SHOULD WE SAY NO TO GLUTEN?
Has anyone else noticed how it has become fashionable to tell people what they should and should not eat? Whether it is a person selling a diet program or a video or a book, or simply doctors who want to get their name out there, the easiest way to get people’s attention seems to be to give advice on ‘how to eat’. This stuff is good for you if you’re trying to do this, and that stuff is not.
Now that we have bashed the food advice brigade, allow us to proceed and do the same. Our pet topic today is a food item that nobody likes anymore. It’s gluten.
You must have heard how it is bad to eat gluten, and how it has so much sugar that it will turn your blood into some saccharine substance within a few hours. Ironically enough, a few years ago, gluten was meant to be ‘good for you’ because back then, we believed that fat is bad but sugar is not. So if it has too much sugar, big deal.
But now gluten has become the villain. Well, not quite. A few studies – one of them out of Harvard – have said that there is perhaps nothing really wrong with consuming gluten. Unless you have celiac disease – which is about 2% of the population. Now what’s more, even wheat is coming under the scanner as something ‘bad for you’.
If you ask us, I think it makes more sense to eat something that doesn’t adversely affect you health-wise, and which is tasty. Everything else is commentary. So if you want to eat gluten, first make sure you don’t have celiac disease. And then go for it.