A couple of months ago I remember reading on Dr. Cordain’s website his answer to a question about Huntington’s Disease. It’s the first question/answer on this link.
Listening to NPR this evening as I packed up around the house (I’m moving soon), I heard this piece regarding a new drug treatment for Huntington’s. My oh my, what a different story. No mention of wheat. A mention of mitochondria without really going into detail, and a very accurate statement regarding how this disease shares various symptoms with other autoimmune diseases such as Alzheimer’s.
If you have read Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes, he reviews quite well how the high levels of insulin may be the cause for Alzheimer’s given how an enzyme is too engaged with breaking down insulin rather than cleaning up the proteins that gather in the brain and are involved in the onset of Alzheimer’s. Essentially, there’s not enough of this enzyme to clean up both the excessive levels of insulin and these proteins.
The common thread here from my limited readings is wheat, but perhaps for different reasons. Gliadin from wheat being involved in the onset of Huntington’s and the high carbohydrate content of wheat causing the insulin spike involved in the accumulation of a protein that is involved in the onset of Alzheimer’s. There appears to be a good amount of “counter-literature” out there that supports the hypothesis that Cordain is working with regarding wheat and Huntington’s. It’s shocking to me that there hasn’t been a significant study regarding eliminating wheat from the diet of a person afflicted with Huntington’s.
I’m rather busy right now, and will be over the next couple of weeks. If I had the time, I would write a longer piece attempting to piece together some of the research out there. My hope is that I’ve put enough key words in here so that if someone is interested in hearing a different viewpoint on all of this, they will be directed on a different path than the one NPR led me down on. Let’s just say that just about anytime I hear the latest drug research being touted on NPR and other news programs… 9 times out of 10 it’s for a disease that has some sort of connection to the non-human high carbohydrate diet brought to us by the food pyramid.
The real choice on so many diseases that afflict modern humans really comes down to relying on the pills or simply avoiding grains and high amounts of fructose and sugar.
But we’re really never even given that choice if we were to only listen to mainstream corporate media outlets (whose advertisements and/or endowment donations are paid by whom?). I believe that there are some fantastic professionals/researchers out there, putting on their lab coats every day highly motivated to find cures, highly motivated to extend our knowledge, to clarify the science. Thank you for your work. I ask you to please consider the picture above and consider whether you may someday ever think it’s worth it to:
to test a hypothesis that eating wheat causes Huntington’s with an experiment that would manipulate whether or not subjects ate wheat. Thus, NOT eating wheat is the independent variable. Each subject’s diet would be tested to see if wheat eating had any effect. Thus, the diet is the dependent variable. The subjects assigned to NOT eat wheat are in the experimental group, whereas subjects eating wheat are in the control group.
I mean… out of hundreds of thousands of things to eat on the planet, asking subjects to not eat wheat for 6 months doesn’t seem like it would be too controversial or expensive? Oh, but it is controversial. A viability study on feeding humanity without wheat and corn would have to be done before this research would ever be funded. If an environmental organization were truly serious, they would consider funding both the Huntington’s research and this human feeding viability study. A return to prairies and perennial crops may be what the folks in lab coats will help us achieve, though they may not understand the implications of their research at the time. 
This entry was posted on Monday, February 8th, 2010 at 10:30 pm and is filed under Granary, Medicine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.