Food rant 2

This brings us round now to gluten. Gluten is a protein that is found, most notably in wheat but also in some other grain crops such as rye and barley. Grain based foods are pushed at us as being healthy and something that should form the basis of our diet. In the US, there are several people who are very strongly against that, and there are books written with catchy titles like Grain Brain and Wheat Belly which lay the modern day illnesses described yesterday, firmly at the door of gluten - not sugar. The reason those illness have become so prevalent is because of a genetic change that was made in wheat in the 1960s. It has basically turned the wheat protein into a poison, and one that is slowly making the world sicker and sicker. And worse than that, it is highly addictive, a claim often laid also at the door of sugar.

I have not read these books and am not particularly convinced by what I have heard so far but, since I have been trying to help my own IBS, I have noticed something very striking. Gluten is in everything - or almost. I don’t think of myself as eating a lot of processed food as I would much rather cook from scratch but those little store cupboard or freezer basics that I like to have, the mushroom ketchup, the quorn sausages. And if I didn’t prepare anything for lunch? Well have you ever tried to find any snack food that is not heavily loaded with gluten? Rows and rows of sandwiches, pasta bowls and crackers abound in the shops. And, think you can have that rice salad? Bound to have gluten in it, most probably in the sauce. It is in pretty much all processed and pre-prepared food, along with its pals sugar and saturated fat.

Does that make you suspicious? Because it certainly smells like rat soup to me. Gluten can, even more oddly, be in our cosmetics. I have been making all my own cosmetics for some time now but this was still a surprise to me.

I don’t personally think that fat, or sugar, or gluten are evil incarnate but anything that is added routinely, and mostly inexplicably to processed foods has got to ring alarm bells.

Heinz Beans are gluten free but notice the exuberant little flash on the front. 1 of your 5 a day! Yes, eating a tin of baked beans is as good as eating broccoli! Hmm.