Gut Health

Gluten & Your Gut Health: The REAL Culprit Behind Gluten Intolerance (Hint: It’s NOT Gluten)

Why Eating Wheat Makes You Feel Sick… and What You Can Do About It 

If you’ve had to say “no” to enjoying pasta, sandwiches, pizza, and cookies because of a gluten sensitivity, what you’re about to hear might change your life...

The rapid rise in gluten sensitivity, gluten intolerance, and celiac disease has transformed the way millions of us eat, all hoping to avoid some very nasty symptoms like:

  • diarrhea
  • constipation
  • bloating
  • foul-smelling gas and feces
  • abdominal pain
  • indigestion
  • mineral deficiencies (including iron)
  • headaches
  • depression and anxiety
  • joint pain

And who wouldn’t want to avoid all that? So we give up wheat products and go gluten-free, and for some of us that helps reduce the symptoms…but for most of us, they never really go away.

That’s because the culprit behind those stressful symptoms isn’t really wheat or gluten after all.

 

When did wheat go bad?

People have been eating wheat without harmful consequences at least 10,000 years. And historically, less than 1% percent of the population suffered from celiac disease (an autoimmune condition that causes damage to the small intestine when gluten is ingested).

But recently, both celiac disease and gluten intolerance (a condition where gluten brings on symptoms without doing intestinal damage) have exploded in the U.S., with millions of people suffering every time they eat so much as a slice of toast.

So how did wheat – a staple food for generations – suddenly become toxic to so many people?

It’s not that wheat now has a higher gluten content…or that our digestive tracts have evolved to naturally reject gluten.

In fact, a surprising clinical study resulted in some very eye-opening results. For two weeks, the study subjects were split into groups and placed on one of three distinct diets: low-gluten, high-gluten, or no-gluten. The results: the high-gluten diet did NOT increase symptoms like bloating. Plus, gluten had no effect on any of the biomarkers that the researchers tested, including immune system responses and intestinal inflammation. 

If gluten’s not the problem, what is?

The answer lies in the way wheat is grown, treated, and harvested: Using highly toxic weed killers that destroy the beneficial bacteria in your gut.

 

The real issue behind gluten intolerance

The extreme rise in gluten intolerance coincides perfectly with the increased use of glyphosate, one of the main ingredients in the world’s most widely used herbicide, Roundup. Check out this chart...

Today, glyphosate (and Roundup) exposure is virtually unavoidable – we all ingest it, in tiny amounts, every day. And formulations like Roundup contain multiple ingredients – many of them undisclosed and untested as “inactive ingredients” – can be 1000 times more toxic together than they would be separately (which is how they’re usually tested). 

In fact, one study showed that Roundup was even more toxic than glyphosate alone. 

Some food crops come with especially high levels of weedkiller… and that includes practically all of the conventionally grown wheat in Americ