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Food stuff
Jul. 16th, 2004 01:37 amMy friend N, who has been suffering from grumbling 'IBS'-like symptoms for months, is being put on an 'exclusion diet' to try to find out whether there is a particular food which is causing the symptoms. Step one is to cut out all likely culprits for two weeks, and look for any improvements. If there are improvements, step two is to re-introduce foods one at a time, and look for symptoms returning.
The foods which N must cut out include: all dairy (not just cows), almost all cereals (all wheat products etc.), legumes (lentils, peanuts etc.), tea, citrus fruits.
The foods which N may eat are: unprocessed meats (including fish), vegetables (excluding potatoes), fruits (excluding citrus fruits), and rice.
It occurs to me that there is a reasonable correlation between 'foods which are potential problems' and 'food which were introduced in the Neolithic through agriculture'. Ever since I learned about celiac disease - which is a gradually fatal auto-immune reaction to protein fragments in wheat, rye, barley and maybe oats - I've been perplexed as to why a staple food could cause such a serious disease. But in evolutionary terms, we're only an eye-blink away from the Neolithic, so wheat still counts as a 'novel food' to our genome...
The foods which N must cut out include: all dairy (not just cows), almost all cereals (all wheat products etc.), legumes (lentils, peanuts etc.), tea, citrus fruits.
The foods which N may eat are: unprocessed meats (including fish), vegetables (excluding potatoes), fruits (excluding citrus fruits), and rice.
It occurs to me that there is a reasonable correlation between 'foods which are potential problems' and 'food which were introduced in the Neolithic through agriculture'. Ever since I learned about celiac disease - which is a gradually fatal auto-immune reaction to protein fragments in wheat, rye, barley and maybe oats - I've been perplexed as to why a staple food could cause such a serious disease. But in evolutionary terms, we're only an eye-blink away from the Neolithic, so wheat still counts as a 'novel food' to our genome...
