brutally honest with him.

When someone has generalized pain like this man it is obvious to me from my overhead view that his body as a whole was not happy. Testing his muscles immediately confirmed this assumption as they were all hypertonic or over tight which is a good indicator to me that his body was overloaded or in a state of inflammation.

A glue for the source of this inflammation did n't come from his current symptoms but from something he suffered from as a child, NOSEBLEEDS.

Nosebleeds in children are an early sign of gluten sensitivity. 

Using muscle testing I tested his bodies reaction to gluten and sure enough his muscles weakened dramatically to wheat which contains gliadin.

Further testing of his muscles also showed that he potentially had a B12 Deficiency, which often is associated with gluten sensitivity because it prevents the absorption. He had also been suffering from fatigue and increased irritability which are also associated with low B12.

For me to help him, I said, I was not going to lay a finger on you to begin with but my advice was to go gluten free and to get his B12 levels checked with his doctor. This is not the whole solution to his problem but like many before him following this advice he'll start to feel better and he'll begin to fly and start to see the big picture.