August 21, 2008 — biohermit

My niece has been recently diagnosed with Celiac disease. I thought I knew something about it but I didn’t know that what I was about to learn would change the course of my dad’s Lymphoma.

One of the concepts I came across while researching her condition is that Celiac disease has a significant hereditary factor. What I didn’t know is that the possibility of genetically transferring the disease was greater from grandparents to grandsons than from parents to sons.

I also learned that gluten in certain grains actually destroys the villi in the small intestine of Celiacs, which would eventually cause malabsorption of nutrients, resulting in conditions such anemia and low B12, among others. It was then that I connected the dots in respects of the symptoms my dad was having with the celiac diagnosis of my niece (his granddaughter). Could it be that my dad’s continuous low ferritin levels and his low B12 had something to do to my niece’s Celiac condition?

I immediately started reading about Celiac Disease and I learned one big, crushing fact: Celiacs have a nine fold increase in the risk of having intestinal lymphomas, particularly Non-Hogdkin’s Lymphoma, the cancer my dad has.

How come nobody told us anything about this? How come he hasn’t been tested for gluten intolerance with so much evidence associating it with his cancer? The chain of events doesn’t stop here. My dad is getting tested this week to confirm or deny the possibility of Celiac Disease, almost at the same time his granddaughter is getting an endoscopy to find out the extent of the damage this disease caused in her small intestine.

The implications are tremendous. My dad is 70 years old. If he is in fact Celiac it would mean that all the gastric problems he has been dragging since childhood leading to his cancer have a reason to exist: the damage gluten has been causing over the years. It would mean he can lower his risk of recurrence even further by stopping gluten intake altogether. It would also mean we should fire our oncologist for being so incompetent, but then, I can imagine the amount of people that has this king of intestinal lymphoma who might be in the same situation. If you are reading this or if you know anybody who has Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, please consider the role gluten might have in your condition. You oncologist may be completely unaware of such role.

Maybe it’s too late for my dad. He may only be able to put his condition on hold for so long if he reverses his already low gluten intake. I’m grateful he started a macrobiotic diet but I realize that this diet, as good as it is to fight cancer, it is too focused on grains, including glutinous grains. It’s not the right diet for certain cancers. I am grateful my niece got diagnosed so early, though, she has time to lower her risks of malignancies down the road.

But then I learned a more startling fact. 50% of Celiacs are not able to stick to their diets even though they are aware of the devastating consequences of eating gluten. Why? apparently there are certain protein fragments in gluten (and casein, a milk protein!) called peptides that remain inactive in the grains (and dairy products), until we eat them. While we digest this kind of food, our stomach acids and pancreatic secretions are able to free these peptides from their larger protein structures.

Once they are freed, they become highly resistant to enzyme digestion in the intestine. They are basically indigestible. In the case of Celiacs they cause damage because they are attacked by the body’s own immune system. In case of lactose intolerant individuals, they cause inflammation.

But these wheat and dairy peptides don’t just affect these population groups. They have the capability to act as opioids in ALL of us, regarding if we are Celiac/lactose intolerant or not. Their opioid effect is similar to morphine. That’s why they calm your body, they put babies to sleep, they make you drowsy behind the wheel. Some views even suggest that they cause constipation because of the peptides’ sedative effect on your colon. The fact is that they highly influence endorphin receptors in the brain bringing all sorts of mood changes, depression, irritability, withdrawal syndrome, etc. These gluten/lactose peptides are physically addictive, causing strong dependency and other psychological conditions.

Maybe that’s why we are so addicted to bread and cheese, why it is so difficult to give them up. They are in fact so addictive that some authors even suggest reading quit-smoking literature to help give up glutinous-grain dependency. Can you believe it? There are even some authors that go even beyond that and expose the believe that mankind possibly started agriculture by cultivating grains and eating dairy because of the addictive effects of such foods. And some conspiracy-theory authors suggest our food system today is filled with these addictive wheat/dairy peptides so we get hooked on buying all sort of products containing them.

You know what? They may all be right.

So what does this addiction have to do with cancer? Apparently opioids have the capability of reducing the activity of our immune system. In other words, the more opiods you take, in whichever form (even if it is smoking pot or drinking wine), the less your immune system is able to do its job: killing cancer cells. Gluten/dairy might not cause cancer per se in the majority of us, but it does increase our risk to get it in all of us, because they deactivate our immune systems making us literally defenseless against cancer takeover.

If you have cancer, you know anybody who does, or you want to prevent it, stop eating glutinous grains and dairy products so your immune system remains at full potential, if you can break the addiction to them, that is…

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