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Returning From Europe With Gluten Intolerance: What Is Up With Our Food Supply? (Ep. 24)

It took 24 episodes for me to finally push myself into a controversial subject. But it was my body, not my mind, that told me I needed to raise awareness on this issue.

The issue is the quality of our American food supply. This is an issue that I've dealt with in the past via various food intolerances, but suddenly, after a trip to Europe for 21 days, I can no longer seem to process gluten. What gives?

In this episode, I'll not only recall my story, but I'll talk about what our government is allowing us to put into our bodies, how we can use capitalism to get healthier foods, and how we should view our politicians. I don't normally like jumping into the world of politics, but this is a subject I feel needs to be addressed.

Note: The same day I released this podcast, The Guardian wrote an article on one of the ingredients I discuss: Potassium Bromate.

I will deliver opinions in this podcast. My opinions are just that, opinions. See it offered as food for thought, literally, and not a doctrine. I offer this as a bridge to a wider discussion, not a fortress of my views. We all need to expand our knowledge to help create a happy healthy future for all.

In this episode, I'll discuss the following:

  • Returning from Europe to a distressing discovery
  • Drew as a pasta hound
  • What is gluten? Is gluten-free just a marketing fad?
  • Is gluten natural or an additive?
  • Finding a rice and corn based pasta
  • My process for self-diagnosis and interest in medications
  • Making lifestyle changes
  • Is being sick a normal state for humans?
  • Getting over heartburn
  • What didn't they put HFCS into?
  • Ocular migraines and how I reduced them
  • Ever experience a 3 sneeze day?
  • The evil florescent light
  • Gluten-free as torture to the traveler
  • My first non-gluten, label reading, grocery store trip
  • Thanks Stuckey's for helping me discover my pecan intolerance
  • No more apples, strawberries, bananas, etc. What now? A fruit intolerance?
  • Montreal, the ground cherry, and the cure to my fruit intolerance?
  • American fruit brings back the intolerance and organics not 100% fool-proof
  • Lost trust in American food, especially after Food, Inc.
  • Shoot first, ask questions later government regulation
  • The plight of the Bald Eagle, our national bird, due to shoot first, ask questions later regulation
  • How did a pasta and wheat hound all of a sudden end up gluten-intolerant?
  • Maxwell Maltz' 21 days
  • Dreaming of Scotland
  • The theory of my reintroduction to American wheat and loss of tolerance
  • 5 theories to more gluten-intolerance: over-consumption, antibiotics, gluten-free fad, misdiagnosis
  • Gluten-free test is working on curing my health issues
  • A hamburger bun does me in
  • Ancient grains are great, but...
  • The FDA and what they are ignoring or being lobbied on?
  • It's great when you can make a personal choice on a chemical
  • How we over simplify things like student loans or gluten
  • Potassium bromate, the carcinogin that the FDA won't ban because of the timing of a clause, rather than it's danger.
  • 150 items a major restaurant chain says they don't trust that the government does.
  • How do you know what chemicals are in your food?
  • The organic and 100% natural lie and calcium sulfate.
  • Awareness sometimes only happens when it's in your own backyard.

Possible Solutions?

  • Wrestle back the narrative from the politicians
  • An educated electorate
  • Go beyond hashtags and sound bites
  • Start questioning why our health issues are increasing so fast
  • Get the rider directing, rather than just changing the horse
  • Politicians should be listening to us, not us to them
  • Consumers are the secret weapon of capitalism

Additional Notes:

  • I am allergic to most antibiotics I've tried (they cause intestinal problems that linger for weeks). Watching Food, Inc, you start to realize this could be from consuming chicken who pass antibiotics on to me, causing me to become immune to the benefits and harmed by the side-effects.

Research

See Discussion with Food, Inc. Filmmaker Robert Kenner

Show Notes

Transcript

Drew (00:00:13):
Hello everybody and welcome to Travel Fuels Life, the show where we share stories, tips and inspiration to help you start living a travel lifestyle. I'm your host, drew Hanish, and I am back off the road. Yes, for the next three months, I am going to take some time off from all of this travel that I've been doing, and I'm going to actually start producing some of this content that I've been telling you guys about, including that Castles and Drams tour, which I'm going to feature during the month of June. So lots of pictures, lots of stories, great information that I want to share with you. And I'll talk a little bit more about my time in Minnesota, Saskatchewan and Manitoba in the coming weeks. So check in on social media, check in@travelfuelslife.com. I'm going to be posting a bunch of stuff out there and I'm going to start cranking out some episodes of the podcast as well with more special guests coming up in the next few weeks.

(00:01:13):
So while you, you're out traveling in this summer season when everybody loves to be out there traveling, I am going to take a break, let you guys deal with the crowds, and I'm going to just kind of take it easy here and get some work done. How about that? One of the things that I did while I was in Manitoba was I went to a snake den and in a snake den that was fully active at that time because mid-May is the time when they do a lot of their mating. So this is a fear that I've had throughout my life of snakes. I just avoid them like the plague, but sometimes you got to challenge yourself. And so I decided to actually walk around a field full of snakes and then actually hold one. And so for me, this was a big achievement to be able to overcome that fear.

(00:02:17):
And isn't that what travel is about, getting out there and stretching yourself and doing things that you might not normally do? Well, when I came back from Scotland, I was introduced to another challenge that it's not one I really wanted to take on, but unfortunately my body said, Hey dude, you're taking this on whether you want to or not. So I'm going to tell you a little bit about it. And it's really what this episode is all about. It's about me coming back from Europe and all of a sudden finding a problem. Now I eat pasta like crazy, so I had pasta. Next morning I wake up and then I notice that I'm not feeling quite so good. I'm feeling a little bloated when I go to the bathroom, I find I have yellow stools. I'm telling you right now, and I'm sorry, trying not to be graphic about this, so we'll just refer to them as stools, but that's not a color that I'm used to seeing.

(00:03:27):
Mustard, I mean it's a little alarming. And the bloating was a concern. So right or wrong, I'm not going to rush right off to a doctor if I see something like this going on. If I sense there's something going on with my body, I go right to research. So I head over to a computer and I'm pulling up on the web, what's the deal with yellow stools? What do those mean? And I found an article through a website called Healthline and it said that some of the main things that you might be concerned with if you have yellow stools are gallstones, liver disorders, celiac disease, stress diet, or food coloring. Well, I'm not really stressed. I just came back from a great trip and I usually tend to avoid foods that have food coloring, celiac disease. Well, I had to look up a little bit more on that, and apparently only 1% of the population actually has it.

(00:04:39):
And according to celiac.org, it is mostly inherited and some of the symptoms were also fatigue and weight loss, and I wasn't having issues with either of those. And if it was gallstones or a liver disorder, in theory, maybe if I could just stop eating gluten for a little while, I could see if everything returned back to normal and then I could count those out. So it didn't seem like a big risk to me to go ahead and do some experimentation before actually running off to go see a doctor. And if it was gluten intolerance, what I was reading was telling me that the gluten was stopping me from producing the bile that I needed to adequately pull the nutrients from my food. And so this was something that I needed to take seriously, but it sounded like I could maybe experiment with this a little bit and not do any kind of irreversible damage.

(00:05:44):
So now I need to know what is gluten and what's it in so that I can figure out how to avoid it. Well, gluten for those that don't know is natural. It's not synthetic. It's a protein and it's found in wheat, barley and rye. Now, what it does mainly is it helps bread rise and it gives bread, pasta, noodles, other wheat products, their elasticity. So in and of itself, it doesn't seem that gluten has any nutritional value, but of course it's going to be I grains that give you some important nutrients dropping those. I don't know, maybe I could find those nutrients elsewhere. I was reading that there are other grains like sorghum, quinoa, oats, and buckwheat that maybe I could replace those with. Or I was reading about this exotic ancient grain concept. To me, that's a keyword for dude, you're going to be baking this yourself and you're going to be shopping at Whole Foods, which means your pocketbooks going to get a little lighter.

(00:07:01):
So this is what I have to deal with apparently if I'm going to try to figure out how to avoid gluten. So I'm all ready to cut gluten for my diet, but I keep thinking why is gluten causing so many problems for people? I keep hearing about gluten-free, gluten-free celiac, so on and so forth. And why have I been able to eat all of these different foods, all of this wheat, all of this pasta for years I've eaten these things with absolutely no problem, and then three weeks in Europe, no problem there. I come back here to the United States and now I have an intolerance. Well, I've got some theories and I've read some theories and I'm going to pass those on in a couple of moments. But first, I think there's two things that would be very helpful for you in understanding about me to understand why I'm doing this particular episode.

(00:08:04):
First, I don't run straight to the doctor for anything. If there is something that's going on with me, I first want to understand myself and educate myself on what it may or may not be before I go to a doctor so that if I go to that doctor, we can have a meaningful conversation back and forth so that I can figure out where I need to go with solving this particular problem. And the other thing about me is that I have had some other intolerances. This gluten thing is not the first intolerance that I've dealt with, and so I'm going to go into a couple of those things as well.

(00:08:52):
I rarely get sick, and the only medicine that I really take more than once a year is a headache powder. And I do that because I occasionally get ocular migraines. Now, I've had the flu once in 15 years. Grass allergies are probably the worst thing that I deal with, and I deal with those for about a week in April, and then they go away and I don't take anything for them. They're not debilitating. And so I just deal with those. I've got a very positive attitude towards my health. I don't think being sick is actually a natural state for humans to be in. I think that being sick is an indicator that you need to pay attention to something in your body. There is something that you are doing either emotionally or physically that is bringing on this state of being sick. And the more I learn about my body when I do have issues, the more that I start to change habits and lifestyle rather than trying to find a pill that's going to cover up the symptoms.

(00:10:00):
And to me, that's just respecting the alerts that are coming out of my body. And the less things that I am using to mask the symptoms, the more I can start to understand when I'm actually making corrections in my habits and my lifestyle that are going to make me healthier in the long run. Now, I don't avoid doctors altogether. Don't get me wrong. Two years ago I found blood in my stool and that wasn't something I was going to mess with. I went straight to the doctor and not too long after that, I ended up having a colonoscopy and they took care of the problem. And that is a case where definitely you have to gauge it and you have to know when is this probably a little more critical than something that you could maybe do some tests on. So that's where I'm coming from in terms of doing these tests on myself in pulling gluten out of my diet.

(00:11:06):
Now, one of my feelings about doctors is that they can only understand so much about your personal health history. They can look at a chart. I tend to go to the urgent care places. I didn't have a primary care physician, and I think that was a mistake because I was having some stress problems. I was going through a divorce and I started feeling this beating in my chest, and I ended up going to a doctor who I'd never met before, and they ran tests on me and he came back and said, well, we think that everything looks fairly normal for you, but your cholesterol is high, so we'd like to put you on a statin drug. And I said, I don't really want to go on a statin drug because everything heard about statins is once you're on them, you can't come off of them.

(00:11:57):
And I don't want to be stuck on some drug for the rest of my life if there's a way that I might be able to get over this on my own, maybe just a change of lifestyle, what I'm eating, how I'm exercising, that sort of thing. And he said, well, those things can have some effect, but they're not necessarily going to cure you. And so we think the statin is the way to go. Well, later I finally broke down and got myself a primary care physician that was the colonoscopy that really kind of forced the issue and said, I need to have a doctor who knows me a little bit better. And he did some tests on me and I asked him about the cholesterol issue and the statins, and I said, when I talk with you, I would like you to be straightforward with me and give me the options.

(00:12:49):
Tell me, yes, if we put you on this, this is what's going to happen if we don't put you on this, here might be some of the repercussions. As we talked through it, he said, well, running through this test and looking at your body makeup, you don't need a statin. You're really at a low risk for heart disease via cholesterol. Yes, it's a little elevated, but it's not something that you should be overly concerned with. Next time you come back for your next physical, we'll check it again, but you should be fine at this point. So I can't emphasize enough the idea of having a primary care physician, but I also can't emphasize enough that you need to have an awareness of your body and not continually mask your symptoms because those symptoms are trying to tell you something. Well, I seem really healthy then, and I don't have too many things of concern since I'm not having to take medications all of the time. But have I actually solved any of my health issues through this?

(00:13:59):
Well, I did. There's a couple of things that I solved. First thing that I solved was heartburn. Now, from the time that I was a kid, I used to have heartburn and I didn't know what it was or where it was coming from. And now there's fancy terms like acid reflux and all of that. And there's an awareness every time you turn your television on because they're selling every prescription drug known to man to cure these or to cover them up, however, they're going to cover them up. So I wanted to go about self-diagnosis and see if I could figure out what was causing my heartburn. So two things stuck out to me. One was coffee and the other was spicy food, and I'm thinking acidic, so maybe these are the things that are causing my problem. So I cut both out of my diet and the heartburn did not go away.

(00:14:54):
Well, I thought more about it and I realized that when I was a kid, if I ate a whole lot of sugar, then I would get this acid reflux. And I thought, maybe it's the sugar. So let me cut sugar out of my diet as much as I possibly can. So I stopped eating sweetss, I stopped getting the pound bag of m and m's and eating those, and I just found ways to get all of those really extreme sugar experiences out of my life. But I still had, heartburn wasn't as bad, but I still had it. So I started reading the packages of food that I buy, including the healthy foods that I was buying, like bread, yogurt, granola. And I found that every single one of those had high fruit coast corn syrup. Interesting, supposed to be healthy, but apparently they can be loaded down with this highly condensed form of sugar and it's okay.

(00:15:57):
So I went on a mission to find a loaf of bread that didn't have high fruit coast corn syrup, and I'm telling you, I couldn't find one. So I just cut bread out of my diet for a while. Well, luckily now on the shelf you can find lots of breads that don't have it because there has been a mission to get it extracted from a lot of our foods. But what I was finding was I was eating so much food that had small amounts of this sugar that when I was eating these other types of sugar on top of it, it was like I was just compounding all of this and my body was just fighting it back against all of this sugar. So when I started cutting all of these other trace amounts of sugar out of my diet, suddenly the heartburn went away.

(00:16:52):
I was fine, no issue. And to this day, I really don't get heartburn. I get heartburn only if I indulge too much in eating out at restaurants. And that kind of compounds after a while, which tells me that they're putting a lot of sugar into the foods that we're eating in restaurants, or if I just decide to go get myself some ice cream and I just eat too much of it. But I usually look for ice cream that doesn't have high fructose corn syrup. I look for stuff that has sugar in it these days, and that seems to help. So I solved the heartburn issue by really being aware of the amount of sugar I was taking in and looking at labels and finding the products that were actually compounding the problem by hiding these ingredients that I didn't know about. So the other thing that I solved were those nasty ocular migraines.

(00:17:52):
I didn't completely solve them. I still get them from time to time. But let me describe to you what an ocular migraine is. What'll happen is I'll be sitting there working at my desk at the computer or something, or I'll be out and about town and all of a sudden I'll notice this pinhole light in my eye. And it's very small, but it grows and it grows and it grows until I can't see out of that eye. It's like a white out. I completely lose vision in that eye. There is no pain with it, but I lose the vision in that eye. So after that, as that starts to dissipate, that's when the pain of the headache comes in. And I didn't know where this was coming from, but it was so frustrating because I would get it once or twice a month and it just got to be too much.

(00:18:48):
Now I would take my headache powder and that dissolves really quickly and gets into your bloodstream, so I could really avoid the pain for the most part. But it's annoying to have this blinding effect going on, and it makes you feel like there's really something maybe wrong with you. Well, as I start to think about me in general and some of the things I deal with in life, I have a light sensitivity, and I don't know if it comes from wearing glasses or what, but bright light does bother me. And one of the places people laugh at this, if you go out with me and we're in a store somewhere and I come walking out of the store and it's sunny, I'll sneeze and sometimes I'll sneeze multiple times. So I started to come up with this thing of is this a one sneeze day, a two sneeze day or a three sneeze day to tell you how bright it was outside?

(00:19:47):
Because without fail, I will walk outside, the sunlight will hit me and I'll sneeze. So I have this light sensitivity, and I started putting two and two together, and I thought, I wonder, because sometimes a car will go by and you'll get that bright sunlight beaming off of it, and that's enough to trigger an ocular migraine for me. And I thought, where do these migraines normally tend to happen? And I realized that I was usually getting them at work while I was staring at a computer screen, A C R T monitor at that time, and I had a fluorescent light over my head and I had sunlight coming in at the same time. So I said, what can I get rid of in this scenario? Well, I can tune down the C r T monitor so that it's not quite as bright and I can turn the fluorescent light off and let's see what happens.

(00:20:43):
Ever since then, migraines, I probably get 1, 2, 3 a year, not per month, which is fantastic. So by being aware of my surroundings and how my body was reacting to things and maybe taking this or that out of the field at the time that I'm trying to figure this out, was enough for me to kind of say, okay, I can remove that and the problem goes away. I will just assume that is the problem. So I avoid fluorescent lights as much as I possibly can because I believe that is probably what was triggering my ocular migraines. This is what's making me feel emboldened to the idea of being able to figure out about this gluten intolerance or whatever it is. And I really want to figure this out because as a traveler, you are inundated, especially in the US with wheat. And I mean, just think about the breakfast buffets that you go to.

(00:21:46):
Free breakfast buffet, what do you have? You got a little fruit over here, you got some yogurt over here, and then everything else is a grain of some form or another. And then if you go to an airport coffee shop, just forget it. I mean, look, cinnamon rolls torturing me as I'm getting my coffee. So this is really a traveler's nightmare to not be able to eat wheat. Think about what they give you when you go on a plane. Now, if you are going to get a free snack, most likely it's going to have some form of gluten in it. The other thing is how many foods that I love am I going to have to now take out of my diet? Philly cheese steaks cous, forget about Italian restaurants. I mean, that's just not going to happen at all. Sure, I could go get a salad, but they're going to bring it to me with croutons on it and a big loaf of bread with olive oil, and I'm going, no, I can't eat that stuff.

(00:22:51):
I mean, this is what I dealt with on my trip trying to go without gluten. It was just tough to do, very tough to do. And then yesterday I did my first non-gluten label reading grocery store trip. And I got to tell you, I was almost in tears. I mean, so many things that I normally grab to eat have some form of wheat and gluten in them. I'm seriously not prepped for this. So I've got to try to figure out whether it truly is gluten or not that's causing my issue. The other thing that's been scaring me about this is I've already had to give up on other foods because of intolerances. I mean, I'm really to the point where I'm questioning the quality of American foods all the way around. I can't eat nuts. I learned about this when I was 10 years old.

(00:23:49):
We used to go to these places called Stuckey's. They're kind of like what the modern travel centers are for truckers. You could go in there, walk around for a little while. It was a gift shop, it had a little restaurant in it. You could get some coffee if you wanted to gas up the car and go. And at Stuckey's, they had these things called pecan log rolls, which if you sort of think about the OT that you get in the middle of a three Musketeers bar, imagine pecans wrapped around that. That's basically what I was eating. And I ate those quite a bit. And then all of a sudden, one time I get one, I take about three bites of it and my throat just starts itching like crazy. This has never happened before. Now suddenly I'm not touching pecans again because I'm not sure what's wrong with them, but I'm not able to eat them.

(00:24:46):
And walnuts followed soon after that, as did almonds. So to this day, I still can't eat pecans, walnuts, almonds, or some cashews. And it's like they have this residue on them, something that just irritates my throat so that I can't eat them. Now, I have learned to eat almonds actually, but they have to be roasted. If they're not roasted, I can't eat them. So now I've cut nuts out of my diet. And then on top of that, I started finding out that I couldn't eat fruit. There were different types of fruit, apples, strawberries, bananas, and let's not even get into watermelon because that stuff, you get it near my throat and it's just, it attacks, it almost burns when I eat it. I'm thinking, what is going on with food? And now you're going to add, okay, cholesterol, I need to pay attention to that.

(00:25:44):
I'm not going to be able to eat wheat anymore. What the heck? I mean, this is just getting out of control. So where do we go from here? And this is why I feel like it's so important now to say, dude, what is going on with our food supply? What's really kind of sad is that I just accepted that there was something wrong with me and that I can't eat fruit and nuts because they're not compatible with me for some reason. But in 2011, I had a very eye-opening experience while I was on a trip to Canada and I was going to spend a week in Quebec City and I decided to do a bike tour through Montreal. I hadn't done much traveling in Montreal. And we did this bike tour, and about halfway through we stopped for lunch. We go to this wonderful farmer's market that has all sorts of fresh fruits and vegetables, so enticing, and I know this is all off limits to me.

(00:26:49):
I'm sitting at the table, everybody's enjoying their lunch, and they have these things called ground cherries, and they're being described to me and everybody's eating them and enjoying them so much, and I'm feeling very left out. So I said, screw it. If I eat this, it's going to irritate my throat, but I've got to figure out what these people are raving about. So I took one, I ate it, no problem. So I took another one, I ate it still, no problem. I ended up eating a bunch of 'em, and I ate other vegetables and fruits that were available on the table and none of them bothered me. And I thought, finally, I can eat fruit again. I've been saved. So everywhere I went in Canada, I was like, I have more fruit, more fruit, more fruit. And it was fine everywhere I went. Now I get back to the United States, and the first thing I do is I go to a store, buy some fruit, bring it home, eat it, first bite, and I start getting the itching again.

(00:27:55):
What the heck is going on? So somebody said, you should go buy organic. Alright, well, I went and bought organic, it costs more, but it did stop the itching in most cases, not always. Sometimes I would get some that would bother me, but for the most part I was fine with the organics. So what's causing my problem? Is it pesticides? Is it what these fruits and nuts are being sprayed with? Is that the deal? So it wasn't long after that that I ended up getting told about a documentary called Food Inc. If you haven't seen it, you should watch it. And on the show notes page, I've actually posted an interview with the filmmaker who put this together and it shows a lot about our animal population and how they've been injecting steroids and altering them with hormones and antibiotics and all of this to help the mass production of different types of meat.

(00:29:02):
And it's also the first time that I heard about the details on genetically modified foods, GMOs, as we like to call them, and all the chemicals that they were using to treat these foods. Well, this was my first day of realization that my food was being altered in some way and that maybe my body wasn't the problem, maybe it was actually what they were doing to the food and not the food itself. So my attitude about American food standards just went straight out the window, the E P A, the F D A, they were no longer shining examples in my eyes. And later on I learned actually that the World Health Organization came out and said that one of the products that they talk about during Food Inc, which is Monsanto's Roundup, the World Health Organization, actually says that they believe it causes cancer. However, the US E P A, they say it doesn't.

(00:30:07):
And a lot of other countries feel the same. Now, France and the Netherlands have outlawed Roundup for home use, but they still let corporations use it. Now, I'm not a scientist and I can't determine whether it does or it doesn't cause cancer, but wouldn't you hope that if there's a little bit of doubt about a product safety that our government would take some kind of precaution against it, but maybe we should just trust our government? I mean, they got to have our best interest at heart, right? I mean, that's the way that I used to think about things. But while in Minnesota I had quite the eyeopener when I went to the National Eagle Center, I had to always wondered why the bald eagle had dwindled as a species and why it went on the endangered list for a while, it seems to be making a comeback, but the country used to be covered with eagles and now all of a sudden they are much more rare and hard to find.

(00:31:07):
So I asked that question and I was told that there was a chemical called D D T that in the mid 1940s was approved for use to kill mosquitoes off, and it was doing a great job of it. And the government said this stuff was absolutely fine to use. And they even had a picture of this hose blowing out all of this d d t directly onto people in a swimming pool. And I thought, well, obviously if you can do that, it must be safe. But in 1962, there was a woman named Rachel Carson and she wrote a book called Silent Spring. And in that book she talks about the use of D D T and how it impacted the bald eagle. It was weakening their eggs, it was killing them off. And so this safe product that was put out by and approved by the government as being safe for humans, nobody was thinking about the wider implications of using this product.

(00:32:14):
So they just released it into the wild and let it go. And years and years and years later, they find out something's wrong with it, but it takes 10 more years after they find out that there's a problem with it, that they finally ban it in the United States for widespread use. And that was in 1972. So when I start thinking about our government and they can't know everything, and these companies that develop these products, they do their own research as well, but it's got to be limited. You're not putting it out into the wild for long-term testing. And as soon as you see an issue with it, man, it's hard to wrangle that stuff back in. And I understand all of those things, but we're creating all of these chemicals and we're changing the way food is made and we're doing it saying, oh, it's all okay.

(00:33:11):
It's not a problem, but how do we really, really, no. Well, let's get back to my experiment on gluten and see how that went. So I go off to Minnesota after six days at home, and during those six days, I ate no gluten whatsoever and my body returned to normal. So I am starting to think that gluten has something to do with this situation in my body. While in Minnesota, I had to eat at Irish restaurants all the time because I wanted to go to a place where I could sit at the bar and chat with people, and I didn't want to just eat salad. And Irish food is actually filled with a lot of potatoes as starch rather than breads. So I did pretty well while I was going to each of these places. But full disclosure, I did have a Guinness while I was having my dinner a couple of times, but it never really seemed to bother me.

(00:34:13):
My healthy signs were still there. I was not getting the bloating, I was not getting the yellow stools. And I thought maybe I'm fine with an Irish wheat because as I understand it, in a whiskey, that protein in gluten is done away with through all the process. But in beer, it still continues to be in there. So that's why you'll find gluten-free beers sometimes because they will find wheats and grains that they can use that don't have this because it does still exist in your beer. But here, I'm drinking Guinness, I'm okay. Well, once I got to Canada, I had a day when I was going to be doing a lot of driving and I decided to stop at a fast food restaurant and I had a hamburger, and the next day I paid for that hamburger with the bloating and the yellow stools. Something in that bun was bothering me.

(00:35:10):
And so pretty much showing me signs that something in wheat is bothering me. And in Canada, it was even bothering me. So I remained off of gluten for the rest of the trip. But it was tough because as I say, when you're flying, and I had to go buy some peanuts to take with me on the plane because they were going to give me snacks, and they did that were wheat-based snacks. So you really had to kind of evolve your lifestyle around it. And when I got back to the United States, the first thing that I wanted to do was see if I could find some wheat options. And I had a friend of mine who's into holistic solutions and she said, yes, these ancient grains, I'll make you some bread. That bread will have these ancient grains in it and see how your body reacts to that. And my body was fine with that. So again, we're now zeroing in on wheat that has gluten.

(00:36:15):
What was annoying at me at this point was how did this happen? I just don't understand because I'm a pasta hound and I will eat pasta three or four times a week, and the other meals are probably 50% wheat as well. So I eat a ton of it, and I had no problems. I went to Europe, I had no problems. But the first day I get back, I have issues. Well, something else weird happened to me when I came back from my trip, I started to realize that I was still in Scotland. In my mind, I would wake up from a dream and I would think I was in Scotland and I had to tell myself, no, I'm home. What is this? And my dreams were all about Scotland. It was like Scotland was now my home base. It was weird, and it took a few days for that to wear off on me.

(00:37:10):
So I wanted to find out where this concept of the 21 days came from the 21 days to form a habit. And it was from a guy named Maxwell Maltz. He was a plastic surgeon in the 1950s. And he came up with this theory by watching his patients who after they had some reconstructive surgery, surgery, they would hold onto those old mental images and not be comfortable with their changes until usually three weeks went by. And somehow this magic of 21 days was enough for the mind to let loose of something and then take on this new direction. Dinging light bulb goes off. I was gone for 21 days. What if my body was so conditioned and tolerant of that wheat and that gluten because I was feeding it to myself day after day after day after day. And then I gave it three weeks off.

(00:38:10):
And when I came back, it had forgotten it, didn't know how to react to it anymore. And all of a sudden now I'm having an issue. Well, this is a theory and this is just a theory, that's all. But it would be interesting to hear if other people have had a similar situation. And it had me hunting now for other theories as well. So I found this live strong article and they had five theories, and I posted it on the show notes page of why gluten intolerance is on the rise in the United States. And some of these rang true, like they say now, the US Department of Agriculture says that we have tripled the amount of intake of gluten based wheat over the last 40 years. It's become a major part of our diets. And if you think about what you eat for breakfast and you think about eating pastas and things like that, you'll start to realize, yes, you probably do have a whole lot more of it in your life than you had before.

(00:39:12):
Another thing that they point to is the over-prescribing of antibiotics, which I found very interesting because it all goes to this thing of not relying on our bodies to solve the problems that are coming up, but instead leaning on some kind of medication to do that. And as you'll see in the food ink show, there is a problem with people who eat too many of these chickens that have antibiotics and they start to reject those antibiotics, they become allergic to those antibiotics. So antibiotics become a very interesting piece of this discussion. Another thing is that gluten-free is a fad. So we may be thinking there's more gluten intolerant people than there really are because of the rise of sales of gluten-free products. So yeah, I could see that another is misdiagnosis, and that's kind of where my theory comes in, that it may not be gluten intolerance, but it may be something else that we're dealing with, maybe a chemical makeup or something on the outside that's affecting the way our bodies are dealing with gluten at this point.

(00:40:33):
So let's get into this concept of chemicals and altering our food and all of that. And I look back at the F D A and I told you that I sort of have this feeling that they're not quite being upfront with us in terms of how they're making these judgements. And in some cases they're just not making the judgements and staying away from things. Well, I've been watching 60 Minutes a lot lately, and they do stories constantly on how the F D A is failing us with prescription drugs and opioids. I remember a story for many years ago on 60 Minutes where they talked about aspartame, which is the chemical that is also known by the name NutraSweet, where they said it was one of the most contested approvals in history. It went on for years because there was this fear that maybe it wasn't tested well enough and that it could cause brain tumors well enough.

(00:41:33):
They ended up finally passing it. And that F d A commissioner who was in charge of passing it, he later ended up joining a public relations firm that worked for the company that made NutraSweet. Now, I'm not saying this is damning evidence of any form, but I am saying that maybe we need to question lobbyists and how they're working with the government watchdogs. For me, the big thing comes down to I want to know what chemicals you're putting in my food. I stay away from things that have artificial sweeteners in them. I do it because I don't trust them. Now the plus is, is that they have to put aspartame on the label so I can make that decision. And a lot of products now are voluntarily putting out there that they are genetically modifying their organisms or they're not. And that's great, but it's not a law.

(00:42:35):
There's not a law that says they have to say that it's non G M O or that it has genetically modified organisms in it. Something that I think would be a nice move forward for our food safety. And not only that, it might actually help me figure out why nuts or fruits have bothered me all of these years or potentially why wheat is bothering me. So I'm still sticking on this theory that maybe it's not gluten, that's the problem. Maybe we're oversimplifying this thing and we tend to do that. Sometimes we'll just grab at the low hanging fruit and point the finger at it because we are not willing to do the research or think it through to figure out what the deeper issues may be. And I'm going to give you an example of that. The student loan issue. I've been seeing this come up a lot lately, and it really needs to because there is a crisis developing with student loans.

(00:43:37):
And there are some people who are of the theory that we should just pay all of this off through the government, which means it's basically the taxpayers are going to bail out the student loan system. I get that and I understand that that's probably going to have to happen in some way, shape, or form. Now, what I've noticed over the years is that politicians all want to tell us that we have to have college educations. It's our right to have a college education, yet colleges continue to raise tuitions and they're getting these people into a life's worth of debt with jobs that will never be able to give them enough income to be able to pay these things off. And there's part of me that goes, is there a tie between these politicians and these universities? I mean, I don't want to get into conspiracy theory and all of that.

(00:44:28):
It's not really my thing, but it's just you got to wonder and now we're going to get the taxpayers to come in and bail out these student loans. We're not fixing the problem. We're just kind of justifying the greed of the schools who are taking this money in because they're just raising their tuitions like crazy. I'm going to give you an example from my own personal experience of when I wanted to go back to community college many years ago and there was a education lottery that was coming into play, but I went and I checked with the community college to see what the semester tuition was going to be, and it was listed at $800 fine, $800. It's a little bit expensive for what I can afford right now. I'm out of work, so on and so forth. But I need an education. So I'm thinking, alright, I'm going to wait till this lottery tuition comes along, we'll see how much that's going to help me.

(00:45:25):
Lottery tuition comes along and they say, we're going to give you $800 per semester towards paying your school. Well, fantastic, right? I'm going to get free education. This is fantastic. Not quite. I go back to the university and somehow within a span of a year and a half, they now have a $1,600 per semester tuition. Interesting. So what has happened in the last year and a half to cause this community college to now need double the funds to educate me as far back as 1985, the average four year degree was $5,500. Yes, $5,500 for the whole four years. Now the average is $26,000 according to the US Department of Education. And I've posted those statistics on the show notes page. That's a lot. Now of course it's not adjusted for inflation and you can check that there, but still it's more than double what it was before.

(00:46:29):
Why did they need so much more money to run themselves? Could it be those eight figure salaries they're giving to coaches? I don't know. But to me it doesn't seem like getting the taxpayers to bail them out is the way to solve this problem. It seems like we're going to have to do a whole lot more thinking on this. And so that's where I'm getting at with the origins of the problem with gluten. I'm thinking, I am seeing situations out there where sometimes we oversimplify and just say, go gluten-free because how many nutrients are there in wheat that I'm going to be giving up by moving off of something that I should have as part of my regular diet and now I have to get rid of because something has gone wrong with it And how it reacts with me? Well, I should have started out looking for this smoking gun, this chemical, but that's not really where I started, not where my brain was at.

(00:47:32):
My brain was at higher level saying, alright, if somebody leaves the United States and they have a gluten intolerance and they go to Europe, would they be able to eat wheat over there? And then I found people who were saying they had that experience. And then when they came back to the US again, their gluten intolerance showed up and one of the people said, look up a chemical called potassium bromate. So I did my search and I found out it's just an additive that kind of improves the process, helps the dough rise a little bit higher, that sort of thing. And it's still being used in the United States, but oddly it's been banned in the EU and Canada and China, and they're banning it because it's a possible carcinogen causes cancer in laboratory rats. So where does the F D A stand on this? As I look it up, I find that in 1999, they realized the problem and they said, bakers, just stop using it.

(00:48:36):
Okay, we're not going to ban it and we're not going to ban it. Because in 1958 when the law came out that banned us from or said that we could ban potentially carcinogenic substances because this was approved before that we're not going to ban it because it doesn't really fall under the guidelines of the clause within. So the F D A is apparently a little more interested in legalese than they are in protecting American citizens. Is that fair? Well, I mean that's kind of the feeling I get from it. So anyway, manufacturers were supposed to stop using it and many of them did. But if you look at the show notes, I have posted a link to a book called Safe Foods from 2004 where Debra Mitchell, the author, states that there are some major fast food chains that were still using it in 2004. Now I've found no more information as to whether these restaurants are still using it or not.

(00:49:44):
And that's kind of the scary part. What kind of chemicals are we putting in our body and how could we know if you're walking into a fast food restaurant and you're just buying the food, it's not like you're going to want to look down the menu and see all the nutritional information of every single product that you're eating. But I mean, it's got to scare the hell out of you that this potentially carcinogenic chemical was being put into our food that we were eating day to day. And then add to that, on my first gluten-free shopping trip to the FDA's credit, you can look at labels now and it's in bold, the things like nuts, soy milk, wheat, those things that people may have some body aversion to, they are clearly present there on the label. So bravo for that. But I picked up a can of diced tomatoes, and as I was reading the label, I saw that it contained calcium sulfate and I don't know what calcium sulfate is.

(00:50:50):
So I looked it up on my phone and apparently it's an inorganic chemical compound that's used to make plaster of Paris. Okay, well, I guess they have some reason for putting this in there. But the scary part about it was the label on the front of that package said that this can of tomatoes was 100% natural. Now, unlike potassium bromate, which could be a cancer causer, this one didn't really have such fears built around it. Calcium sulfate seems to be okay, but the question I have here is how can a product say that they are a hundred percent natural and have a chemical compound in it? And then I looked over for the organic cans and they had calcium sulfate also. So you're telling me that an inorganic compound in my can of tomatoes can still be put in there. And this be considered by the U SS D A as 100% organic.

(00:51:57):
I mean, is this experimentation? Is it outright deception? I don't know, but it feels pretty slick to me. So to this point, I've sort of pinpointed wheat and gluten as the items that are causing my digestive issues. But to go a little deeper and figure out how to solve that issue, what's creating this intolerance? I mean, is it us wheat? Is it how the wheat's being treated? Is it how wheat's been changed over time? Or is it just me eating too much wheat and then my body has just actually hit a breaking point of some form? Well, stay tuned because this fall I will be heading back to Europe and I will eat wheat when I get there, but I'm going to stay as I possibly can through the summer and hopefully I won't have any kind of issues out of that. And what about you?

(00:52:55):
Well, my intention here was not to scare you or make you go, oh, I'll never eat American food again. No, I don't really think we have to get that drastic about it, but I do think that we need to be aware of our bodies and what our bodies are telling us, and we need to start questioning labels. And I really wanted to leave this episode with some food for thought of some different steps that you might be able to take moving forward that I think will be helpful in helping us get a better food supply here in the United States or wherever you live. So the first thing I think we have to do is we have to stop attacking this low hanging fruit and educate ourselves. You saw with student loans how we can oversimplify things. And so the problems underneath are just going to grow and fester if we're not going to take the time to educate ourselves and do a little bit more deeper analysis into what the core problem is, we just can't take things by face value anymore.

(00:53:57):
I think we've got to also understand that our government isn't necessarily going to go find the solution for us. They're a little bit too preoccupied with their election campaigns and perpetuating this current situation that we have. So I think it's time to get a bit of education. And as my second item more into the education thing, we need to learn about what we're putting into our bodies and we need to start reading those labels. We got to question things like this major rise in disorders like Alzheimer's, dementia, a new disease called F T D. Again, a brain disorder that is frightening if you ever read about it. We've got to ask why these things are on the increase and why food intolerances are coming up all over the place and all of these cancers that we have going on and intolerances to antibiotics and the overprescribing of drugs.

(00:54:56):
There's got to be a point where we say, wait, what are we doing? We're just like on autopilot here and we got to get a little bit more focused and we need to figure out why these federal agencies take so long to ban products like D D T or they refuse to ban a carcinogenic chemical like potassium. I mean, these things should be a little alerts to us that our government sometimes needs to have a little oversight on it as well. And the third thing is we need to stop thinking of our politicians as people with all the answers. They are us. I mean, where do politicians come from? They come from our ranks. So it's not that they're any smarter than us, they're just a little bit more powerful than us. But I think if we educate ourselves and we gain some confidence in the knowledge that we have and we can start telling our politicians what we want, which is the way it's supposed to be working, we aren't here for them.

(00:55:58):
They're here for us. So get educated. I think an educated and concerned electorate makes for a much better country and we're less likely to fall for this stale us versus them rhetoric that's been going on in the political landscape forever. We're all in this together, people. And if we're going to just sit here and be distracted by us versus them and forget that we need these real issues like food safety taken care of, then we're just putting ourselves in a really big hole. And opting for non politicians for elected office is not going to solve this problem. This is a political system, and you have to work within the confines of that political system. It's not the horse so much as it is the rider. I think we need to assert ourselves a whole lot better and not just start by changing the horse because the horse is what the horse is.

(00:56:58):
We as the rider take control and we should be pushing these things in the way that they need to go. So deal with those politicians you got because they're going to be, it's like the who said meet the new boss, same as the old boss. We have the power, we just need to use it. And then the fourth thing is we need to realize the weapon that we have at our disposal when we live in a capitalistic society and that weapon, they're our dollars. And we already used this weapon, whether we know it or not. When I walked into Walmart the other day, they had ancient grains bread on the shelf. So this is gluten-free bread. And the shocking thing about it is it was the Walmart brand. So they've already gotten the message that they need to provide something because there is an audience that will pay for that.

(00:57:55):
Walk into Walmart, you're going to see organics. Why do they have organics in Walmart? I don't think it's because of a mission that they have. I think it's because that's what they can sell. They know there's a market for it, and so they're going to sell it. When we talk about looking at things too simplistically, I think the most simplistic thing we can figure out in a capitalistic society are corporations. Corporations. They want to make money. So stores want your dollar. If you're going to buy it, then they're going to stock it. And if you're not going to buy it, they're not going to stock it. So that's why you see gluten-free all over the shelves. Now, manufacturers have listened. They're like, okay, we'll even stamp this on our packages because this is something that's going to help us to sell our product. And you guys are doing that, and you're doing that by how you're speaking on social media and how you are spending your dollars.

(00:58:53):
But do understand that if you keep on buying products that say a hundred percent natural like that of tomatoes that I had, those corporations are going to be looking at that going, we can still take advantage of them. They're pretty gullible. Yeah. Yeah. So keep that in mind when you go, oh, I'm just going to go ahead and buy that it has high fructose corn syrup. Anyway, understand that you're telling a corporation at that point that you want high fructose corn syrup. So pay attention to what you're buying and make sure that you're only buying products that really meet what it is that you want in terms of healthy food. Now, the only thing that I think we're missing is oversight on labels. So that's going to take a little bit of a combination of politicians and your spending dollars. But I think if you reached out on social media to a company that's not putting enough information on their label, they may actually go ahead and put that information on their label.

(00:59:53):
Or you may have to start an online petition. But there are so many ways nowadays to let these companies know what you want as a consumer. And if you just keep buying what they're selling you, then you're going to keep getting that, and they're going to keep making it cheaper and cheaper, and they're going to keep putting in things that are more and more questionable. But if you say, I'm not buying that anymore, they're not going to sell it anymore. So it's going to take a lot of changes, going to take some effort, and I don't know if we can truly pinpoint all of these little issues and figure out how to fix them, but at least we got to try, right? I mean, there is definitely something wrong right now my body tells me there is definitely something wrong with the food supply right now. Make sure that you're feeding yourself with as much knowledge as you can. I do believe the adage that knowledge is power.

(01:00:50):
Well, I hope you enjoyed the episode today, and I know it was a little off track. Did get into travel a little bit here or there, but for the traveler, I think this is very important too, because we can't read labels while we're on the road. We're going to be eating things that we have no idea what's in them. And so I think the better we can make our entire food supply as a whole, the better it's going to make for us when we are out on the road and traveling and eating things where we don't have an access to the package or we have no idea where that particular food came from. So if you guys have any thoughts on the episode, feel free to post them on travel fuels life.com. At the show notes page, we'll have a little comment box down there at the bottom, or join us on Facebook, facebook.com/travel fuels life. And I'll post up the episode there and you can leave comments there as well. Or on Twitter. Always good to have conversations on Twitter, and you can do that at twitter.com/travel fuels life. I thank you guys so much for listening and coming up. We will have more guests and a great summer headed your way, and I'm going to be looking for people to help us fuel those travel dreams. So until next week, I hope you have a fantastic week. Travel safe and Until next time. Thanks for listening to Travel Fuels Life.

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